I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up.
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"
Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
It's just pattern recognition at work. None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam, so it's about as notable as a scam founder wearing black shoes.
But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.
Scammers/predators/grifters/sociopaths will adopt any disguise and say whatever needs to be said that gets the mark to fall for it.
Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests.
Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's membership.
Is there a push to reduce qualifications in order to bring in people who don't historically enter your profession? No matter how kind or society-changing you're being, scammers will see that you're doing that, and will abuse that mercilessly.
They likewise bilk people who oppose that ideology, and will gladly present themselves as collecting for disadvantaged white boys, before running off with the money.
Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage. You don't have to harden your hearts, but you do have to engage your brain and apply suitable skepticism and scrutiny of their claims.
Appreciate you taking the time to engage, unlike those that eye rolled and down voted. (They don’t like admitting their participation in pattern formation it would seem.)
No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She rode that wave.
Men ride other waves, but specifically not that one. Unless you count trans women in sports. Or Tim Walz.
EDIT: luckily I quoted the things I was replying to, because the above poster drastically edited his/her post, just resorting finally to namecalling.
> Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen.
Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any more and expect people to believe you, because who would lie about a thing like that? People now know that someone such as yourself would definitely lie, and so they will check for themselves. You need evidence.
> Case in point: there has been zero outrage about trans men. If you looked at a trans man you’d never suggest that a person who looks like this [1] should compete in women’s sports. You’d probably never even realize they were trans unless you were specifically told.
That's because a lot of the aim of society is to protect women, in various ways. So men who claim to be women who can beat women in women-only sports competitions, or can go in their changing rooms or bathrooms means women are not being afforded the protections we have tried to give them. That's why we have different bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports contests in the first place. No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
> Just so you are factually and scientifically informed, when trans women transition, they are taking hormone replacement therapy that blocks testosterone. It tends to make them significantly worse at sports as a result.
No, you are misinforming here. They don't have to do anything. "Self ID" exists. That's why a male rapist claiming to be a woman got put in a woman's prison in Scotland[0]. Also, for those who do take hormones, hormones don't help with lung capacity, size, Q angle, bone density, and all the many other things that make men better at sport.
The point is that anything subject to hype is also at a greater risk of being a scam.
If we were desperate for red-headed founders then the risk of any given red-head riding the wave of hype rather than substance is higher than at baseline.
That's the point being made. Your comment about male led misses it because there's currently no hype about male led. Though I can see it coming back.
That’s only true in the public Zeitgeist, there is a huge preference among portions of the workforce for male leadership stated or unstated. This is not a good thing. I literally worked with a guy who was about to quit because a woman would boss him around and she was about 10,000 times as qualified as he was
No one markets ‘male founder’ as a reason to trust the business. Once gender is framed as a virtue, people start asking whether that claim actually means anything.
No one thinks that the number of males participating in business is too low, and that it is socially-beneficial and morally-important to promote male-run businesses.
Scamming as a male can actually improve your reputation. Donald Trump is currently the president of the united states despite years of ripping people off. If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
Here’s how I think it makes sense: accountability for unethical behavior arrives via more or less direct routes depending on who you are.
The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent.
But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.
This is true, but I think my point still holds. If he were to get of jail, say by donating a substantial sum to Trump and then coincidentally getting a full pardon. And then he ran, I don't think that his infamy as a scammer would hurt him. If anything, that fame and name recognition would help. He could just lie and say he was framed and set up and yada yada and people would believe him.
It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped.
I watched the entire trailer fully believing that Nathan Fielder had managed to find the most unhinged uncanny look-alike actress to play Elizabeth Holmes.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
Or Charles Manson could weasel his way into existing startups, claim them as his own, become the richest man in the world, AND kill so many more people than he ever thought possible!
Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
All founders and CEOs are like this, to the point that when I meet a person in leadership who clearly isn't a sociopath my default reaction is to assume that they're not successful.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
Who was it again that said money is thrown out the window without any concern, you just have to stand below the right window? It was true then and it is true now. Really helps if the money you are throwing out isn't your own, too.
I watched a 90 second clip from this film earlier today: Holmes unblinking asking ‘Why would I deceive you…’ Really strange stuff. I have to admit that I watched the clip a second time.
There was some major tension in the trailer - I can't believe that's actually Elizabeth Holmes, but seeing her I can see how she managed to win over so many - she is very intense.
> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
The difference between science and engineering right there...
she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
Holmes seems to have the Harvard Business (MBA) mindset: science, R&D, engineering are just results to squeeze out of recalcitrant practitioners. Any failure in those domains is evidence only of the scientists' or engineers' refusal to align themselves with the Vision.
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.
It’s rarely “just pattern recognition at work.”
Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests.
Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's membership.
Is there a push to reduce qualifications in order to bring in people who don't historically enter your profession? No matter how kind or society-changing you're being, scammers will see that you're doing that, and will abuse that mercilessly.
They likewise bilk people who oppose that ideology, and will gladly present themselves as collecting for disadvantaged white boys, before running off with the money.
Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage. You don't have to harden your hearts, but you do have to engage your brain and apply suitable skepticism and scrutiny of their claims.
Only by sexists.
Only if you're determined to look for it.
No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She rode that wave.
Men ride other waves, but specifically not that one. Unless you count trans women in sports. Or Tim Walz.
> Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen.
Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any more and expect people to believe you, because who would lie about a thing like that? People now know that someone such as yourself would definitely lie, and so they will check for themselves. You need evidence.
> Case in point: there has been zero outrage about trans men. If you looked at a trans man you’d never suggest that a person who looks like this [1] should compete in women’s sports. You’d probably never even realize they were trans unless you were specifically told.
That's because a lot of the aim of society is to protect women, in various ways. So men who claim to be women who can beat women in women-only sports competitions, or can go in their changing rooms or bathrooms means women are not being afforded the protections we have tried to give them. That's why we have different bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports contests in the first place. No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
> Just so you are factually and scientifically informed, when trans women transition, they are taking hormone replacement therapy that blocks testosterone. It tends to make them significantly worse at sports as a result.
No, you are misinforming here. They don't have to do anything. "Self ID" exists. That's why a male rapist claiming to be a woman got put in a woman's prison in Scotland[0]. Also, for those who do take hormones, hormones don't help with lung capacity, size, Q angle, bone density, and all the many other things that make men better at sport.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Bryson_case
If we were desperate for red-headed founders then the risk of any given red-head riding the wave of hype rather than substance is higher than at baseline.
That's the point being made. Your comment about male led misses it because there's currently no hype about male led. Though I can see it coming back.
Management is not just about qualification, it's also about the human aspect.
I have seen enough toxic femineity at work to say it is actually a thing, on par with toxic masculinity.
And yet somehow he - a man - is in jail. A jail built by men, condemned by a justice system designed by men to lock bad men up.
The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent.
But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.
> Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-wa...
Word to wise entrepreneurs.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
Just not the kind of genius that can invent new products or lead a successful company.
If she had partnered with a competent engineer and CEO, Theranos might still be in business.
The company wasn't doomed from the start. It began with a real vision.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
Or is a sociopath, just not *clearly*.
The tech industry is rife with such suckers. We wouldn't have the wealth we have without them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI
Seeing her like that gave me flashbacks to Mark Zuckerberg before he seemingly trained away that empty stare he and others share.
The difference between science and engineering right there...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI (The Simpsons)
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
Amodei: AI will cure cancer
Elizabeth wasn’t ambitious and visionary enough for the current era.
An AI CEO was absolutely Holmes' calling. You can only imagine.
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
This is fable level unreadable to me
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
https://www.memesita.com/elizabeth-holmes-thanksgiving-visit...
And wtf is even a "prison camp?"