The lesson here is that that investors can blame founders for their own stupidity and walk free with their reputations intact and their very questionable behavi

The lesson here is that that investors can blame founders for their own stupidity and walk free with their reputations intact and their very questionable behavior unchallenged. And several of those weren't betting with their own money of course. Which IMHO makes them negligent in a way that you might argue is actually fraudulent. You might even argue that some of them were maybe willingly part of this fraud and just looking the other way on the off chance that this thing might have exited before the shit hit the fan. Raise lots of hype, offload the company, via some exit and cash in before the whole pyramid scheme implodes. That too is part of SV founder culture. Business as usual if it doesn't work. Great success if it does. Nobody seems to be talking much about the elephant in the room here BTW; which is that this is about a pretty young woman dealing with male investors in a culture where sexism, harassment, etc. are routinely covered up by disingenuous political correctness. It seems we just don't talk about this and pretend it wasn't a huge factor both with investors being taken for the fools they were, the media drooling all over this because having cute women on the front page is great for business, the public interest in Ms. Holmes (same), the near complete lack of that for her male co-conspirator, and a (male) judge taking the side of the cringe worthy crowd of crocodile shedding wealthy male "victims" demanding revenge for being taken advantage of by a pretty woman. If she was male this company would not have raised this much and the related fraud would not be front page news. Nor would the sentence be this high because this is business as usual in SV. It's a harsh sentence for two kids to have to grow up with mummy in prison.