> Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, lost investors $1 billion. She faces up to 20 years in prison.
> Adam Neumann, founder of WeWork, lost investors $11 billion. He then raised $350 million for his next startup.
> Adam Neumann, founder of WeWork, lost investors $11 billion. He then raised $350 million for his next startup.
It's entirely possible he was being fraudulent as well, but he didn't A. mess with icky medical things or B. cross the line as obviously.
If we were a strictly rational utilitarian society he'd be in prison for 220 years but because literally everyone is basically just shooting from the hip roughly all the time...here we are. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just I feel something we all forget very frequently.
I don't think you understand how risk works. You cannot judge him only on the downside, without considering the upside that could have been.
If you jail every startup founder who fails for 220 years, nobody would try to create risky startups, and your utopia would miss out on innovation.
And I don't think there's a suggestion that every startup founder whose company fails should be jailed - only that if there's some kind of serious wrongdoing, like fraud, involved. Unfortunately with the popularity of "fake it 'til you make it" it's easy for people cross the line, knowingly or unknowingly.
Incompetence is not a crime.
Fraud is a crime.
Neumann just parted some fools from their money.
I'm fully in the camp of people wondering why anyone is stupid enough to give Neumann even one cent of fresh capital for anything. But focusing the comparison between Holmes and Neumann on the amount of money they lost their investors is just plain wrong.
WeWork may have a bad model but there's still "something" actually there. Not with Theranos.