To get a contract, Bob Noyce claimed for a buyer that Fairchild could produce & deliver a new type of transistor, in a large quantity, without having any production capability for it yet, as it had never been built.
Excite bid on getting a place on Netscape's browser, before having the money to actually pay for it (they figured they'd get it afterward):
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/persistence_pay_1.h...
Microsoft on multiple occasions said or implied they had something they didn't have at the time, in dealing with MITS and IBM.
Stanford students are generally sheep that know one thing for certain: That they are smart enough to get into Stanford and that they now have pretty much zero excuse to not be successful.
They assume that other things (vision, relentless lifelong obsession) are means to ends. It is a fertile breeding ground for what Trungpa Rinpoche most accurately describes a "Spiritual Materialism"
Their logical conclusion is that the key to success is not relentless pursuit of practice, but rather playing tricks like the ones you describe.
Bob Noyce, Bill Gates, Marc Andressen all succeeded as a result of their passion and relentless dedication to a narrow problem space over years of effort. They saw "the truth" and thus were able to make those leaps. "Truths" are always present in every society ... and are hidden. Unfortunately it requires dedication to uncover such truths and most stanford students would rather re-use the same hammer that got them into Stanford on real life than to truly seek "truth".
That's my 2 cents.
EDIT: I can see how this was condescendingly phrased and discriminatory towards a large group of people. We should all note that the person who outed Ms. Holmes was also a Stanford student and did something very brave. I was just annoyed with seeing this pattern everywhere and even partaking in it myself -- something that impacted me very negatively.
Let's also not forget that she pursued a vision that was severely flawed, no different than many college students today even. She made a lot of mistakes that many of her peers made at the same age. She's just really unlucky at this point.
She did not graduate. She dropped out.
I also dropped out of college at a young age, but not to defraud the world in an effort to become a billionaire. So, this is not intended to suggest being a drop out is inherently bad.
#JustTheFacts
minorities sell 5 oz of weed: '25 years in prison'
Colleges need to hold learning to the highest regard ... Holmes was constantly invited as a speaker to campus before she became disowned.
Look into Clinkle if you want another example. Kids are obsessed with getting rich quick and glamorizing that behavior and spoon feeding it back to them is a recipe for disaster. Snapchat is another example!
Institutions of learning and knowledge need to emphasize and glamorize that. Often times Professors themselves go to work for these companies ... the intellectual elite should feel that way about themselves: elite in their knowledge. A snobbish dismissal of material wealth might be exactly what the institution needs.
It can be a fine line. Theranos didn't know where that line was.
I've seen lots of misery because of this, both with the inventors themselves, their families and employees. In one case a suicide.
It's very sad and one of the downsides of being in the business I'm in because I have come to recognize the signs of this particular ailment fairly quickly and it is a huge balancing act in both convincing my client not to invest while at the same time not pulling the rug out from under a quite possibly already unstable person.
Fraud can be intentional, or it can be the consequence of someone genuinely believing their own misguided version of reality, usually powered by some form of 'wouldn't it be great if' and associated lines of thinking.
Even so, Theranos - to me at least - seems to have crossed over into outright fraud from very early on in their lifetime. There were significant questions about the tech early on and without a good answer to those the project should have never moved as far as it did without some serious caveats about what they believed to be possible and total transparency about what had actually been achieved.
For a nice example of how gullible people are check out the Ilium thread on the homepage right now, it's a great example of how wishful thinking can cause investors to part with their money:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167870
uBeam is another, so far they produce roughly two ecstatic press releases per year but there is no product in sight.
Did Excite sign a contract saying that they had the funds to pay in the case of winning the bid? I don't know the answer to that, it wouldn't be an uncommon requirement when bidding on a contract like that however.
Microsoft almost certainly lied on multiple occasions about what they already had, in trying to get MITS and IBM to take them seriously. The common historical story goes that they did lie - just how the wording went, who knows, they were clearly being intentionally deceptive regardless to capture the opportunity.
The former is a gamble, but it may be an informed gamble where you already have some idea of how to make it happen. The latter is a lie.
Startups absolutely should be operating in the realm of "It has not been done, but we think we can pull it off. In fact, we are pretty confident of that." They should not be operating in the realm of outright con artistry and fraud.
If you have the right experience, skills, education, personal assets of various sorts and solid mental models, predicting your expected success in a specific domain does not guarantee you will succeed. But it isn't necessarily just BS either.
The challenge is for other people to know which category you fall in. But you should know whether you are genuinely confident or straight up conning people -- barring serious delusion of some sort.
Arguably, it is not even fraud when Theranos took samples and used a different method of testing (as long as the testing was just as accurate).
Therano's fraud was then telling investors and potential partners/clients that it had been testing using their test, when they really weren't. That is a lie designed to get additional funding or contracts.
