Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Agree, though their hands were somewhat tied. AFAICT, it’s not that Theranos looked “bad,” it just provided patchy evidence about its goings-on to potential $. You’re simply not going to knock a media savvy female founder who’s come to “shake up the old boys’ club” over that

I think the fundamental problem with Elizabeth Holmes was that she was a story SV *wanted to tell.* “Attractive young woman drops out of Stanford, takes over world with consumer product that disrupts dusty industry subject to severe cost disease” is a really really good story

They wanted a female Steve Jobs and so they got one. As I say, if you're offering big bucks for a platypus, sooner or later someone's going to glue a bill onto a weasel.

SV operates on a lot of real magic *and* a lot of pageantry. Sometimes nobody really knows how much of each is in play w/ a given bet until a rocket actually goes up or whatever, which can take years. On net, it’s great that we have a mechanism for funding big crazy projects

what does worry me is that if a really determined Madoff-style fraudster gets into that ecosystem there are absolutely no controls that would stop them.

But Holmes is a near-optimized version of this & she’s just... not... the end of the world? You can’t easily do this w/ a software product, people expect an iterable thing to play with. And the problem w/ a fake physical product is that at some point people say “OK, where is it?”

She's nowhere near optimised. The actual cash stolen by Theranos is a lot less than a billion. What I'm worried about would be if a fraudster got control of one of the VC funds themselves.