I get it, Elizabeth Holmes | Hacker News Reader

I get it, Elizabeth Holmes

techcrunch.com

16 pointsjaytaylor9 comments

Being a woman that ticked all the boxes for a big investment was exactly one of Holmes main selling features, so a lot of the author's points ring hollow. Everyone was / is looking for a success story like hers, and she shrewdly took advantage. I agree fully that she didn't do anything out of step with what other startup founders are doing all the time. It's just that the stakes are higher in front line diagnostic medicine than in some SaSS thing, and so a failure has a higher cost. But overall,

    I'm not guilty. You're the one that's guilty. The lawmakers, the politicians, the Colombian drug lords, all you who lobby against making drugs legal. Just like you did with alcohol during Prohibition. You're the one who's guilty. I mean, c'mon, let's kick the ballistics here: ain't no Uzi's made in Harlem. Not one of us in here owns a poppy field. This thing is bigger than Nino Brown. This is big business. This is the American way.

(Don't hate the player hate the game)

That may have been why she got a lot of press, and her gender may also have been the focus of much of that press. But I don't see any evidence that people invested in her -because- she was female. In fact, many of the most public and well known VC firms did not invest in Holmes. These big public firms are the ones most interested in deal flow and PR image. If Holmes was such a draw for being female, why did they pass?

In fact, most of Theranos' investors were individuals like Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison or firms that were positioned to profit from retail testing like Walgreens and Safeway.

I'll start entertaining the idea that investors are putting money into female owned companies just because they are female when I see the percentage of capital invested in female owned companies go above a few meager percentage points.

VC firms didn't invest in her because they know how to smell fraud. The other investors didn't and invested in a story line over a product.

This article seems to somehow be painting Holmes as a byproduct of startup culture while conveniently ignore the kind of insane things Holmes and others did at Theranos that are not at all the norm in Silicon Valley or the broader startup world. It’s been some time since Bad Blood came out, but I’m recalling serious problems like intimidating employees, defrauding lab inspectors, and performing false testing that misled patients about their health. Holmes and Theranos were a relatively unique example of incredibly bad product and leadership, and it was enabled by the irrational attention given to gender and diversity over merit. Exhibit A in this society-wide grift was Fortune’s now deleted cover story on her (https://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/).

> But I still believe that she thought she was doing the right thing taking the universal advice of Silicon Valley: “Fake it till you make it.”

Thats fine when it comes to the next Uber-for-cats CRUD app, but Theranos produced fraudulent medical results that impacted and endangered peoples lives.

Elizabeth Holmes was a fraudster, and everyone who tried to call her out before Theranos fell apart was (and still is it seems) branded sexist.

Grievance peddling for clicks. AKA Contemporary Journalism.

Being a woman was her whole selling point. How many articles were written about her being a woman who “could be the next Steve Jobs”? And honestly no one points the finger at the VCs who took a RISKY investment in hopes of getting super rich. What’s that statistic about 9/10 startups failing for then?

Oh please. She didn't get all that funding by pretending to be a man, she got it because people wanted to believe in a a "female Steve Jobs." She succeeded in fundraising because she was a woman. A man doing a Steve Jobs impression wouldn't have gotten nearly as far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Wuornos

> Aileen Carol Wuornos was an American serial killer and sex worker who murdered seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990 by shooting them at point-blank range. ... She was sentenced to death for six of the murders and was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

> In August 1976, Wuornos was given a $105 fine for drunk driving. She used the money inherited from her brother to pay the fine and spent the rest within two months buying luxuries including a new car, which she wrecked shortly afterwards. ... On May 20, 1981, Wuornos was arrested in Edgewater, Florida, for the armed robbery of a convenience store, where she stole $35 and two packs of cigarettes. ... On January 4, 1986, Wuornos was arrested in Miami and charged with car theft, resisting arrest, and obstruction of justice for providing identification bearing her aunt's name. Miami police officers found a .38-caliber revolver and a box of ammunition in the stolen car. ... On June 2, 1986, Volusia County deputy sheriffs detained Wuornos for questioning after a male companion accused her of pulling a gun in his car and demanding $200. Wuornos was found to be carrying spare ammunition, and police discovered a .22 pistol under the passenger seat she had occupied.

> Wuornos told several inconsistent stories about the killings. She claimed initially that all seven men had raped her while she was working as a sex worker but later recanted the claim of self-defense, citing robbery and a desire to leave no witnesses as the reason for murder. During an interview with filmmaker Nick Broomfield, when she thought the cameras were off, she told him that it was, in fact, self-defense, but she could not stand being on death row—where she had been for ten years at that point—and wanted to die.

> Wuornos's crimes are consistent with the psychopathology model of women who kill. She was considered to have a psychopathic personality. ... Wuornos also allegedly met the criteria for both borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbm3j4/how-serial-killer-ail...

> Shortly before Cardi B released her single "Press" back in May, she revealed the track's controversial cover art—a recreation of an infamous photo of Aileen Wuornos in a prison jumpsuit ...

Emphasis mine:

> ... those whose identities intersect these experiences have been quietly looking to Wuornos as a cult hero and feminist icon for some time. "Today marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Aileen Wuornos, a beautifully humane woman who will forever hold a place in my heart for her strength and courage ..."

> "This woman was a lesbian sex worker who k*lled a client who she thought her life was threatened by," Love told VICE. ... "Aileen is bad-ass, and so is Cardi," Love said.

The stories of Holmes and Wuornos are complicated and I encourage you to do some reading before making a conclusion about either of them. But one thing is for certain - some people will always be willing to ignore or misrepresent serious crimes when it fits their narrative. Social media and public attention rewards extremism, not subtlety.

(Sorry for many edits, I keep borking my formatting.)

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