Browsed by
Tag: #ElizabethHolmes

Fake It Till You… Meh – Scratch That

Fake It Till You… Meh – Scratch That

Image by Elisa from Pixabay

Fake it till you make it has been the credo of the tech industry since the very earliest days of the industry. Make big promises and bold statements and no matter that the product may end up as shovelware of vaporware, founders were inventing the future and no matter that investors who bought into the hype were expecting big payoffs that often didn’t happen. You pay your money, you take your chances. So it goes.

Erin Griffin wrote an excellent piece in The New York Times recently entitled The End of Faking It in Silicon Valley and it’s must-read. “Faking it is over. That’s the feeling in Silicon Valley…Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the past year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far… the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences.”

Gee, who’d have thought? Considering that California was basically founded on the Gold Rush, and the tech space was essentially the state’s second Gold Rush, didn’t investors realize that during that first Gold Rush, many were taken in by Fool’s Gold? History does have a way of repeating itself, and if it worked the first time… Read More...

And Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year Is…

And Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year Is…

 Said Merriam-Webster, “In this age of misinformation—of “fake news,” conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time.

“…gaslighting is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” 2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for gaslighting, with high interest throughout the year…Its origins are colorful: the term comes from the title of a 1938 play and the movie based on that play, the plot of which involves a man attempting to make his wife believe that she is going insane. His mysterious activities in the attic cause the house’s gas lights to dim, but he insists to his wife that the lights are not dimming and that she can’t trust her own perceptions.”

In the earlier days of tech and home computing, Apple was the underdog and Microsoft the Evil Empire, and note those were the days of MSFT with founder Bill Gates at the helm. Google took over the ‘evil’ designation, with Apple fanboys still blindly committed to their tech god. Now it seems that Apple Is Tracking You Even When Its Own Privacy Settings Say It’s Not, New Research Says, Gizmodo reported. Read More...

Where in the World Is Travis Kalanick?

Where in the World Is Travis Kalanick?

If your reaction to the above was ‘who cares?,’ do not pass go, do not collect $200. How can we so quickly forget one of the seminal unicorns of Web 2.0.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of four of the 11 counts of fraud brought against her (three of the charges were dismissed and the jury was deadlocked on the other four, so it may not be over yet), and while she may serve (a reportedly fairly negligible amount of) jailtime, did this send chills through Silicon Valley, which at this point has become a generic term, like ‘Band-Aid’ and ‘google,’ considering that Report: Californians Leaving for Texas So Rapidly, U-Haul Ran Out of Trucks?

Will this verdict be a wake-up call? The Elizabeth Holmes verdict: Silicon Valley’s reckoning or a single bad apple? Will the guilty verdict change “fake it ’till you make it” culture?, the Mercury News asked. “Experts say the guilty verdict and the potential prison sentence it carries are sure to send a chill down the spines of entrepreneurs and investors — especially in the health care field — and prompt them to tread carefully. But it may not be the major reckoning that some have been clamoring for in Silicon Valley, where criminal charges remain rare and money continues to flow.” Read More...

Fake It Til You Make It – To the Witness Stand.

Fake It Til You Make It – To the Witness Stand.

We are all aware that fake it til you make it is one of the premier mantras of the tech industry. At this point, we should also keep in mind that you can fake it for just so long – Adam Neumann’s WeWork being a notable case in point – and careful what you fake: in the case of Theranos and the company’s founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, it led to 11 counts of fraud that are being litigated as we speak.

As the Mercury News reported, “Holmes is charged with allegedly bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and defrauding patients with false claims that the company’s machines could conduct a full range of tests using just a few drops of blood.”

Here’s a cautionary tale for you: despite the fact that Holmes followed the Silicon Valley playbook – attend an Ivy League school (Stanford dropout); be mediagenic (the tech might have been flawed, but in every photo of Holmes that the media proffered, she looked perfect); get a LOT of press (aka due diligence for clueless investors). Bonus points: dress in a manner that recalls a tech icon – in this case, Steve Jobs (easy one: black turtlenecks. Done!). Read More...

The Great Tech Lies: Do They Hold Up?

The Great Tech Lies: Do They Hold Up?

When the tech industry was first establishing itself, it was something completely new to the planet, like, for example, the Industrial Age before it. Various mantras hit the zeitgeist: fake it til you make it; move fast and break things; fail fast. There are byproducts of these practices: the disregard for ethics, morality and responsibility or as we’ve said many times before, the only way to cover up a crime is to commit an even bigger crime.

 

The Elizabeth Holmes trial is on and it turns out that the Stanford dropout sidelined the real scientists at Theranos “By leaving them off email threads,” The Verge reported. Then attempted to blame them for Theranos’s failures. “A lot of new emails were introduced, showing Holmes was aware of the company’s problems, and was even actively trying to manage the situation. Several times in those emails, (former Theranos lab director Adam) Rosendorff tried to get Theranos labs to run FDA-approved tests instead of the ones Theranos developed. But maybe even more telling were the emails that Rosendorff was excluded from…“The company was more about PR and fundraising than patient care,” he said. Read More...

