And hiring "real researchers" to front your fraudulent operation as a way to hide what's going on behind the scenes shouldn't be reason to look the other way. In some ways it's worse than the alternative, since there's not just fraud, but activity intended to take attention away from it.
The thing is, after she got that $200k in branded VC capital from family friend Tim Draper, Holmes went knocking on the doors of all the big silicon valley VC firms and all the big bio-sciences VC firms. They consulted with blood scientist type people who informed them device had zero chance of living up to it's promise. All of them said "Sorry Elizabeth, we must politely decline your invitation to flush our money down the toilet."
The money she did get after that seed funding was from fly-by night wannabe VCs, and the bandwagon effect took off from there. Who did their due diligence? Nobody. I'm not shedding any tears for Rupert Murdoch, but there were hedge fund managers in charge of people's pensions who gave Theranos 100s of millions of dollars without looking into what it was they were spending other people's money on. It baffles me that anyone that stupid can get to be in charge of that much money in the first place.
Imposter syndrome is a real phenomenon and successful people are mere mortals who should not be put on pedestals. But it's possible to attribute too much to these factors. And dishonesty (faking it) should not be where you turn.
Regardless faking state-funded health experiments in a heavily regulated industry has nothing to do with fail fast mentality of the software world either (just like how everyone here criticized that personal banking startup who tried that in the heavily regulated finance industry). We have nothing to defend here.
Which is true! But also, very beside-the-point.
The point is, that some people really are impostors. Some people really don’t know what they’re doing, in a much deeper sense than the usual “oh I struggled over a judgment call yesterday while doing 90% of my job the routine way”.
From the inside, it’s hard to know whether you have excessive self doubt, or you’re an Elizabeth Holmes. And it’s a pretty freaking important distinction to make.
The HN/SV mentality I’m criticizing is the one that jumps straight to “oh that’s impostor syndrome” rather than giving concrete tests for whether the self-doubt is justified. Who swears that every expert engineer, manager, and businessperson occupies the same epistemic state that Holmes felt, who equates the occasional judgment call with knowing nothing about the core problems of the domain you’ve entered.
So yeah, you called Theranos early on. Good for you!
Now, for your victory lap, stop telling the next 100 Holmeses to double down on their “faking it” on the way to the inevitable “making it”. Help them determine whether they’re a Holmes or just worrying too much.
Impostor syndrome is caused because you believe you aren't good enough, but how can you know that when you are still new in a domain? Why would someone that better in that domain would pay you to works on that? Because he has evidences that suggest that you can do what's required in that job.
Now if experts tell you that your idea already exist and doesn't works for X, Y, Z, it's no longer self doubt.... it's actively ignoring evidences.
> So yeah, you called Theranos early on. Good for you!
Which make it no longer a self-doubt.
Faking until you make it was never about faking results or evidences, it's about faking confidence. Confidence is a great motivator, it's a great way to push beyond, but it doesn't replace real evidence.
The real issue here is that theses VC didn't require more than confidence to invest that much money. The fact that plenty of expert called out that scam early on show how an easy due diligence weren't done correctly.
What most successful founders are good at is running a business. However, I'll be really clear on this: there are 2 necessary things without which you will fail. First you need someone on staff that does know what they are doing. If you are good at recognising that person, then you've got some potential to be a good founder. Second you need to be flexible in your vision. Because, as founder, you probably don't know what you are doing.
One of the best companies, in that regard, that I worked at was Corel. Michael Cowpland was an engineer, but I've talked with him a few times and I'll just say that I've never been that impressed with his technical grasp of the situation. However Corel's first product was a SCSI card. It failed. Then they built a graphics card. To go with the graphics card they made a graphics demo. That demo became Corel Draw. Cowpland had a great ability to know when the spaghetti was sticking to the wall (and he threw great gobs of the stuff against the wall, let me tell you!). They just dropped everything and poured everything into Draw. Great move.
The "fake it till you make it", in successful circles, means to stall long enough for your development team to actually build something you can sell. Now, I will say that committing fraud as a way to stall is a stupid, stupid move, but not something I haven't seen before. One place I worked at we were late to demo our product at a show, so we bought the competitor's product, stuck it under the pedestal and then wired it up through an empty box which was supposed to be our hardware. People were astounded at how quickly we had caught up to the competition! BS stuff like that happens all the time and especially if you are young, it would be easy to think "Oh, everybody is doing it. It will be alright. We'll succeed before anyone notices".
I don't know enough about Theranos or Holmes to say anything intelligent, but being a founder is a very different job than being a developer. What I lovingly refer to as "blowing sunshine up everyone's ass" is a big part of the job. Your core competencies are really different and have to be geared more towards evaluating people rather than evaluating things. At the same time you have to be an anchor of calm in the middle of chaos, because if you start to freak out, then everybody else will to. A lot of the advice given to founders can easily be misinterpreted when seen in a different context and I think that may be what's frustrating you. Having said that, being an entrepreneur is a career that attracts more than it's fair share of people who are not suited for that career...
Okay, but the biggest reason for that is because Holmes and Balwani are sociopaths[1]. I wanted to point this out because I feel like your comment is defending her somehow by way of naiveté. Their actions are indefensible on so many levels, from very early in the company's history.
To the grandparent's point, there were people working there in earnest on research. They often did not last long, or, in the case of Ian Gibbons, was driven to suicide by the stress of potentially revealing Theranos's faulty technology in a court case, or lying and hurting patients [2].
Be sure to read "Bad Blood". It was a very good read about this company and Holmes.
[1] - Yes, this label is overused, but not in this particular case.
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gibbons_(biochemist)