Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
That’s true. But this idea was unworkable because of basic biology/physics. It doesn’t matter how good the sensor is if you’re dealing with bad samples.
For most of the tests they wanted to perform, a finger stick will always provide an unrepresentative sample. And not in a predictable way.
The thing is experienced people knew this. All you had to do was to talk to anyone who knew the biology and they would have told you this could never work. Not this can’t work with today’s technology, but this is fundamentally at odds with reality.
But the implication is that others weren't banging their heads. The amount of money invested in this particular domain is in the tens, if not hundreds, of billions. There are so many companies whose lives, whose workflows, product lines would be made vastly easier.
The thing that calls her out as a scammer is that Theranos probably invested more money in the faking it, the deception, with Siemens equipment than they did in actually trying to solve the problem itself.
> To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable.
Sure, but also lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable regardless of how many times heads get banged, due to some fundamental limitation, like perpetual motion machines or homeopathy. It's a spectrum, but from what I understand Theranos was closer to the "unworkable in theory" side of things than the "currently unworkable in practice" side of things.
And surely with all the competent engineers working for her, she could have figured out where to pivot to, once she understood that the original basic idea was unworkable.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.