[oooyay]

Rather than focusing on Holmes and her lover, I'd like to posit some other questions I have with this approach. Let's assume for just a minute that Holmes wasn't trying to rug pull and that she genuinely wanted Theranos to succeed in it's stated mission.

Wouldn't a foundational invention like this 20-30 years ago come out of a university lab? It feels like VC funding is not the right vehicle for the kind of development that takes a lot of time and must work the first time. Those VCs are going to be looking for returns.

[CalChris]

That was implication of the original con. She was this superstar Stanford undergrad who’d discovered something so radically important she had to drop out of school for the sake of humanity.

[rchaud]

She wasn't a "superstar" in any way whatsoever. She dropped out after 1 year of undergrad, with zero papers published where she was a principal author, or anything that would even hint that she knew what she was doing. She was rich and connected so was able to get funding on the basis of not much more than a powerpoint and a couple of supportive professors.

[CalChris]

Yes, those are the cold facts. I probably should have put superstar in scare quotes. But the con was that she was some sort of Stanford 'superstar'.

I looked over her bio on Wikipedia. Yeah, she certainly came from a rich + connected background. So she understood rich people and what they wanted to hear. However, I don't think her Stanford professors were implicated, at least as far as I've read. They didn't knock any sense into her but they also didn't co-sign.

But none of the adults raised alarm. I got into it once with a VC trying to say that Sand Hill was blameless. That was nonsense too.

[forgotpwagain]

It is possible that they are licensing technology that was developed in academic science and are raising money to scale it up and get it ultra-standarized for commercial scale.

I agree that the modern Silicon Valley model of VC funding has been spoiled by SaaS startups, where the capital expense is smaller, the timeline to exit is shorter, and pivots are easier. It is not great for deeptech innovation because those require more capital, time, and are more technology-constrained than software. Ironically, modern VC was developed to support semiconductor startups (1970s-90s), but has drifted from that technology-heavy origin.

[catgary]

I was always under the impression that actual science/tech startups were more of a MIT/Northeast thing than what you generally see out of Stanford.