I'm pretty confident Theranos was partly a product of a company being founded by an attractive young woman surrounded by powerful men cooing at her instead of holding her accountable or giving her the kind of constructive criticism they would give a male founder.

Women get personally attacked and dismissed a lot while no one tells them "x needs to be done differently." They get inured to hearing everything "mansplained." They start tuning out the ugliness.

We don't have well developed good paradigms for how to do this effectively.

I think the "woman founder" bit might have impacted media coverage, and even investor decisions, but to make a gendered narrative out of the blatant fraud ignores Balwani's role in the affair. There was at least one high-ranking male who knew exactly what was going on and where the bodies were buried. To me this is a clear case of "fake it till you make it, and defraud investors in the mean time hoping you actually make it."

I'm a woman. A lot of men find me attractive, though my youth is long gone and it took a lot of my beauty with it when it left.

Men mostly either coo at me or treat me like an idiot who desperately needs a heavy heap of Mansplaining.

I've been on HN nearly a decade. I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leader board.

I am endlessly mocked and belittled for pointing out how differently I get treated from the guys on the leader board. People go out of their way to make it clear that expecting this to be a professional networking opportunity that enhances my career and bottom line is point-and-laugh worthy, never mind the overwhelming evidence that participation here routinely enhances the careers and bank balances of countless men.

So that's the lens through which I view the Theranos debacle where the world imagined the company wasn't merely a billion dollar unicorn but, instead, valued it at ten billion and called it a dekacorn. Then, overnight, it's valuation dropped to zero.

I don't think the same scenario would have flown for so very long and gotten so crazy out of hand with a charismatic man as the front person.

I desperately want good constructive feedback and mostly can't get it. I'm quite confident that Holmes was largely starved of honest and factual feedback about life, the universe, the company and how business is done.

The most recent article I read indicated she shacked up with one of the investors. Her public narrative was that she was completely celibate out of single-minded devotion to the company.

I have never seen an article that really questioned that. The media has bent over backwards to be respectful of this known fraud.

I'm still waiting to hear that the real secret of her success was sleeping with multiple powerful men who then backed the company in exchange. I think the one other time I said that on HN, it was downvoted.

Sexual politics. Can't give the obvious answer about how a college drop out with no business experience managed to "fake it" so long without ever making good on any of those empty promises, even after it has come out that she moved in with some old guy who invested millions in her company.

Theranos had (almost) all the boxes ticked: cool founder, noble goal, opposition to "medical mafia" - you name it.

Like a foam strawberry which looks like it's edible and smells like it's edible. Enough to fool my one year old daughter.

Regarding Theranos, I think we can all agree that the worst capitalist excesses are the unique products of an excess of unchecked greed and incompetence at multiple levels and have relatively little to do with personal efforts or domain expertise.

Dunning Kruger, IMHO, is a straw man / false dichotomy. Sure, none of us are perfect, but if you disable your focus by worrying unhealthily about perception by others and where you line up, or if you are ultimately some sort of imposter, then you've missed the boat by definition. The old story of 99% perspiration, enough personability to acquire funding and at least reasonably effectively manage others, and the resulting chain of stubborn achievement will get you almost anywhere... just come up for breath now and then and check you're not failing versus any competition, and/or if you're going blue ocean/greenfield and having doubts make sure people you trust can reassure you you're not completely insane, or the financials are secure enough to justify an onward march.

So, if you just have enough pluck and funding then you can do anything? Years, if not centuries, of learning and specialism be damned, right?

Yep, basically. You can hire that stuff when necessary.