Shining star of Silicon Valley gets her comeuppance
Theranos’ Holmes was hailed as next tech visionary until she was exposed
Elizabeth Holmes’s start-up Theranos made her a multi-billionaire hailed as the next US tech visionary by age 30, but it all evaporated in a flash of lawsuits, ignominy and, finally, an 11-year prison sentence on Friday.
The rise and fall of Holmes, who in January was convicted of defrauding investors of her biotech start-up, is a heavily chronicled saga that prompted a hard look at her methods but also the unseemly aspects of start-up life.
In many ways Holmes fit the image of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, from her dark-coloured turtleneck sweaters that evoked tech legend and Apple founder Steve Jobs to her dropping out of California’s elite Stanford University.
But it has all come crashing down with the tech star, who is now pregnant, set to surrender herself in April of next year to begin serving time. The fundamental question surrounding her case was always whether she was a true visionary who simply failed, as she claimed on the stand, or a skilled self-promoter who took advantage of a credulous context to commit fraud.
Young achiever tag
Holmes won admission to Stanford, and there began work on cutting-edge biomedical initiatives, founding in 2003 what would become Theranos when she was just 19. Part of her ability to convince her backers was her apparent deep personal commitment — she applied for her first patent while still at university and after dropping out, convinced her parents to let her use her tuition savings to build the company.
By the end of 2010, she had raised a whopping $92 million in venture capital for Theranos, which she pledged was developing machines that could run a gamut of diagnostic tests on a few drops of blood.
Theranos hype kicked up another gear in 2014 and, in the span of just over a year, a turtleneck-wearing Holmes appeared on the covers of Fortune, Forbes, Inc. and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Ultimately though, it was a series of Wall Street Journal
reports starting in 2015 — which Holmes tried to kill by appealing to the paper’s owner and Theranos investor Rupert Murdoch — that set the company’s collapse in motion.