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The story of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes captivated the imagination of the public. His story is now at the base of a best-selling book, a series of podcasts, an HBO documentary and a future film, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes. .
For those who are unaware, in 2004, at the age of 19, Holmes dropped out of his engineering degree in chemistry at Stanford University to found Theranos, a company that promised to revolutionize health care. His technology would be able to diagnose a range of ailments from a single drop of blood. Holmes has managed to convince many people to keep his promises, by acquiring millions of pounds of investment and making sure his company is valued at $ 10 billion in 2014. But it turned out that the claims were false. The tests did not work. There was no product.
In March 2018, the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos with "mbadive fraud". It is said that Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, former president of Theranos, had lied for years about the technology of the company and encouraged investors to give hundreds of millions of dollars to Theranos. Holmes, now 35, and Balwani, both pleaded not guilty. And although a trial date has not yet been set, if they are found guilty, they could be sentenced to decades of imprisonment.
The magnitude of this scam has left many people wondering how such prestigious investors have been fooled. People blame the "toxic" culture, "simulate until you do it", "move fast, break things" of the Silicon Valley culture.
This may be inevitable for the story of an intelligent and ambitious woman who left university to change the world – a vital part of Silicon Valley's ethic. But calling it "toxic culture" may miss something much more relevant to the Holmes case – the myth of "the entrepreneur who dropped out of school".
The abandoned entrepreneur
From business heroes, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, to pop culture icons like Kanye West, "abandoned entrepreneurs" are the latest formation of an ideal that goes back to the United States in the middle of the 19th century. At that time, the United States was moving from a predominantly agricultural economy to an emerging market-oriented economy and industry.
It is at this time that the notion of "oneself" is badociated with material success rather than concern for the civil good or moral character. At the heart of this idea, there was a story of "rags to riches" that measured an individual's success against the ideals of self-confidence and hard work.
In recent years, this discourse has become a central part of the trend of bright students dropping out of school and giving up the promise of a secure job to create their own path in the world. In this way, by abandoning Stanford, Holmes conformed to a mythical archetype of our time, which the late Steve Jobs regarded as the incarnation.
"The apple of health"
The story of Theranos is one of the key elements in Holmes' story, considered "the next Steve Jobs". This badociation was adopted by Holmes, who made concerted efforts to pose as the public character of Jobs. She was wearing black turtlenecks, recruiting Apple employees, and, crucially, lining up her own story about leaving university to pursue her dream.
Her story of "dropout" to "self-taught billionaire" is all the more fascinating in relation to the broader myth of entrepreneurial success, because the university from which she left school is the one that Steve Jobs pronounced in his speech of graduation in June 2005. The speech focused on triumph over adversity and what you love:
Your job will occupy a large part of your life and the only way to be really satisfied is to do what you feel is a great job. And the only way to do a good job is to love what you do. If you have not found it yet, keep looking. Do not settle. As with everything about the heart, you will know when you will find it. "
When the fraud suggestion was first reported in a Wall Street Journal article in 2015, Holmes responded publicly by paraphrasing Apple's famous "Think Different" campaign of 1997, stating: "C & # 39 is what happens when you work to change things.They think at first that you're crazy, so they fight you, so you change the world. "
This answer speaks volumes about Holmes' belief in the myth she complied with and the culture in which she operated. And, in this way, Holmes' so-called eccentricities can be seen as a desperate attempt to be "a round peg in a square hole".
The risk of perpetuating the myth
Most reports on this story describe Holmes as disillusioned – a fraudster or a calculated psychopath. But that just risks further mythologizing Holmes and his story.
By calling her "crazy", we risk playing with the very story on which her initial success and fraudulent demands were based. In 2015, Holmes' self-confidence and ambitions were unshakeable when she declared at the Forbes summit 30 to 30:
You'll be upset again and again, and you'll get up … I've got a lot reversed and it became very clear that that was what I wanted to do and I would create this business over 10,000 times if I had to .
To say that we must reject the culture of "simulacra until you make it," which Holmes' narrative has become a central element, is simply too easy. While it helps to explain the climate in which fraud could take place, there will always remain an element of speculation and risk in any entrepreneur's proposal to acquire capital.
And because Silicon Valley's culture is based on a spirit of non-compliance and anti-regulation, calls for regulation and change will only perpetuate the aggressive self-confidence and blind ambition of Holmes' story. .
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