She clearly had some knowledge and strategy about the technology and likely fully intended for it to be successful, but responded to delays and difficulties with deception rather than just admitting it was harder than they expected.

"If we just get over this hurdle, we'll revolutionize medical testing and become legends." Not unlike Ponzi schemes which start out as legitimate investment ventures, do very poorly, and then just make up the return numbers. Martin Shkreli arguably pulled that fraud off "successfully" and actually got over the hurdle, but of course it came back to bite him.

However, they could not get the technology to work and abandoned several development paths in favour of a less ambitious approach that, among other things, involved doing blood analysis the old-fashioned way (manually in the lab), and only pretending to be using new tech they'd invented. They knew it didn't work, but kept selling it anyway, which is where it went from just faking it to outright fraud.

Most of their money was raised after they failed to develop their blood analysis technology, but to the investors, to the press and to their clients (such as Walgreens), they were still claiming to be using their proprietary technology [1].

[1] http://m.nautil.us/issue/60/searches/does-theranos-mark-the-...

I'm playing Devil's advocate and not justifying or defending their fraud and the physical harm they caused, but if we were to look at Holmes' intentions, I'm suspecting it was something like "we just need to do this for a few months/years until our technology works", rather than "let's just run this scam forever and get rich". As for how close they actually were to developing that technology (and assuming most of their talent didn't leave) or if it was even possible for them, who knows. And of course, regardless, they still intended to commit fraud and should pay the price.

(Not making any real life connections here, I am absolutely not qualified to call anyone medical terms, but in the subthead about clinical psychopathy it seemed important to point out.)

Reddit is an interesting case, but I'd say there's a categorical difference between faking that you are able to do something you can't (Theranos) and pre-filling a functioning site with content (I assume that's what you are referring to?).

It's especially relevant if the difference actually matters for whom you are tricking: If the results had been accurate (which from what I understand they weren't) and absent any other specific claims of superiority Theranos end-users wouldn't care about what tech they use, but for investors relying on claims that they can do something others can't to establish their value it obviously does matter.

Which in the case of reddit I guess makes the question: does it make a material difference for users if the site they enjoy is entirely fed by an organic community, or is the most important thing that the site is enjoyable regardless of origin? I guess you could argue that faking a community is also "faking that you are able to do something you can't".

My understanding is reddit did this at the very start of the site's existence and stopped pretty early. They probably would've died quickly if they didn't seed some content.

Europe doesn't reward winners. So Europeans move to the US for their startups.

Do you know Europe is the largest buyer of the US securities? They surely feel compelled enough to benefit from the business scene in the US.

You can't really fake science.

This may have been faking too hard in a place where experimentation, or R&D, yielded nothing usable.

What does this mean? Thanks :)

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested-Compe...