Trying to collect digital information from a drop of blood should be much less challenging than playing piano with the brain, and Elizabeth Holmes had 10 years before she was hounded out as maybe a thief and a scammer, but Musk's Neuralink has already run for five years, and I don't think the promised delivery will be made in another five. Both have had Steve Jobs comparisons. I think Musk is validly compared to Jobs.
2020, the year of the Coronavirus, is the Netscape year for biotech.
The elephant in the room is gender. Musk seems to have a longer runway because he is a man. And I do think Musk is quite off on the idea of human habitation of Mars. The rocket part is fairly easy, though plenty challenging. The hard part is the human body is designed for the earth's surface. Lack of gravity is disorienting and debilitating for many organs. Mars is more hostile than the deep ocean, and we have not colonized the deep ocean. I'd rather fund the Green New Deal than attempt Mars. It is fairly basic biology. If you can't get the eyes, you should not attempt the brain. Eyes start bulging out during prolonged loss of gravity leading to permanent sight damage.
I am strong on Tesla. I have consistently been. I am also strong on robotic mining of asteroids.
Elon Musk hit speed bumps with the SEC, and Elon Musk fans think he is a hero.
I never really read much about Elizabeth Holmes during the decade when she was ascendant, although I meant to. It was interesting a woman was doing it. Also, this was not some photo sharing app. She was marrying bio with infotech. I thought that was really something.
There's a picture of Holmes sharing stage with Bill Clinton and Jack Ma. If that is not social acceptance, what is? She put Henry Kissinger on her Board. She raised money from Larry Ellison, not my idea of a gullible guy. Tim Draper still defends her as a visionary who got wronged and got bullied by white men in black suits.
What happened? I don't know. I am not in a position to know.
But think about it. There is as much information in one drop of blood as in 100 drops of blood. And it should be possible to extract all information from that one drop of blood and to digitize it. And once you have digitized it, you should be able to scale it. Whether you look for cholesterol one time, or next time you look for another needle in that haystack, there is no difference. You can do it.
The basic premise feels doable to me. Somebody should be able to do it in less than 10 years from now. Too bad it was not Elizabeth Holmes.
Otherwise she attempted something Marissa Mayer did not, Sheryl Sandberg did not.
She was not the scientist who built what needed to be built. She started with a vision. She raised a lot of money. She hired the best of the best. She did all that an entrepreneur is expected to do.
If she is a fraud, she is a really good fraud. The movie on her should beat Catch Me If You Can at the ratings.
But then Steve Jobs, her hero, could not have put together the PC. It was the engineer Steve Wozniak who did that. On the other hand, there was no way Woz could have built a company. And very soon Apple did hire a ton of engineers such that when Woz left to teach elementary school, Apple did not exactly suffer.
So not being a scientist is not a fraud.
Bill Gates came up with something like an iPad in the late 90s. But the product did not take off. Was he a fraud? Was he ahead of the times?
This is not me defending Holmes. This is me asking some questions.
You could not have built YouTube in 1995. Maybe this Theranos experiment was a decade too early.
Being in stealth mode is not fraud either. The iPhone was built in super stealth mode. Theranos being in stealth mode for 10 years, is that too long though? I don't know. The iPhone unit stayed undercover for something like two years, maybe more.
The media did a remarkable job of building her up for over a decade. Then it spent a few years tearing apart her image. So the media reports are not reliable gauges.
Was this failure? Was this fraud? Was this an attempt too early? Like trying to build YouTube in 1995? 10 years too early?
Holmes did manage to articulate a valid vision. She did manage to raise money from people like Larry Ellison, who does not strike me as gullible. She did manage to put Henry Kissinger on her Board. That guy dealt with Chairman Mao. She did manage to hire the best of the best in the field.
Google has had hundreds of failures many of which you don't know about.
Granted a photo-sharing app is different from a blood testing tool.
Maybe a PhD is not such a bad idea after all.
Or, more likely, the scientists that would bring the valid vision to fruition simply have not existed. You can't find those PhDs that you need. They don't exist.
