7 ms·

Presentations and pitch decks by failures and frauds

163 points by oyster143 3y ago

spamizbad 3y ago
Arguably the best pitch decks of all time. If you can sell turds to financial elites you're at the top of your game.
- yevpats 3y ago
  Or you are stupid enough to do it and end up in jail for the rest of your life instead of putting your own imagination and skill into something a bit nicer
- taeric 3y ago
  I think you will find that many of these were arguably "financial elite insiders" the whole time. Worse, if you read too long, it is very easy to get sucked into the narrative that they were the stooges for the actual insiders that still made out with the bank.
- rapind 3y ago
  That could actually be the pitch. We’re selling turds to idiots with too much money… of course not you though (audience).
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    There are times when it makes sense to invest in so-called "turds." Just like there are times when it's economically rational to "invest" in lottery tickets: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/4998/is-there-an-economic-analysis-of-the-rationality-of-buying-lottery-tickets https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/4998/is-there-...
- duped 3y ago
  This is like saying the 2017 Astros are one of the best MLB teams of all time because they cheated to win the World Series.
  - drBonkers 3y ago
    "best pitch deck" != "best company and product"
  - lifeonlars 3y ago
    Surely there's an argument to be made that they are among the best cheaters of all time?
- at-fates-hands 3y ago
  >> If you can sell turds to financial elites you're at the top of your game. My Dad worked for several silicon valley startups in the 60's and 70's and his advice always stuck with me. When I got caught up in the first dot com craze in the late 90's early aughts, he always told me about his experience then and told me: "Listen son, if it sounds like blue skies and bullshit, then it probably is." It helped me steer clear a few disastrous startups right after graduating from college.
  - vivegi 3y ago
    > blue skies and bs... I am going to steal that line. :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- public_defender 3y ago
  I sort of agree with this, but it assumes that the pitch deck impacts a critical outcome for these businesses. For example, sometimes in my line of work a prosecutor reads a mitigation report (pitch deck) and offers a good plea bargain because they learned something that moved them. But there are other times that a prosecutor wants to make a better offer and wants a little administrative cover. They might text me, "Send me some mitigation. Sooner is better, nothing fancy." Those are the cases with the best outcomes, but not really the best "pitch decks."
tylerhou 3y ago
Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:33YqNEF3x-wJ:https://www.slidebook.io/blog/article/on-the-road-to-failure/&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:33YqNE... But the slides themselves aren't in Google's cache.
- neonate 3y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20230428164428/https://www.slidebook.io/blog/article/on-the-road-to-failure/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230428164428/https://www.slideb...
AirMax98 3y ago
Site is unfortunately down.
revelio 3y ago
> Fraud and corporate collapses were always part of business landscape, but they became more frequent and severe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries Is this actually true? No citation is given and my gut sense was that corporate collapses used to be far more frequent. Think railroad manias, tulip bubbles, wildcat banks. If anything economic conventional wisdom has lately become that there aren't enough corporate collapses due to the flood of endless cheap money propping up zombie firms that endlessly lose money. The Theranos deck is interesting though. Even the first slide appears to be a word salad that makes no sense. "Our immediate goal is to become the standard for improving the efficacy and risk/benefit and safety profile of every therapy"? That's an (over-broad) mission statement, not an immediate goal. Then slide 3 "Theranos Today" they're talking about assumed future deals not the state of the company in the present, and somehow "Existing deals: $120M - $1.5Bn in revenue"!? Then a bunch of graphs that look like they must have come from a real patient but nothing is stated about what's really happening. Also, "Drivers for success: management and culture" lol.
- seizethecheese 3y ago
  I really doubt frauds have become more common. Currently reading a biography of Grant. He’s already gotten swindled multiple times and I’m not even halfway done. This is availability bias of someone who consumes more news than history
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    I think frauds may actually be less common, these days, as they can be cross-referenced more easily. But some folks want to be fooled, and fraudsters know how to find them.
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    Hugh or Ulysses?
    - neaden 3y ago
      Ulysses I assume as he very famously had a bad head for business and many people who took advantage of him.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
axus 3y ago
The Arthur Andersen slides from WorldCom use colors to indicate if an accounting process is "Effective" or "Ineffective", but these archived slides are in black & white so the results are ambiguous. In my imagination, it's showing all green.
manv1 3y ago
These look exactly the same as the ones by firms that became successful!
- guywithahat 3y ago
  That's what I was thinking too, and really very few if any of these were planned to be a fraud from the start. It would be more interesting to see slide decks of people who knew from the start they would defraud their investors, instead of companies like SVB who focused too much on diversity instead of risk assessment or Lehman Brothers who collapsed during a recession.
  - pcrh 3y ago
    I can't speak for the other pitch decks, but to anyone with any knowledge of how medical testing works in practice, Theranos was a clear fraud from day 1. This derives from the simple observation that almost all current blood tests eventually measure only a small sample (microlitres) of the blood initially drawn, and the business proposition didn't address the question of why larger samples are normally drawn (a lot of the answer lies in the "engineering" problems inherent in handling complex biological liquids). Obviously, the Theranos deck wasn't pitched to people with the requisite knowledge...
    - whatever1 3y ago
      But they were pitching their own testing hardware that supposedly had solved these engineering problems. Not sure how just from the deck I could had called them out.
      - ska 3y ago
        After seed round anyway, a red flag was a combination of the technical hand waving and having the wrong sort of board for the product. In earliest decks you can only really look at the team anyway. I'm not sure you could reliably discount them in the first 6 mo, say.
    - 3y ago
karol 3y ago
Why not train a ML engine on them to find more?
agnosticmantis 3y ago
The presentations and pitch decks were probably the only successful part of these businesses. So these may actually provide good lessons for people with legitimate businesses.
ansible 3y ago
Apparently, there is an attempt to run Fyre Festival again: https://variety.com/2023/music/news/fyre-festival-sequel-billy-mcfarland-vows-fyre-festival-ii-1235579488/ https://variety.com/2023/music/news/fyre-festival-sequel-bil... This was announced shortly after Billy McFarland got out of jail on fraud charges related to the first one. I'd like to believe that people are not nearly stupid enough to put money towards this again. But the way the last decade has gone, who knows?
rasz 3y ago
Missing Meredith Perry and her uBeam trying to sell idea of ubiquitous wireless charging. Tedtalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c Analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1R9IQF0Y9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1R9IQF0Y9s "for each technological hurdle deemed insurmountable by the experts I would spend just a few hours thinking about the problem from a variety of approaches so I was able to solve problems when the PhD experts couldn't with just a few hours of really simple research every single argument over why the technology couldn't work has been indisputably wrong has taught me to be skeptical of experts the expertise represented a narrow way of looking at things engineers are inherently linear thinkers and tend to take a very binary approach to solving problems as a non expert I had an advantage because I could look at a problem from different angles because I just didn't know it was possible by thinking outside the box by thinking around corners you can out think the top thinkers and now eight months later I have four of the top ultrasonic engineers in the world working for me we're working with me it's going to work and it's going to be awesome and I can't wait to give the middle finger and smiled all the engineers that criticize the crap out of me" Spoilers: She is a fraud, it never worked, one of the ultrasonic engineers she boasted about hiring even ran a blog debunking her claims https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com. >$20 million from Andreessen Horowitz/Mark Cuban/Marissa Mayer down the crapper. At least it didnt manage to IPO.

