Hi there!

Let’s start with the beginning, shall we? In 2003, at only 19 years of age, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of her chemical engineering studies at Stanford University to pursue a dream: creating an automated device capable of running thousands of blood tests using a few droplets of blood. With that in mind, and with her then-partner Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, she founded Theranos, a biotech company that promised to turn that dream into reality. Flash forward almost two decades to the 18th of November 2022, and Holmes has been sentenced to 11 years of prison. Why? You might ask… Well, (very) long story short: she lied to her investors.

Venture capitalists certainly know that when they give money to up-and-coming entrepreneurs, they are, most of the time, investing in ideas, ideas that might have yet to become real. It is precisely their money that will propel the concept out of the paper and into customers’ hands, resulting in handsome revenues. They are also aware that most companies die unable to achieve prototype completion; but back in the mid-2010s, that was most certainly not the case for Theranos, whose blood analyzer, the minilab, could already accurately run several tests. Moreover, the minilab counted with the seal of approval of the industry giant Pfizer, whose scientists had written a very supportive report about its technology, and the U.S. Military, who had deployed it in Afghanistan where its performance had proven invaluable. And now, ten years into this adventure, the Theranos’ analyzer was already available for public use at Walgreens (the second-largest pharmacy store chain in the United States). What they didn’t know was that Elizabeth Holmes had fabricated all those claims (except for the last one) in hopes of keeping the stream of money that was keeping her company afloat. The situation culminated in 2018 when Holmes and Balwani were accused of fraud by The Securities and Exchange Commission (the independent agency monitoring investment practices in the U.S.), and Theranos promptly dissolved.

Originally, I had thought about this piece as an open letter to Elizabeth. However, I then realised that I would rather use this platform to address us, the women in STEM. We were all rooting for Elizabeth. Her technology had the potential to revolutionise medical care and save countless lives; and she was one of us, a female face amongst all those men running Silicon Valley. Never underestimate the power that representation might yield on you once it’s time to set and chase your goals – both the good and the bad kind.

Holmes made a trademark out of dishonesty: she lied about the readiness of her device (which was, in fact, not ready at all); she made up stories, documents and lab reports that allowed her to smoothly slip into the lives of patients; and gosh, she even lied her way into the cover of Forbes magazine in 2014. She wanted to leave a mark, and, let me tell you, she definitely did – a whole generation of life science and biotech women are currently suffering the aftermath of her ‘shenanigans’. In a New York Times article published in 2021, the drug discovery entrepreneur Alice Zhang talks about life after Holmes, or more so, life next to Holmes, to whom she keeps being uncomfortably compared by investors, academics and journalists. The sad truth is that Zhang is not alone. Female entrepreneurs feel impregnated by Holmes’ mistakes. They have realised that taking their biotech start-up ideas from pitches to reality has now become even more difficult for them than for their male counterparts. If the man heading a big company falls into disgrace, there are dozens to replace him, but after Holmes’s downfall, we seem to have been left orphaned of good representation.

I’d argue that turning Elizabeth Holmes into the (mainstream) face of female tech leaders was unfair in the first place. Even though she very much enjoyed carrying that banner, it was and still is a disservice because it is not even true. Other women are and have been riding this wave for as long as Silicon Valley has existed. Let me give you a few examples:

Melinda Gates, a computer scientist herself, was the general manager at Microsoft before she and her now ex-husband, Bill Gates, retired to create the famous non-profit Gates Foundation, and to this day remains its co-chair.
MacKenzie Scott, notorious for her widespread millionaire donations to organisations working in various fields from public health to racial equity and climate change, co-founded Amazon with her then-husband Jeff Bezos.
Priscilla Chan, who holds a medical degree, co-established with her husband Mark Zuckerberg the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with the objective to ‘help cure, manage, or prevent all disease by 2100’. I am not a big fan of binding biological and medical research to the same strict deliverable-based deadlines that usually constrain tech companies and that are the bread and butter of big investors (funnily enough, Theranos’ failure illustrates my point fairly easily). Still, I think praising Dr Chan for her work and ambition is required.

In any case, the damage has been done. We cannot change what Elizabeth Holmes did but, hear me out, we could still own the narrative. The angle Holmes’ very expensive lawyers advised her to take during her testimony was that of a victim. Sadly and outrageously, probably the only real chance she had to escape unscattered. In a move that only helps perpetuate the view of women as damsels in distress, Holmes accused her ex-partner (both in the romantic and business sense), Sunny Balwani, of abusing and pressuring her to lie to investors during the time he was president and COO of Theranos. Luckily, her statement didn’t fly. And I’d say let’s take a moment to clap and rejoice on that; let’s allow Elizabeth Holmes to be the villain of this story. Because I believe that, for women to get something (anything) out of this whole ordeal, Elizabeth Holmes must be held accountable for what she did. For women to get something, Elizabeth Holmes needs to be portrayed like the mastermind she was – like the mastermind she is.

Because yes, women, too, can be masterminds.

One last rec

Ultimately, Holmes’ actions resulted in some very rich people becoming less rich, some regular janes and joes losing all their life savings; and most importantly, some patients, who trusted the diagnostic capacity of Theranos’ equipment, having misguided ideas about their health condition, causing in some cases great distress. I wrote this post intending to convey my impressions regarding what might be the conclusion, at least for now, of this story of greed for medical glory and, for the sake of brevity, I didn’t engage on the specifics that led to Holmes’ accusation and eventual sentence.

For a better account of the facts, I recommend any reader wishing to draw their own conclusions to listen to The Dropout, the podcast that kept me up to date while this whole debacle was taking place.