I mean, I've seen a lot of criticism in the non-stupid parts of the internet about Marissa Mayer, for example -- and she arrived really late to the party.
Now, I know that rushing to conclusions about "women entrepreneurs" from three, five, fifteen, sixty-seven cases is really sexist because we don't rush to say men are terrible entrepreneus because of countless projects gone awry. I mean, I can only imagine the vitriol Nick Denton would have gone through were he a woman.
But people are sexist. People are racists -- if instead of female CEOs we were talking Sri Lankan CEOs, we'd have long arrived at a cliché conclusion, I think. Am I too pessimistic?
If you're already prone to some degree of sexism, observing Theranos, Yahoo, and maybe uBeam recently might result in confirmation bias kicking in.
If you try to be rational and as self-aware as you can though, you realize these are just a handful of examples with coincident timing and there are many, many, many times as many female CEOs who are doing just fine. You also recall all the male CEOs who have been fuckups or caused tremendous damage, not only in startupland but elsewhere like Wall St, and realize that sex is probably not a significant contributor to outcome. Mindset and ethics are among the far more likely indicators.
So, will this affect things on the margin? Maybe... with people predisposed to look for negative signals about fitness of women as CEOs. Not for anyone trying to be as objective as possible.
It is sort of a doubled edged sword, if race and gender have no significant effect on outcome, then in a way that could be used as a justification for blocking those people from said positions. On the other hand, if it's the opposite then is purely superficial.
Moreover, Mayer, Holmes, etc. will see more opportunities in the future. Once people are on this track it's seldom they fall off completely. Someone will see potential in them.
Whether you think they executed well or not, this time round, they have invaluable experience for the next company.
Yup, and it applies to both genders. I have seen idiots running their companies into the ground only to re-surface a few years later at another company, as CEOs, because: experience.
"Once a CEO, always a CEO".
I wasn't able to follow this sentence. What is the cliché with Sri Lankan CEOs? I'm not even sure I know of any. I had to look up Sri Lanka to find out that it is not part of India because initially I assumed you were trying to say something about the Indian CEOs we see in the valley.
If they're unhappy with press coverage they just phone the reporters and try to explain their position.
I don't know how I'd handle the level of scrutiny she's under.
I'd hope that you would step down from your post as CEO because you're too damaged to lead the company any further rather than to cling to your CEO position and likely accelerate the sinking of the ship.
It's actually sort of difficult to understand what they thought they would gain by exposing the public to their experimental tests.
I've said this before, but it would make a lot more sense to me to establish an exemplary traditional lab and use that for opt-in proofing of your revolutionary tests than it did to establish a shitty corrupt lab and void thousands of test results.
It's sort of an indictment of the concept of consumer education that anyone would still trust their health to the results of a test run by this company.
...or if you are saying you are confident that everything she has said and done was said/done in good faith.
It also looks like they're going to attempt to get some kind of fast track approval of this new device by playing on Zika virus fears. There was one very pointed audience/expert question about the validity and inconsistency in their Zika virus claims that didn't appear to be fielded well.
As I understand it, this device will still take a small amount of blood, dilute it, and then theoretically perform up to hundreds of tests. So while Holmes made no attempt to answer the question of "how many finger pricks will it take to do these tests", one of her employees was still making the claim that a microliter dilution was enough--going from 170 uliter to 1 uliter.
The play could very well turn into Theranos waging a press and political war with the FDA around Zika in order to rush this out. The board advice may be paying off from a political/PR standpoint even though the presentation didn't answer any questions from a scientific standpoint.
https://twitter.com/DrDanHolmes/status/760232173836185600
The science is the science. You can't really wage a press war around the facts.
I am less optimistic around the FDA's ultimate neutrality when it comes to political pressure. Facts certainly need to win, but Theranos didn't hire a board like they did if they were counting on facts alone to save the day. It's the same playbook from before, now pivoted to public health crises instead of a DoD endgame.
> Holmes’ appearance does not reflect an endorsement of Theranos or its technology by AACC, and Theranos has not provided any financial contribution to AACC in exchange for the invitation to speak, nor has it provided any sponsorship monies or other forms of grants to AACC.
I remember having to do a lot of paperwork to speak at medical conferences because of CME credentialing. I wonder what happened in this specific case?
His company raised the price of a drug to an absurd level and overnight he became "the most hated man in America".
Her company endangered, and likely caused real harm to, numerous patients' health and she gets to keep on selling and is even given a platform by the AACC to due so.
I've never thought about what it takes to run a medical devices company but think about that statement. It looks like Theranos just did a huge pivot and they won't be able to generate any revenue from the resulting pivot for atleast a few years?
At this point, shouldn't goal number one be to get a product, any product approved by the FDA, are they the only governing body they need to get approval from?, and then get it to market ASAP?
Someone get Holmes a copy of Ben Horowitz book "The hard thing about hard things". If she wasn't already, she is now a war time CEO.
It looks more like she's a post-Hiroshima CEO.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JRG733ReQ
Slides:
https://www.aacc.org/~/media/files/annual-meeting/2016/thera...
