- was also bubbling throughout the company’s mustard-and-green Palo Alto headquarters, which was nearing the end of a $6.7 million renovation.
Not sure how many startups you guys have been apart of, but none of the ones I worked for were making 7 million dollar renovations to their offices.
- Holmes largely forbade her employees from communicating with one another about what they were working on—a culture that resulted in a rare form of executive omniscience.
This also keeps your employees in the dark when the ship starts sinking.
- Moreover, he was also struck by Holmes’s limited ability to explain how it all worked.
You're running a biotech company and you don't even know how the technology works? Another HUGE red flag.
- And, as a then dark-haired 19-year-old first-year at Stanford University’s School of Chemical Engineering
So somewhere she was able to charm people that she was some kind of biotech expert after only having ONE YEAR in a chemical engineering program? Unreal.
There's a bunch more, but I'm quite shocked frankly she got as far as she did. There should have been so many red flags on the investors part to stay away from this company and they all got suckered into it.
> So somewhere she was able to charm people that she was some kind of biotech expert after only having ONE YEAR in a chemical engineering program? Unreal.
It's also worth noting the context: the media/large segments of the population were (still are) clamouring for women in STEM. Holmes emerged as a woman in STEM, who was a college drop out, dressed like Steve Jobs, apparently had the work ethic of Elon Musk, came from a well connected family, all while also being some sort of science prodigy who found a way to defy the physical rules of biology.
They ate it up and anyone who asked any questions was immediately labeled a misandrist, so I think it's quite easy to understand how she got this far. Virtually everything was stacked her way and she was immune to criticism.
>> That's only because you don't know who she knew. With such deep connected friends when you bring powerful people to the board, money will follow.
This is the one thing that I always think about when people talk about the SV crowd. There were a fuck ton of red flags and everybody ignored them continually until you couldn't any more.
All I ever read about SV is that you have to have a solid idea, solid financial plan and make damn sure you know what you're doing before you even get a whiff of the big VC money. In her case, all of that somehow just evaporated and they jumped in without doing any due diligence. I guess to some degree, the investors have no one to blame but themselves. If you're not going to vett these companies before you throw a few million at them, then you get what you deserve and her investors are getting in spades right now.
On renovations - I consulted for Powa Technologies, in London for a while, who claimed to be a startup and who blew a couple of million pounds on outfitting their offices in the middle of London's financial centre.
Heard of them lately? Well only if you read about their bankrupcy and total shutdown earlier this year...
They'd almost have to be. "The thing that tells you whether you have cancer or not" is inherently going to need to stand up to regulatory scrutiny in a way that "the thing that lets you send people pictures of your lunch" never will.
medical research is much more heavily regulated (or at least it's supposed to be) with oversight from federal regulatory agencies poking around inside processes. And the needs of university funded "publish or perish" medical/biosciences. You can develop something like Magic Leap in near total secrecy, not so much advanced medical technology.
To be pedantic, research isn't heavily regulated. Hell, even getting a CLIA license is a bit of a joke. Once you start selling to the general public however...
