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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jennifer Lawrence is said to be playing Holmes in the film adaptation.
convenient when an actress who already really looks like the subject, also happens to be an academy award winning actress!
I doubt it's news to many here, but Bad Blood is an amazing book on Theranos. It doesn't follow as far as the deposition (I had no idea she was facing 20 years!) but I'd highly recommend it for anyone interested in this story. The audiobook is great too.
I was listening to an interview with the author and he made a somewhat valid point that it's part of the 'tech culture' to fake it until you make it. However, at the same time apparently Larry Ellison was advising her. During the early phase of Oracle's history one of their chief criticisms is over-promising on timelines to keep existing customers on their product so that they assumed something was going to ship in 9…
> But rather than a follow-up from Holmes, Shultz received an email, obtained by "Nightline," from Sunny Balwani. > In the email, Balwani wrote in part: "...The reckless comment... based on absolute ignorance is so insulting to me that had any other person made these statements, we would have held them accountable in the strongest way. The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this personall…
There was a great story in the book about how the engineers would mess with Balwani by repeating a random technical word that didn't make sense in context, to see if he would start parroting it in his conversations. Which of course he started doing, more than once. He was a fraud who knew nothing about technology but thought he could manage an advanced technology project (which is not too uncommon in silicon valley - but he did it to fraudulent levels and like a dictator).
My intuition points to Elizabeth starting the snowball in motion - once she over-promised, built a huge personal image, was in over her head - before it turned into an avalanche from the work of Balwani. The person who had a history of getting rich flipping useless companies with no value during the dot-com boom. I hope he gets punished as much or more than Elizabeth.
And if I had to choose I'd 100x rather have worked for Elizabeth than Balwani.
You realize that since 2-3 years it is now standard legal practice to make sure deciders don't know the details of important decisions. They know the decision, of course, and what was chosen, and they decide. But they don't know who the email was sent to to implement the decision. Or they don't know the law firm depositing it. Or they only generally know the numbers involved, and have since destroyed the exact number…
I doubt it's news to many here, but Bad Blood is an amazing book on Theranos. It doesn't follow as far as the deposition (I had no idea she was facing 20 years!) but I'd highly recommend it for anyone interested in this story. The audiobook is great too.
I was listening to an interview with the author and he made a somewhat valid point that it's part of the 'tech culture' to fake it until you make it. However, at the same time apparently Larry Ellison was advising her. During the early phase of Oracle's history one of their chief criticisms is over-promising on timelines to keep existing customers on their product so that they assumed something was going to ship in 9…
Interesting, considering Steve Jobs acknowledged Ellison as his best friend after his return to Apple, at a time when Oracle was considered the 2nd largest software company in the world. It makes sense that she would turn to Ellison for advice all in the name of trying to be like her idol, Steve Jobs.
Holmes underestimated the amount of technical risk she needed to overcome to succeed in the marketplace, as did the Google founders when Larry Page initially came up with PageRank but had no clue just how long it would take to download the entire web to disk. But the Google guys unlike Holmes had a lot of help from their advisors combined with Stanford university resources, which allowed them to stay immune to investor pressure to show results for invested capital.
For a technology like finger-prick based tests to succeed, you’ll need to expend millions of USD in a university research lab before you begin to see promising results that are repeatable. Essentially, Theranos should have started out as a science project (like BackRub which birthed Google) and not as a startup. She picked the wrong vehicle for her mission.
Ellison on the other hand piggy-backed on a seminal 1970 paper by IBM researcher: E.F. Codd to launch Oracle [0]. In those days, hierarchical and network databases were the competing database paradigms. Codd’s paper introduced the relational model as the third competing paradigm which turned out to be vastly simpler than the other models. The simplicity afforded by RDBMSes unlocked a lot of value and ultimately created wealth for the database industry.
0: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_c...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
convenient when an actress who already really looks like the subject, also happens to be an academy award winning actress!
Lawrence does lack the sociopath gaze though. She'll have to work on perfecting that to really channel Holmes.
Having worked in tech for a few years now, it's pretty clear that Holmes is far from the only liar/sociopath/fraudster in the Valley. There's many just like her.
edit: As someone coming into tech from physical science, I have never seen the Dunning-Krueger effect anywhere like I do in tech. It's mainly in the management, but folks do have a very serious problem accepting expertise from scientists or engineers outside of tech industry.