No. You know what? No. Calling bullshit on this. The dude was "chastened" for arguing against an entire approach to technology: He wasn't "bragging about not investing in a company that failed" he was celebrating the death of a bad idea that had been backed by big fucking money. goobster's comparison to Hollywood is apt - there are all sorts of abominably bad projects drifting around where the first thing you do is look and see what rich, powerful asshole is backing it - I mean obviously a movie in which a father and son speak babytalk to each other for two hours while communicating psionically to avoid a space bear is never gonna get made except when it is. And of course big backers can't steal all the good ideas from one idea to prop up another except when they do. You know why Hollywood makes nothing but fucking superhero movies now? Because in order to get anything done you need some asshole with $150m and the only thing he's going to make is sure things so now we've got Disney which bought Marvel which will stack 27 fucking movies together to drag your ass to Avengers Endgame. Meanwhile, every decent idea anyone has ever had eats shit. So here's Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Fucking Thiel and they've decided they're going to AynRand fucking primary school and somebody - the guy who was at the fucking Gates foundation for ten years - calls bullshit on it and you are BENDING OVER BACKWARDS to figure out a way for the blowback to be his fault. I'ma drag thenewgreen into this because I love how offended he gets whenever I mention Theranos but you know what? Theranos happened because Elizabeth Smart grew up next door to, and played with the daughter of, Tim Draper. So she bats her eyes at Tim Draper, says that her magical bullshit patent doesn't violate the space-time continuum, and inside ten years, $700m are up in smoke. Because nobody is gonna call bullshit on Tim Draper or else they'll be punished for it and now, the entire medical technology space smells like poison. No. The dude's future was existentially threatened for calling a spade a spade. In a space where WeWork has gone from a $57b valuation to a $10b valuation in six months only because the financial press has started going what the fuck softbank. Sure - saying you're smart because you passed is inane. But saying certain business models deserve to fail is the sort of thing investors should be allowed to hear.$174M lessons here. We passed on Altschool multiple times, mainly because disrupting school was a terrible strategy, but also b/c founders didn’t understand #edtech is all about partnering w/existing districts, schools and educators (not just “product”)
You're right, of course. She was able to do it because of who she knew. But also, she was very talented at pitching and lying.I love how offended he gets whenever I mention Theranos
I just hate her. HATE. She poisoned the well for all legitimate businesses in the biotech space. These are people that aren't liars but are trying to build solid companies, solving big problems. Her company came up in conversation a number of times while I was raising our seed round.
Yes but Elizabeth wore the Steve Jobs black turtleneck and jeans while she lied, so she must've been... r̶e̶l̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶?̶ b̶r̶i̶l̶l̶i̶a̶n̶t̶ so confident that the VC community was a bunch of suckers that she'd be able to lie for the next 50 years of her life without solving anything? Thank goodness she was wrong on the timescale by more than an order of magnitude, but just a cursory grasp of how big Quest Diagnostics is and all of the market incentives they have to develop the product themselves made me immediately skeptical of Theranos. I know you guys are doing something totally different, and I'm genuinely sorry, because the odds are that some conjob cost you at least one legitjob. P.S. someday the chumps in my field at U-Mich will host a conference, and I'll bother you.