For anyone who has somehow stumbled onto this site, moved to tears by the amazing content, and asking has “he written anything more recently?” The answer is an emphatic yes! You can peruse my current literary output on my Medium account: https://agreenjay.medium.com/. I just finished writing about the Theranas mishegas and it reflects years of headache-inducing sessions listening to pitches, plying the trade show aisles, and my own stint at a data security startup.
As crazy as it all was, there was at least a small part of these pipe dreams that was based on reality. That was not the case with Theranos’s Edison gadget. It was known by the medical science community that Holmes was a fraud years before the John Carreyrou story broke the story in the WSJ. In reading some of his reporting and watching the enlightening Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, I saw Theranos as the complete realization of something Dan Lyons wrote in his startup memoir Disrupted. And that is startups are really about making movies and the investors and VCs are the producers.
With Theranos, they skipped the part about the product actually working and went full Hollywood. Read the piece and learn how animatronic Barbie is the perfect actress for fleecing investors and fooling the public.
Image credit: SAWS