The Great Tech Disconnects

The Great Tech Disconnects

Jennifer, Mara, Astrid & Aniyia on Medium

How many times have we heard that the VC model is broken? Of course everyone is looking for a unicorn and the big pay-off, but considering the rate of failure of startups, are investors missing the forest though the trees?

That’s not the only disconnect. Again, pay attention.

We found an interesting piece from a few years back (2017) about investing in zebras (Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break), as opposed to unicorns which, let’s face it, are mythical creatures after all, while are zebras slow but steady growth companies that tend to solve real world problems, as opposed to a unicorn such as, for example, Google, which has created more problems for the world than it has solved. That sort of software isn’t eating the world, as Marc Andreessen once said: it’s more or less attempting to chew it up and spit it out. Read More...

Will “creepy” be the new norm for the 2020’s?

Will “creepy” be the new norm for the 2020’s?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Since it’s the beginning of a new decade, as a starting point, we thought we’d take a look at 2010 and see what the sentiment was then. Eric Schmidt set the tone when he famously said, “There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Said Business Insider, “If you don’t cross the creepy line, we suppose by definition you aren’t creepy. But making it a policy to go right up to that line “on a lot of things” is, well, something a lot like creepy.” So, where do we stand now and as for the creepy line crossed – how often and in how many ways was it breached, if not completely ignored? Some instances from the past year and the past decade:

The Digital Arms Race Read More...

Don’t Look Now, But Did a Bubble Just Burst?

Don’t Look Now, But Did a Bubble Just Burst?

If you’re starting a tech company and are in search of outside investment, your chances of raising that funding will rise exponentially if you’re potentially a unicorn. But there is something that you need to understand: that tech is driven as much by hype and press as it is by investment dollars. It’s the tech industry that produces the rock stars of today – and some of that spotlight has reflected back onto the industry’s now high-profile investors. But careful there: if you’re wondering why Adam Neumann’s name is still in the headlines, albeit via Monday morning quarterbacking and as a cautionary tale, his outsized ego is a wakeup call to the media’s – and some investors’ – sometimes priorities: their exaltation of the cult of personality, their acquiescence to the notion that it’s acceptable for a single individual to have enormous control over a company or vertical, and the idea that investment dollars trump common sense, even when the math doesn’t quite add up. Cases in point: Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), Adam Neumann and yes, even Mark Zuckerberg qua his foray into the financial world with Libra.

First, if you’re going to hang your hat on the Cult of Personality, good idea to take a bold stance at some point – and aim for a hot button. In the We Company’s case, we will remind you that not too long ago, We advocated reimbursing employees’ meals at events only if they were meatless, in the name of corporate responsibility, of course. ““New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact,” (We co-founder Miguel) McKelvey told employees. WeWork estimates the ban will save 445 million pounds of CO2 emissions, 16.7 billion gallons of water, and 15 million animals by 2023,” Bloomberg reported and never mind that Neumann’s contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions imperative was to travel on a company-owned Gulfstream – a fact that somehow never made it into that reporting. Read More...

Fake It Til You Make It 2.0

Fake It Til You Make It 2.0

More and more we’re seeing founders without so much as a plan to profitability raise outrageous amounts of venture capital based mostly on, from what we can tell, hubris, being mediagenic and what may arguably be either a Napoleonic complex, a touch of bipolar syndrome, or some combination of the two.

There seems to be a clear pathway to success in technology without having to be bothered with showing profits or even having a viable or clearly defined product, but given the downfall of Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), Travis Kalanick (Uber), and most lately Adam Neumann (WeWork), that pathway hasn’t been clearly defined, or refined. But we have been paying attention, and we believe we have come up with 12 basic rules for success in technology – even with little or simple tech required: Read More...

Unicorn, Shmoonicorn. Is It a Fantasy?

Unicorn, Shmoonicorn. Is It a Fantasy?

Image by Julieta Mascarella from Pixabay

If we noticed anything this week, it was that it may be time to rethink unicorns and hockey stick growth. We know what investors look for: TAM (Total Addressable Market) and it had better be big, as it’s all about ROI.

WeWork is planning their IPO, and after years of expansion and so-called hockey stick growth, the cracks are showing. Business Insider laid out The history of WeWork’s meteoric valuation rise — and fall, including “the coworking startup’s governance, real estate holdings, succession plan, employee retention, and questionable patent purchases have spooked potential investors. WeWork has amended its SEC filings twice already to address several of those concerns, but it might not be enough.

“According to a Reuters report, WeWork will target a $10 billion valuation for its IPO, drastically lower than the $47 billion valuation it last fetched in private markets. A $10 billion public valuation would be only slightly above the total amount of funding WeWork has taken in as a private company: about $8.39 billion since 2011, according to Pitchbook data.” Read More...