“Fake it until you make it” or the story of Theranos

Just finished watching The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley by Alex Gibney, a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and the story of her company Theranos which was on a mission “to revolutionize medical laboratory testing through allegedly innovative methods for drawing blood, testing blood, and interpreting the resulting patient data”.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, it is a terrifying story of how a young and ambitious Elizabeth was able to raise over $700m and create a ‘religion’ in the Silicon Valley with a product that was effectively a lie. The company reached a $10b valuation at its peak in 2013, 2014.

[Wikipedia] By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America, on the basis of a $9 billion valuation of her company. In the following year, following revelations of potential fraud about its claims, Forbes had revised its published estimate of her net worth to zero, and Fortune had named Holmes one of the “World’s Most Disappointing Leaders”.

She is the true face of “fake it until you make it” philosophy. The same philosophy that resulted in a number of tech bubbles in the last couple of decades.

The most horrible thing is that the results of the blood tests her company was producing had extremely high inaccuracy. She was effectively playing with people’s lives.

There are so many thoughts to discuss or debate on with regards to her story, but I would rather recommend watching it for yourself or reading the book by John Carreyrou called Bad Blood: Secret and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Comment with your thoughts (if you would like to share them), would be interesting to hear your point of view.

Was she really a fraud or was she just an entrepreneur with a vision that could not be achieved? Should she have admitted to have failed the first time the blood testing machine did not work, or was she right to keep trying while keeping this failure a secret? Was it her intentional decision to continue lying about her product, or was it her advisors who kept whispering into her ear how genius she was? Was it the absence of experience or the very young age that made her belief anything would go or was it her personality?

Two other film titles that could fit her story: The Invention of Lying and Eyes Wide Shut.