“These kids don’t overthink, they don’t get bogged down into the way things always used to be done, they don’t want review cometees. Bureaucracy: they want to get things done now”. This is said by a Walgreens executive in. The. Dropout (2022), the Hulu series that fictionalizes the story of Elizabeth Holmes. And in that assessment. Made with admiration and optimism. Lies the key to the resounding downfalls of Sam. Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes. Two young promises who wanted to “get things done now”.
Silicon Valley is the hotbed of startups, where everyone wants to “. Change the world” and, while they’re at it, become billionaires. Nick. Goldberg, an executive coaching specialist, says that “the fluid nature of tech startups, coupled with the inexperience of young entrepreneurs, increases the risk of making bad decisions.” In Silicon Valley there are no rules or best practices, it’s the Wild West and, as long as the money keeps rolling in, no one asks questions.
Until two of the most celebrated billionaires of this paradigm lost their entire fortune and now face years in jail. Let the questions begin.
Elizabeth Holmes: the false revolutionary
Elizabeth Holmes is 19 years old and a specific database by industry sophomore at Stanford University when she famously -or should I say infamously?- decides to drop out to start her own company, Theranos. Still a teenager, she convinces her parents to invest her college fund into her dream: creating a device that can detect hundreds of diseases with just a drop of blood. So far it all sounds very noble and admirable, right? But things get ugly when Holmes fails to get her device to work properly and, in order to keep her investors, starts falsifying results and manipulating data.
Somehow the young woman manages to get some
The most powerful men in America to invest millions of dollars in a product that never works. But Holmes didn’t just play with the fortunes of old white men: her product failures meant that millions of people received false or grossly inaccurate results about their health, such as a false positive for HIV or a false diagnosis of cancer.
Meanwhile, Holmes was gracing the covers of every magazine as the “youngest self-made billionaire,” fooling everyone for more than a decade. awb directory In 2015, a Wall Street Journal article by John Carreyrou exposed wrongdoing at Theranos labs and the company began to receive scrutiny from all media outlets. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled that Holmes had committed massive fraud and the company was shut down for good.
After a lengthy court case, in November of this the best press release examples and templates (with template) year the judge in her case sentenced her to 11 years in prison, a sentence well below the maximum 20 years she could face. Holmes’ lawyers asked for a more lenient treatment of their client on account of her being “a well-meaning businesswoman”, now a mother with a second child on the way.
In that defense lies one of the keys to how
This young woman with no college degree or experience. Managed to convince titans such as. George Schultz, Rupert. Murdoch or Henry .Kissinger to invest in a supposed technological innovation without ever seeing reliable results. Holmes’ entire success was based on the construction of her character, on selling herself as “the new Steve Jobs”. A carefully orchestrated fiction: from her all-black attire to her artificially deep voice that made her sound. Like a pre-teen boy trying to get into a movie theater.