163 points by oyster143 3y ago

spamizbad 3y ago

Arguably the best pitch decks of all time. If you can sell turds to financial elites you're at the top of your game.

yevpats 3y ago
Or you are stupid enough to do it and end up in jail for the rest of your life instead of putting your own imagination and skill into something a bit nicer
taeric 3y ago
I think you will find that many of these were arguably "financial elite insiders" the whole time. Worse, if you read too long, it is very easy to get sucked into the narrative that they were the stooges for the actual insiders that still made out with the bank.
rapind 3y ago
That could actually be the pitch. We’re selling turds to idiots with too much money… of course not you though (audience).
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  There are times when it makes sense to invest in so-called "turds." Just like there are times when it's economically rational to "invest" in lottery tickets: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/4998/is-there-an-economic-analysis-of-the-rationality-of-buying-lottery-tickets https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/4998/is-there-...
duped 3y ago
This is like saying the 2017 Astros are one of the best MLB teams of all time because they cheated to win the World Series.
- drBonkers 3y ago
  "best pitch deck" != "best company and product"
- lifeonlars 3y ago
  Surely there's an argument to be made that they are among the best cheaters of all time?
at-fates-hands 3y ago
>> If you can sell turds to financial elites you're at the top of your game. My Dad worked for several silicon valley startups in the 60's and 70's and his advice always stuck with me. When I got caught up in the first dot com craze in the late 90's early aughts, he always told me about his experience then and told me: "Listen son, if it sounds like blue skies and bullshit, then it probably is." It helped me steer clear a few disastrous startups right after graduating from college.
- vivegi 3y ago
  > blue skies and bs... I am going to steal that line. :)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
public_defender 3y ago
I sort of agree with this, but it assumes that the pitch deck impacts a critical outcome for these businesses. For example, sometimes in my line of work a prosecutor reads a mitigation report (pitch deck) and offers a good plea bargain because they learned something that moved them. But there are other times that a prosecutor wants to make a better offer and wants a little administrative cover. They might text me, "Send me some mitigation. Sooner is better, nothing fancy." Those are the cases with the best outcomes, but not really the best "pitch decks."

tylerhou 3y ago

Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:33YqNEF3x-wJ:https://www.slidebook.io/blog/article/on-the-road-to-failure/&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:33YqNE... But the slides themselves aren't in Google's cache.

neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230428164428/https://www.slidebook.io/blog/article/on-the-road-to-failure/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230428164428/https://www.slideb...

