1/ One takeaway from Bad Blood, @JohnCarreyrou’s excellent book about the massive Theranos fraud, is that Elizabeth Holmes went to college at exactly the wrong place and time: @Stanford in the early 2000’s.
2/ Here’s an unusually bright and ambitious teenager who dreams up what amounts to Star Trek medical technology and says to herself “I should drop out of college, found a company to build this, and rule the world.”
3/ Instead of providing a strong dose of realism and suggesting that she stay in school and learn some things, a bunch of people high on the @Stanford / Palo Alto culture of heroic entrepreneurialism were all like “You’re a genius, definitely do that, here’s $100 million.”
4/ Including, notably, famous Stanford chemical engineering professor Channing Robertson, who publicly compared Holmes to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and Leonardo, all while being paid (ahem) $500,000 a year as a Theranos “consultant.”
5/ Given that Theranos was a decade-long fake-it-til-you-make-it scam of epic proportions, and that was obvious to everyone who bothered to look, the most charitable interpretation of this relationship is some combination of greed, indifference, and naivete.
6/ (The consistent pattern of Holmes cultivating endorsements and professional relationships with famous old white men, including the current Secretary of Defense...doesn’t reflect well on the judgement of those men, put it that way.)
7/ I’m all for universities getting outside the ivory tower, but sometimes towers are built for a reason, and even people of integrity aren’t immune to flattery mixed with enormous quantities of free money.
