[agosta]

This article borders on slander. To call Smashmellow the "Theranos of Marshmallows" is outrageous - even the article says they didn't commit fraud so how would it be even vaguely appropriate to compare them? Absolute garbage journalism

[petesergeant]

Quite. If the founder isn’t in jail, and nobody died, then it’s just a startup that didn’t scale.

Another pet peeve is people describing Adam Neumann as flying too close to the sun. If you made a list of people who have historically flown exactly, to a micrometer, the idealest distance from the sun, he’s in the top ten. He enriched himself beyond measure and the people who’s money he took seem keen to give him more of it.

[thomasjudge]

It's Business Insider, what did you expect

[unwise-exe]

The actual comparisons from TFA:

> That meant he had to grow fast and figure out the engineering on the fly — the classic entrepreneurial strategy of Silicon Valley. When it works, you get Tesla; when it doesn't, you get Theranos.

> But if Theranos taught us anything, it's that a business model won't work if it hinges on a technology that doesn't exist. Sebastiani wasn't an Elizabeth Holmes-style grifter. Marshmallows are real! But he did ignore the experts, and proceeded without having the necessary technology in place. If there wasn't a machine that could mass-produce his marshmallows, he would just build one. How hard could it be? In Silicon Valley parlance, he would fake it until he could make it.

The article is severely whitewashing the Theranos fraud. That's why it sees the comparison as legbitimate; it doesn't actually understand what Theranos did that was wrong.

[jahsome]

Business Insider is a blog with good branding. Nothing more. Certainly not journalism in any reasonable sense.

[ineedaj0b]

It’s funded by some anti-tech people/groups. They really don’t like Elon or Silicon Valley in general.

If anyone wants to dig more into that, there’s probably a decent exposé for someone’s Substack.

[jahsome]

Most people don't, so it gets clicks.

[whoitwas]

In context it made perfect sense. They compared 2 companies who had a product without the technology to enable it.