Surprised by the downvotes. Promoting Holmes as the next Jobs gave the tech press a chance to show how it was trumpeting diversity and gender balance in its coverage of founders. To those that downvoted - would you completely disagree that this played a role here?
implies that nothing happened here but the media overhyped someone. While clearly true, and I have no doubt having a young female entrepreneur was a good angle, that's not the story.
If anyone promised what Theranos promised it would be a big story. Could have been a 73 year old Doctor. No big needle draws? Tons of tests right at the doctors office? No more slow giant labs? A big breakthrough like that is NEWS.
Having a female founder was just one more bullet on the 'cool story' checklist. The hype would have been there without the female founder angle the OP focused on.
Saying the media is 100% to blame also absolves Theranos, its board, and its founder. Even when being overhyped they shouldn't have lied. They shouldn't have hidden things. They could have acted MUCH better.
They could have not sold their services while knowing they didn't work.
Absolute best case: they were wrong about how good their machines. But due to hype they kept trying and thought 'we can fix this before were caught'. And it just snowballed and snowballed.
I'll also point out the end of the comment tends to imply that women run companies into the ground or aren't qualified to succeed since all anecdotes are of failures.
For my anecdote: I've heard companies tend to elect women to be CEOs when there is basically nothing left to lose and saving the company is nearly impossible. Because by that point they figure it doesn't matter they don't have the 'best', some other proven CEO that happens to usually be a guy.
