A young Stanford dropout, at just the age of 19, Elizabeth Holmes became the founder and CEO of a biotech company she named Theranos — a mashup of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.” Intended to develop affordable single-drop blood tests, Theranos was supposed to revolutionize the health care industry and change the lives of millions.
She quickly rounded the support of Silicon Valley’s elite, raking in almost $1 billion in venture capital. These investors, including high-profile figures like Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos, contributed to Theranos being valued at $9 billion in 2015. She bragged about teaching herself Mandarin and selling C compilers to Chinese universities in high school, having later gone on to study chemical engineering in college.
A young woman – intelligent, forward-thinking, communicative and well-spoken – leading massive progress in a realm dominated by men like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet, among so many others. It all seemed so perfect.
The catch? The company’s technology didn’t actually work. John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal covered Theranos’ fraud, revealing that its patented blood tests gave inaccurate results.
ABC’s “The Dropout” discusses the leadership abuses, manipulation and blatant lies that were promoted by Holmes and the company’s former president Sunny Balwani, who maintained a secret relationship with Holmes for several years.Both are facing criminal charges of wire fraud.
My friends poke fun at me because I haven’t stop talking about Holmes’ narrative. In a way, they’re right – crimes like this happen quite often, unfortunately. It’s nothing to be surprised about. But what Holmes did was morally detestable – she played with the lives of so many while toying with her image as a powerful, trail-blazing woman marking deep grooves in tech and business. The fact that she got away with it is fascinating.
As a computer science student, as a young woman who looks up to powerful female leaders like Holmes advertised – I am so disappointed. The image that she and all the magazines and TV networks that she graced, peddled in order to achieve the company’s billion dollar status is one that so many other women like me would have gladly looked up to as a representative of the roles we might someday maintain in similar fields. Holmes exploited the idea of the strong female business lead, using it to leech off of others so as to fuel her own personal ambitions.
As a society, we need to be more careful about the types of people we place on pedestals. Stop using stereotypes – and, even worse, socially-acceptable standards of beauty and grace. Would a young woman of color have experienced that much success in collecting the same money and fame for her entrepreneurial pursuits? Perhaps, but more likely not.
Elizabeth Holmes is not the career-oriented, ambitious, gracious and intelligent entrepreneur that we should look up to. Her lack of integrity is enough to prove that. There are so many other deserving women – from Stanford faculty to lab technicians – who supported her career dreams, discussed in “The Dropout.” Let’s be sure to remember and stop glorifying.
