Reply to The Dropout on Hulu (Elizabeth Holmes story)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I still don't understand how they thought they were going to get away with it. They didn't have the technology. If the show is at all accurate, it seems like Elizabeth was maybe both delusional and too uneducated to fully grasp it, but surely Sunny would have known.

It's one thing to bamboozle investors as a startup, but what did they think would happen once there were real patients relying on their tests-- and with watered down blood samples transported from hundreds of miles away??[/quote]

I think they deluded themselves, and I think Elizabeth, in particular, convinced herself that they really were doing something groundbreaking and they would figure it out eventually. And while I think you are right that Sunny was much more aware of the degree to which they were cheating, I also think his lack of knowledge in this specific area of science allowed him to also convince himself that some of the more questionable things they did (specifically stuff like running the tests on Siemens machines, or falsifying test results) were part of a justifiable tech development process.

Not to take the heat of Elizabeth and Sunny (who are clearly very culpable) but the culture of venture capital investment is a huge part of it. Start-ups begin with mostly an idea, maybe a prototype, and very determined leadership. But they need investment dollars to hire out and really develop the idea -- that's expected. But of course the minute you get VC money, pressure begins to deliver on the promise. It absolutely creates a situation ripe for lying and cheating. Companies don't want to lose their funding and feel pressure to make it look like they are moving more quickly than they might actually be. The show does a good job, I think, of showing how these moving parts create a rock and a hard place -- there's huge pressure for Theranos to get a big contract (first they are pushing for a pharmaceutical contract and then they pivot to Walgreens) to prove they are viable to the investors, but what they really need to be able to do is say "actually the tech isn't there which is why we are struggling with getting these contracts -- we need billions more in funding and probably another 10-20 years to get to where we want to be." But of course no investor is going to stay on the hook for that because they want results now.

People like to laud venture capital as being great for entrepreneurship and invention, but it's not really. It takes the focus of the technology and invention and puts it on money. A development like what Theranos promised probably cannot be developed in a VC environment. It pretty much has to be supported by some combination of government funding, academic support (because of how long it will take) and private funding. Which is how most major medical breakthroughs happen anyway. Silicon Valley got cocky in thinking they could do it better or faster.[/quote]

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