Agreed with this. She was in the spot she was less because she was attractive and more because she was connected to the right people. Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of the huge problems with putting women on a pedestal and expecting more of them… It never occurred to anyone that such a distinguished and impressive young woman would just straight up scam them. A big part of that was the fact that she was a woman, and a fair number of them probably liked having a female investment to go along with their black friend (probably Daymond John lol).
That’s been my recent experience with startup culture - where our CEO was some kind of D-level Silicon Valley player. The stories were just stupid. Oooh you shared a hot tub with Marissa Mayer once!
But I realized that even that level of connections he had were absolutely essential if we were ever going to get funding beyond the $2-3M or so the founder put in.
Well, if people are throwing billions of dollars at the project you’d think someone would do some due diligence and hire an expert to look into how the whole thing works. It seems like all the experts who looked at it all immediately realized it was bullshit.
How about lol Walgreens signing a massive deal to put it in their stores when it blatantly didn’t work?
Power comes from all three of these things.
I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209 - renovation program, spare parts for twenty-five years… Who cares if it worked or not?
Well the more I think about how dreamy your smile is, the more I agree with you. So maybe you have a point. 
Power comes from being the guy who pissed on Matt Damon in the Good Shepherd. He was tagged for Skull and Bones and upper echelons from birth.
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sorry but well akshually according to wikipedia they raised 700 million for 10 billion valuation
19 years old LMAO like she was a sexy doogie howser
I always thought Theranos was funded due to FOMO and like a weird reverse bystander effect where everyone assumed that someone else had validated the technology and business model.
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This is certainly most of it.
It’s wild to me, because if you want to get a 500k grant from the NIH or NSF or whatever, there’s damn sure going to be some expert looking over your proposal but if you have a techbro friend you can just dress up like Steve Jobs and give an elevator pitch and walk away with $700M.
I think this applies to a ton of Sili Valley funding. Also there’s always the assumption you can sell to a greater fool later if things go wrong. Heat and name recognition are the main priorities. Viable business is details to be hammered out later.
I’m sure plan A for Theranos was take the $700M and figure out how to make their scam product actually work the way it was claimed to. You can solve a lot of problems with that much money. But apparently not all.
This issue is more widespread than tech. A lot of big companies have moved toward a “nimble” business attitude that rewards high concept thinkers and punishes anyone who asks “how is this actually going to work”. TEAM PLAYERS HAVE A POSITIVE ATTITUDE DONT YOU WANNA BE A TEAM PLAYER.
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This is actually a pretty big part of the portfolio management industry. When people are talking about “high” price/earnings ratios and stuff like that what they’re getting at is that FOMO type activity is driving share prices above what is supported by the company’s actual commercial prospects. Basically there is an entire profession dedicated to analyzing stock price signals to answer questions like yours. That doesn’t mean it’s conclusive though - if you want 10 different opinions on whether stock prices are too high or two low just ask 10 different investment professionals what they think.
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STONKS
Company that has never made money and has the worst governance imaginable, with all the conflicts and self-dealing imaginable, will fetch $22 billion valuation
I legit may buy the stock at it’s open and sell at the end of the day. Probably an easy 10-30% because STONKS!!!
I guess this goes here, you can still buy Biden not dropping out before 11/1 at 91c.
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Check futures -1.5, nek minnit nearing +1.5?!