Elizabeth Holmes and her downfall – SME.sk

4. jan 2022 o 16:04 I Paid content

PALO ALTO, BRATISLAVA. A place where the future is formed, where revolutionary ideas arise. Investors are ahead in whether they are investing more in connecting billions of people or in a private space program.

The American Silicon Valley has built an image of the most innovative environment in the world. When only 18-year-old Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos here in 2003, her goal might have seemed a little less ambitious.

Change the way blood samples are analyzed. Instead of the annoying and lengthy process of collection and analysis, her device had to perform about two hundred different tests from a single drop of blood.

This will be done at home instead of in the laboratory. “It is already in the production phase, it could reach the market in the second half of the year,” she promised on a radio show in Tech Nation in 2005.

She also said that a new version of the device is already in the prototype phase, which the user will not even have to touch. So not a drop of blood will be needed.

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Steep fall to the bottom

The company no longer exists today. None of the announced home analysis devices came on the market, but Holmes’ Theranos company became a Silicon Valley phenomenon and the youngest woman, the world’s youngest billionaire, made a living.

Holmes’s fall was even steeper. It turned out that her blood analysis either doesn’t work or uses other companies’ technologies. That everything was simply a scam. On Monday, the court found her guilty in four cases of deception by investors, and she faces up to 20 years in prison for each offense.

The world’s media calls it the largest Silicon Valley fraud trial to date, but people in the California Valley still question whether Holmes belongs to their ranks.