Presentations and pitch decks by failures and frauds | Hacker News Reader

Presentations and pitch decks by failures and frauds

slidebook.io

163 pointsoyster14334 comments

Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:33YqNE...

But the slides themselves aren't in Google's cache.

http://web.archive.org/web/20230428164428/https://www.slideb...

> Fraud and corporate collapses were always part of business landscape, but they became more frequent and severe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries

Is this actually true? No citation is given and my gut sense was that corporate collapses used to be far more frequent. Think railroad manias, tulip bubbles, wildcat banks. If anything economic conventional wisdom has lately become that there aren't enough corporate collapses due to the flood of endless cheap money propping up zombie firms that endlessly lose money.

The Theranos deck is interesting though. Even the first slide appears to be a word salad that makes no sense. "Our immediate goal is to become the standard for improving the efficacy and risk/benefit and safety profile of every therapy"? That's an (over-broad) mission statement, not an immediate goal. Then slide 3 "Theranos Today" they're talking about assumed future deals not the state of the company in the present, and somehow "Existing deals: $120M - $1.5Bn in revenue"!?

Then a bunch of graphs that look like they must have come from a real patient but nothing is stated about what's really happening.

Also, "Drivers for success: management and culture" lol.

I really doubt frauds have become more common.

Currently reading a biography of Grant. He’s already gotten swindled multiple times and I’m not even halfway done.

This is availability bias of someone who consumes more news than history

I think frauds may actually be less common, these days, as they can be cross-referenced more easily.

But some folks want to be fooled, and fraudsters know how to find them.

Hugh or Ulysses?

Ulysses I assume as he very famously had a bad head for business and many people who took advantage of him.

I don't know if anyone has done the deep analysis to determine if fraud is more frequent and severe and agree this seems like a doubtful statement, but I suspect it's likely that corporate collapses have in fact become more common and more frequent -- but due simply to the fact that the global total number of corporations has increased exponentially since the mid 20th century.

I assumed the question being posed was more: have they become more frequent as a % of all corporations?

Frauds are definitely less common because of regulation/oversight and social media. Read up on all the corner-cutting of 1800s and earlier business, you could scam someone and run away and those affected just wouldn't be able to find you.

To add, it's worth noting that "snake oil salesman" was a very real thing in the 19th century[1]. It is pretty hyberbolic to assert that there's more figurative snake oil salesmen when there were once literal ones.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil

These look exactly the same as the ones by firms that became successful!

That's what I was thinking too, and really very few if any of these were planned to be a fraud from the start. It would be more interesting to see slide decks of people who knew from the start they would defraud their investors, instead of companies like SVB who focused too much on diversity instead of risk assessment or Lehman Brothers who collapsed during a recession.

I can't speak for the other pitch decks, but to anyone with any knowledge of how medical testing works in practice, Theranos was a clear fraud from day 1. This derives from the simple observation that almost all current blood tests eventually measure only a small sample (microlitres) of the blood initially drawn, and the business proposition didn't address the question of why larger samples are normally drawn (a lot of the answer lies in the "engineering" problems inherent in handling complex biological liquids).

Obviously, the Theranos deck wasn't pitched to people with the requisite knowledge...

But they were pitching their own testing hardware that supposedly had solved these engineering problems.

Not sure how just from the deck I could had called them out.

After seed round anyway, a red flag was a combination of the technical hand waving and having the wrong sort of board for the product. In earliest decks you can only really look at the team anyway. I'm not sure you could reliably discount them in the first 6 mo, say.

I know of a company that's using dried blood for testing, which apparently is the same as what Theranos was saying from a layman's point of view.

The level of process you're talking about usually isn't in a deck; it's usually "get sample - mail it in - get results."

Decks are pitched to investors, who most of the time have more money than technical skills in the area in question.

The Arthur Andersen slides from WorldCom use colors to indicate if an accounting process is "Effective" or "Ineffective", but these archived slides are in black & white so the results are ambiguous. In my imagination, it's showing all green.

Apparently, there is an attempt to run Fyre Festival again:

https://variety.com/2023/music/news/fyre-festival-sequel-bil...

This was announced shortly after Billy McFarland got out of jail on fraud charges related to the first one.

I'd like to believe that people are not nearly stupid enough to put money towards this again. But the way the last decade has gone, who knows?

Missing Meredith Perry and her uBeam trying to sell idea of ubiquitous wireless charging. Tedtalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c Analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1R9IQF0Y9s

"for each technological hurdle deemed insurmountable by the experts I

would spend just a few hours thinking about the problem from a variety of

approaches so I was able to solve problems when the PhD experts couldn't

with just a few hours of really simple research every single argument over why

the technology couldn't work has been indisputably wrong has taught me to be

skeptical of experts the expertise represented a narrow way of looking at things

engineers are inherently linear thinkers and tend to take a very binary approach

to solving problems as a non expert I had an advantage because I could look at

a problem from different angles because I just didn't know it was possible by

thinking outside the box by thinking around corners you can out think the top

thinkers and now eight months later I have four of the top ultrasonic

engineers in the world working for me we're working with me

it's going to work and it's going to be awesome and I can't wait to give the

middle finger and smiled all the engineers that criticize the crap out of me"

Spoilers: She is a fraud, it never worked, one of the ultrasonic engineers she boasted about hiring even ran a blog debunking her claims https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com. >$20 million from Andreessen Horowitz/Mark Cuban/Marissa Mayer down the crapper. At least it didnt manage to IPO.

The presentations and pitch decks were probably the only successful part of these businesses. So these may actually provide good lessons for people with legitimate businesses.

Arguably the best pitch decks of all time. If you can sell turds to financial elites you're at the top of your game.

Or you are stupid enough to do it and end up in jail for the rest of your life instead of putting your own imagination and skill into something a bit nicer

I think you will find that many of these were arguably "financial elite insiders" the whole time. Worse, if you read too long, it is very easy to get sucked into the narrative that they were the stooges for the actual insiders that still made out with the bank.

That could actually be the pitch. We’re selling turds to idiots with too much money… of course not you though (audience).

There are times when it makes sense to invest in so-called "turds." Just like there are times when it's economically rational to "invest" in lottery tickets:

https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/4998/is-there-...

This is like saying the 2017 Astros are one of the best MLB teams of all time because they cheated to win the World Series.

"best pitch deck" != "best company and product"

Surely there's an argument to be made that they are among the best cheaters of all time?

>> If you can sell turds to financial elites you're at the top of your game.

My Dad worked for several silicon valley startups in the 60's and 70's and his advice always stuck with me. When I got caught up in the first dot com craze in the late 90's early aughts, he always told me about his experience then and told me: "Listen son, if it sounds like blue skies and bullshit, then it probably is."

It helped me steer clear a few disastrous startups right after graduating from college.

> blue skies and bs...

I am going to steal that line. :)

I sort of agree with this, but it assumes that the pitch deck impacts a critical outcome for these businesses.

For example, sometimes in my line of work a prosecutor reads a mitigation report (pitch deck) and offers a good plea bargain because they learned something that moved them. But there are other times that a prosecutor wants to make a better offer and wants a little administrative cover. They might text me, "Send me some mitigation. Sooner is better, nothing fancy." Those are the cases with the best outcomes, but not really the best "pitch decks."

Why not train a ML engine on them to find more?

Site is unfortunately down.

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