Elizabeth Holmes Is a Visionary, and We Need More Like Her

This author is getting ratioed in the extreme on Twitter, and for good reason. Look, we all know that startups carry an inherent risk, and in a lot of cases, game-changing ideas look terrible at first. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to take this path, and failure is the default outcome when you do.

With all of that said, there is LIGHTYEARS of difference between failure and fraud. 99% of startups that fail fail because they run out of money or don't find product-market fit; they don't fail because they outright lie, repeatedly, to customers, regulators, investors, and partners.

This article is some nuclear weapons grade spin. She may have been a visionary, but we don't need more like her. Like many others in the community who attempted to do their due diligence before investing (we didn't invest) we concluded that she willfully hid information about using her competitor's testing equipment at Walgreens rather than being forthcoming with her machine's serious deficiencies.

The Theranos investors were impatient to make it big. Would they have had Edison's persistence for 1000 attempts at making their innovation work?

Elizabeth Holmes's talent was to exploit the gullibility of greedy investors. History is replete with fraudsters using illusionary innovations to hoodwink investors. The Theranos management team are merely just a recent example.