Bad Blood

The sheer enormity of awards, appearances, and fawning over Holmes – when she had not yet produced a workable product – is extraordinary.

Frauds are frauds. But I don't blame her entirely. She, and a lot of other women, grew up in this "You go, girl" environment where they were not held to high standards, where gold stars were figuratively handed out just for showing up.

I'm less worried about, say, having women fly military jets than I am that they are in that position in the first place because of "You go, girl" affirmative action. We know this is rampant. And as that Wiki article stated, Holmes has set back women's credibility in business. And, I think, rightfully so. The orgy of "You go, girl" for her from all quarters showed how flabby the psychological infrastructure is regarding women.

I don't know how the world of venture capital works, but I assume it is reality-based. But reality took a vacation in regards to Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. Again, it's worth noting the no venture capitalist who specialized in the health care industry got on board. There were probably at least three clear reasons for this. Holmes was touting a finger-prick blood test device that was making claims akin to Tesla saying that they had an anti-gravity car in development. The three main issues were:

1) Getting blood from a finger rather (capillary blood) was inherently polluted with other stuff compared to blood drawn from the arm.
2) It generally takes a fair amount of blood to do just one test for some things.
3) Miniaturization of any testing apparatus (cramming a whole bunch of stuff together in a small package) would have inherent problems with heat. And heat distorted results.

Holmes claimed her finger-prick device could do dozens of tests simultaneously and from just a small sample of blood. There should have at least been an attitude of "Show me" before one dollar was invested. Perhaps a finished device wasn't necessary. This was, after all, supposedly a product in development. But you'd have to show that you have a solution to these inherent problems, at least in principle.

The rat was even enough to sniff out if not overcome with the "You go, girl" deferential vibes.

Nowadays, one encounters the results of this and the "affirmative action" environment, which are related, across the board. And we are all paying for it. Does anyone believe that the present degraded state of the USA is due to geniuses running things, to the pursuit of excellence? Not only are mediocraties pushed on society, mediocracy is actively pushed as a way of life. This in the name of "equality." Over the long term, this leads to a level below mediocracy, or to paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynahan, "mediocracy gets defined down" and down, and down ad infinitum.  

From the cashiers who can't count, to the salespeople who don't understand their product, to the bankers who don't know banking, to the medicos who don't understand basic science, to the military brass who are incompetent, to the bureaucrats who don't know much of anything except to hold on to power. As I have read somewhere, America has become a country which excels at only two things, people holding on to power and public relations. This later conforms to my observation upon returning to the country that all one needed to do business in America was a marketing organization. Manufacturing could be done elsewhere. Still, marketing organizations are not cheap in America. 

A stellar example of the insidious result of affirmative action over the last decades.  This bimbo is as dumb as rock, and dishonest to boot. I seem to recall having seen her on PBS Newhour a few years back, when I still occasionally watched the network news.  She was a dummy then.  Yet, she has reached the pinnacle of her "profession." 

I am an idiot

HBO has a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes called The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. It's a shallow, even dishonest, recounting of the story.

The positive aspect is that if you've read the book by John Carreyrou (who is also interviewed in this), you can put faces to some of the names. But the documentary is padded, rambling, and never once touches on the central fact of the scandal: Had this been a man, investors would have required more evidence of the technology being workable.

What we do see from this documentary is that Elizabeth Holmes was a master at talking in cliches and slogans (which is by no means unique for a Silicon Valley CEO). As one venture capitalist noted, to really make money you want to be in on the ground floor of a venture, so there is a leap faith. You're working on an idea at first, not necessarily a finished product.

What the documentary, or even the book, doesn't get quite into is how you have all this money, these hundreds of employees, this big building, and basically produce nothing.

The documentary (and probably the book as well) gets superficially into the problem that in order to get done what Holmes wanted done, it would take a larger processing device (at the very least) to do it. But Holmes set a limit to the size and that was basically that. That was the lid that prevented any type of success, assuming they were capable of achieving any type of real success.

I think (and the documentary certainly does not state) the central problem of Theranos is that, aside from the CEO's lofty rhetoric, this ever only was a miniaturization project – something you might trust the Japanese to but not a cliche-spouting female demagogue. They had no inherently new technology or technique for scanning blood. They were just trying to do it with a smaller box using a pin-prick sample. Miniaturization, not re-invention.

That's fine. That in itself isn't a bad idea. But the engineers and medical techs on day-one basically understood that trying to do over 200 different types of tests on a pin-prick sample of blood in a barely bigger than toaster-size processing unit presented physical and thermodynamic barriers that were not wished away by lofty rhetoric or by bullying the engineers.

That fact that this documentary did not once make reference to the fact that people wanted to see a female Silicon Valley CEO succeed reminds me of the trouble Rush got into when he once pointed out the obvious: The NFL wanted a black quarterback to succeed. Everybody knew this but you couldn't for some reason say it.

And this documentary goes (or, doesn't go) into this same no-go zone. It makes a passing reference to how a young, pretty blond could turn the heads of old men such as George Schultz and Henry Kissinger. And that played no small part in this having a board of directors that gave her fraud legitimacy. But what really fueled it was that everyone wanted a female CEO to succeed so investors (and probably regulators) gave her much more leeway.

So, yeah, you still can't trust the media to state simple truths and get to the core of the issue.