4 ms·
Good old common sense is lacking all throughout this farce. It's one thing to build a company on an existing technology, like Jobs did, but promise to implement
by paulvs 10y ago
Good old common sense is lacking all throughout this farce. It's one thing to build a company on an existing technology, like Jobs did, but promise to implement it better. It's another to come up with a wouldn't it be nice if... scenario, and raise capital on it.
Are Silicon Valley investors stupid enough to throw their money at any bright young dropout with a change-the-world idea? The fact that some Ivy League dropouts found billion dollar companies does not mean a particular Ivy League dropout chosen at random (or one of the many who express a desire to change the world) has a non-zero chance of returning $$$ on investments.
Demonstrating that inteligence and common sense are seperate traits, the latter not always accompanying the former.
- fsloth 10y agoHolmes had extremely good family connections. I'm sure it sounded credible at the time. From VC:s point of view the type of people she had connections to functioned as social proof and some of them even probably as celebrity advocates (i.e. Rumsfeld).
- lordnacho 10y agoIf you wait for all the pieces of a proposed business to be functioning properly, you will have missed the boat as an investor. It's perfectly reasonable to take a bet on someone who appears intelligent and well connected, with a "maybe" idea. There's all sorts of hurdles that a company might not get over: - Tech turns out to be a red herring - Tech works, but competitors also get it to work - You can't scale the team - People buy the product, but you need critical mass to make it worthwhile - etc
- TillE 10y agoI don't think it's too much to demand a scientifically verified "proof of concept" before investing. There's still a very long road from that to a real functioning business. What Theranos had was merely the hope of developing such a process, with many reasons to believe that it's simply impossible. That's insanely risky.