Elizabeth Holmes is a hero. What you just read is true even if you believe that she failed.
Holmes’s heroic nature recalls Carver Mead at Caltech. Mead has written about weekly gatherings of Caltech professors not to talk about their successful experiments, but those that failed. Success was confirmation of existing knowledge, or stasis, while failure was rich information that moved the pursuit of even more valuable information forward.
Applied to Holmes, and assuming you think she and Theranos failed, you should still revere her for having successfully raised so much money in pursuit of what you deem a failure. In expending relatively large sums on a new, less invasive way of drawing blood as a path to broader detections, Holmes and Theranos substantially expanded what Mead and colleague George Gilder put on a pedestal above all others: information.
To which some readers will say “stop right there.” Holmes is a fraud. She raised substantial sums of money from some of the world’s most prominent venture capitalists, billionaire capitalists, along with some of the biggest names in public policy and science, only to dupe them.
Please re-read your analysis in the form of an argument. And think even more about it. In doing so, you’ll see just how contradictory it is.
If not, it rates saying that Holmes didn’t raise money from widows and orphans, the local Tupperware club, or door to door, rather she passionately brought her vision to the most seasoned investors, CEOs, and prominent minds in the world.
It’s a comment that two things can’t be true at once. Either Holmes is a fraud who duped the easily fooled, or she’s a visionary who didn’t just secure funding from the most seasoned, prominent investors in the world, but also had the most seasoned, prominent investors beating down her door trying to secure shares in Theranos.
Sorry, but it has to be one or the other, but not both.
It’s no doubt true that all the world’s greatest investors have stories of being wrong, or of having had the proverbial wool pulled over their eyes, but this many at once? Highly unlikely. Markets are way too efficient.
Still, the title of this piece is that Holmes’s critics want it both ways. Since they do, let’s accept for fun the popular, media driven narrative promoted in an innuendo-filled book that Holmes was a fraud who defrauded the world’s greatest investors and capitalists. In other words, Holmes didn’t have a product as much as she had a fake, shiny object that she used to knowingly extract precious wealth from the world’s greatest investors and capitalists.
If so, those who embrace what screams oxymoron must explain why, having perpetrated the fraud, Holmes didn’t liquefy at least a portion of her Theranos holdings that at one time were worth $4 billion. Lest readers forget, Holmes had the world’s greatest investors and capitalists lined up in hot pursuit of the shares she held in a business that her critics say was a fraud. Except that she held on to her shares.
Sorry once again, but three contradictory things most certainly can’t be true at once anymore than two things can be. If people want to believe against all reason that a fraud could dupe not one, but an enormous collection of the world’s greatest investors and capitalists, then it must be that she sold private shares of her scam when the world’s greatest investors were clamoring for them. Except that she didn’t.
Holmes couldn’t sell what she believed so passionately in. Instead, she raised enormous sums in pursuit of what she believed in so passionately. That’s what heroes do.