AirMax98 3y ago

Site is unfortunately down.

revelio 3y ago

> Fraud and corporate collapses were always part of business landscape, but they became more frequent and severe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries Is this actually true? No citation is given and my gut sense was that corporate collapses used to be far more frequent. Think railroad manias, tulip bubbles, wildcat banks. If anything economic conventional wisdom has lately become that there aren't enough corporate collapses due to the flood of endless cheap money propping up zombie firms that endlessly lose money. The Theranos deck is interesting though. Even the first slide appears to be a word salad that makes no sense. "Our immediate goal is to become the standard for improving the efficacy and risk/benefit and safety profile of every therapy"? That's an (over-broad) mission statement, not an immediate goal. Then slide 3 "Theranos Today" they're talking about assumed future deals not the state of the company in the present, and somehow "Existing deals: $120M - $1.5Bn in revenue"!? Then a bunch of graphs that look like they must have come from a real patient but nothing is stated about what's really happening. Also, "Drivers for success: management and culture" lol.

seizethecheese 3y ago
I really doubt frauds have become more common. Currently reading a biography of Grant. He’s already gotten swindled multiple times and I’m not even halfway done. This is availability bias of someone who consumes more news than history
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I think frauds may actually be less common, these days, as they can be cross-referenced more easily. But some folks want to be fooled, and fraudsters know how to find them.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Hugh or Ulysses?
  - neaden 3y ago
    Ulysses I assume as he very famously had a bad head for business and many people who took advantage of him.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

axus 3y ago

The Arthur Andersen slides from WorldCom use colors to indicate if an accounting process is "Effective" or "Ineffective", but these archived slides are in black & white so the results are ambiguous. In my imagination, it's showing all green.

manv1 3y ago

These look exactly the same as the ones by firms that became successful!

guywithahat 3y ago
That's what I was thinking too, and really very few if any of these were planned to be a fraud from the start. It would be more interesting to see slide decks of people who knew from the start they would defraud their investors, instead of companies like SVB who focused too much on diversity instead of risk assessment or Lehman Brothers who collapsed during a recession.
- pcrh 3y ago
  I can't speak for the other pitch decks, but to anyone with any knowledge of how medical testing works in practice, Theranos was a clear fraud from day 1. This derives from the simple observation that almost all current blood tests eventually measure only a small sample (microlitres) of the blood initially drawn, and the business proposition didn't address the question of why larger samples are normally drawn (a lot of the answer lies in the "engineering" problems inherent in handling complex biological liquids). Obviously, the Theranos deck wasn't pitched to people with the requisite knowledge...
  - whatever1 3y ago
    But they were pitching their own testing hardware that supposedly had solved these engineering problems. Not sure how just from the deck I could had called them out.
    - ska 3y ago
      After seed round anyway, a red flag was a combination of the technical hand waving and having the wrong sort of board for the product. In earliest decks you can only really look at the team anyway. I'm not sure you could reliably discount them in the first 6 mo, say.
  - 3y ago

karol 3y ago

Why not train a ML engine on them to find more?

agnosticmantis 3y ago

The presentations and pitch decks were probably the only successful part of these businesses. So these may actually provide good lessons for people with legitimate businesses.

ansible 3y ago

Apparently, there is an attempt to run Fyre Festival again: https://variety.com/2023/music/news/fyre-festival-sequel-billy-mcfarland-vows-fyre-festival-ii-1235579488/ https://variety.com/2023/music/news/fyre-festival-sequel-bil... This was announced shortly after Billy McFarland got out of jail on fraud charges related to the first one. I'd like to believe that people are not nearly stupid enough to put money towards this again. But the way the last decade has gone, who knows?

rasz 3y ago

Missing Meredith Perry and her uBeam trying to sell idea of ubiquitous wireless charging. Tedtalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c Analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1R9IQF0Y9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1R9IQF0Y9s "for each technological hurdle deemed insurmountable by the experts I would spend just a few hours thinking about the problem from a variety of approaches so I was able to solve problems when the PhD experts couldn't with just a few hours of really simple research every single argument over why the technology couldn't work has been indisputably wrong has taught me to be skeptical of experts the expertise represented a narrow way of looking at things engineers are inherently linear thinkers and tend to take a very binary approach to solving problems as a non expert I had an advantage because I could look at a problem from different angles because I just didn't know it was possible by thinking outside the box by thinking around corners you can out think the top thinkers and now eight months later I have four of the top ultrasonic engineers in the world working for me we're working with me it's going to work and it's going to be awesome and I can't wait to give the middle finger and smiled all the engineers that criticize the crap out of me" Spoilers: She is a fraud, it never worked, one of the ultrasonic engineers she boasted about hiring even ran a blog debunking her claims https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com. >$20 million from Andreessen Horowitz/Mark Cuban/Marissa Mayer down the crapper. At least it didnt manage to IPO.