There's an old Silicon Valley saying called "Fake it untill you make it." Pretend to believe in yourself until you succeed.
To put it bluntly: keep pretending until you actually succeed.
In fact, many Silicon Valley people are so convinced of this course of action,
According to the Silicon Valley Index Report, silicon valley averages nearly 20,000 patents registered and filed every year.
Of course, many of them can become a cure for curing diseases and saving people, but the vast majority of them will become deceptive "economic bubbles".
Elizabeth Holmes, the protagonist of the play we are going to talk about today, is such a "business wizard" -
Dropouts
The Dropout
Directed By: Michael Shawt / Francesca Gregorini / Erica Watson
Writers: Elizabeth Merrywether / Matt Ratsky / Hilary Betis / Dan Lefrand / Liz Hannah / Weining Yu / Liz Herdens
Starring: Amanda Seyfried / Navion Andreeves / William H. Messi / Laurie Metcalfe / Stephen Frey
Genre: Drama
Country of Production: United States
Language: English
Premiere: 2022-03-03 (USA)
Episodes: 8
Episode length: 52 minutes
The story begins with the protagonist Elizabeth being investigated by the police, pale and looking gaunt.
However, she recently topped the headlines, the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States.
What exactly put her in jail?
Why did the $9 billion business empire she built with her own hands go to naught?
It all starts at the very beginning.
As early as his student days, he was admitted to Stanford University's biotechnology major in advance, and he also received a full "presidential scholarship".
At that time, she showed different persistence and perseverance from others, and designed a clear plan for the future - to become a billionaire.
And this excessive pursuit of fame and money is due to a sudden change in the family - her father is suddenly laid off.
Her father, a vice president at Enron, went bankrupt after being caught up in the biggest financial fraud scandal in history, leaving all executives and employees out of work.
She regarded Jobs as her life goal, and often faced the Poster of Jobs posted in the room, and secretly resolved.
In the summer before officially starting her university career, she came to Beijing to participate in summer camps.
As the "king of inner volumes", Elizabeth did not give up any opportunity to practice Chinese in her life in Beijing, and even on her rest days, she persuaded her classmates to communicate in "Mandarin".
She was obviously not popular with her classmates, except for the acquaintances she met here, the elderly international student, Sonny,
To her surprise, Sonny was about to become the most important person in her life.
Elizabeth returned to the United States and began to immerse herself in her own life plan.
In her freshman year, she joined a graduate-level biomedical research project with her talent and ingenuity, and at this moment she was eager to make a feat that changed the world, fame and fortune.
Through this scientific research project, she began to conceive of her own business.
Entering her sophomore year, she first hoped to create a wearable device similar to a patch, which would realize autonomous drug administration and monitor the efficacy of the drug at the same time, and diagnose and treat in one.
However, this naïve idea was finally ruthlessly rejected by the professor, after all, medicine is a field involving the treatment of diseases and saving people, not a simple imagination can be completed, and it is not possible to make a rash diagnosis based on data.
The professor kindly reminded Elizabeth that she could not think of achieving it overnight, and that she needed to do her job in a down-to-earth manner.
However, Elizabeth is not a down-to-earth person at all, and her life credo is "do it or let it go, and did not try this statement".
And this line of Master Yoda in "Star Wars" was later printed on the wall of her company.
Elizabeth did not give up because of the professor's words, and she quickly came up with a second plan -
With a portable blood tester the size of an iPod, a condition can be detected with just one drop of blood.
This time she finally got the voice of affirmation. However, this is not an easy task.
Almost every Silicon Valley startup myth is accompanied by dropping out of school, and Elizabeth, who is a sophomore, is no exception.
In order to realize her dream of changing the world, she resolutely dropped out of Stanford and became a "dropout" as the title suggests.
She used the rest of her tuition to start her own company, Theranos (Therapy + Diagnosis).
In the rented office, Elizabeth smiled happily, because she was here and was about to become the next Jobs.
But the road to entrepreneurship is so simple, after a period of scientific research, Elizabeth's equipment began to take shape, but data detection has always failed.
Creating a precise blood diversion system in such a small space, so that the samples can enter different detection reagents without contaminating each other, is a difficult project to complete.
Supporting trial and error requires a large sum of money, and money is being burned every day. She had to get out of the lab and start preaching to raise money.
In order to convince investors, she must come up with a viable prototype of the device, but where does she get the data of success to show it to investors?
In a hurry, Elizabeth did not hesitate to fake, and in the process of the demonstration, she pretended to be the only successful data before the scene as real-time detection data on site.
Luckily, she managed to get her first round of financing.
As the saying goes: a lie takes countless lies to cover up.
And this is only the beginning of her continuous deception, step by step swallowed up by her own ambitions and desires, and driven to the abyss by the help of capital.
It is said that art originates from life, and this seemingly bizarre farce is actually completely based on the real world of Silicon Valley.
In 2015, North Atlantic invited 101 Silicon Valley CEOs, investors, and think tank members to conduct a discussion on "Which Startup Will Change the World?" " vote.
The results show that Theranos is second only to Tesla.
Forbes hailed her as "the world's youngest entrepreneurial billionaire";
And was named "100 Most Influential People of 2015" by Time magazine;
The success of Elizabeth's lies cannot be separated from her tireless packaging.
At the beginning of her business, she tried her best to persuade her mentors to join her, and then used her connections and outstanding ability to draw cakes to form a "star board".
Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State); Jim Mattis (former U.S. Secretary of Defense);
George Schultz (former U.S. Secretary of State); Richard Kovaschewicz (CEO of Wells Fargo);
William Perry (former U.S. Secretary of Defense); William Fogg (U.S. epidemiologist, former director of the CDC)...
But lies are lies after all, and in 2015, Elizabeth's myth of changing the world was punctured by a wall Street Journal report, Theranos is an out-and-out scam company.
According to reports, in order to maintain the "one drop of blood" test slogan that has been played out, Holmes and CEO Sonny bought a traditional blood testing machine from Siemens and other companies, and attributed the results of the test with the traditional machine to their own developed machine "Edison".
In addition, in order to make up for the lack of blood collection, Holmes even chose to dilute blood samples for related tests.
Subsequently, Theranos was investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and officially closed down in 2019.
In January 2022, a jury found four counts of criminal fraud against Holmes.
It was found to have deliberately deceived investors and patients and lied about Theranos' blood testing capabilities and business prospects.
It is reported that Holmes may face up to 20 years in prison, but the final sentence will not be determined until the end of September this year.
From the world's youngest entrepreneurial billionaire to a fraudster facing accusations, Elizabeth has fallen from a false paradise to a real hell.
When the bubble of capital subsides, only great irony remains.
Success is never a quick success, down-to-earth is the only way.
*Body author: Shallow