Theranos isn't a typical case of founder hype like you describe. It was a con job through and through.

Don't harbour sympathy for Holmes. She's made it harder for good-faith actors to get access to funding.

Imagine the trauma of being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, only to find out later that you’re fine. Or worse, a false negative result leading to a disease going undiscovered until it’s already progressed to a late stage.

You make it sound like they were 80 or 90% of the way there. But it seems like what they promised—hundreds of tests from a drop of blood—is totally impossible, which is why it sounded so amazing. They were not even 1% of the way to what they were saying they already could do. And they were giving what sound like fairly random blood test results to people with serious medical conditions, while pretending they were 100% of the way there.

She blatantly lied and out on a facade to be deceptive for millions of dollars. She is the one to blame and hopefully serves federal prison time

At the end of the day, this feels like a bunch of rich people got suckered, couldn't dump it on the public market, and wanted to blame someone for their embarrassment.

Over in reality, the company’s operations burned $34 million in 2020, and they’re projected to burn $133 million in 2021. In the rest of the deck, Aspiration refers to its “EBITDAM profitability this quarter” and then uses EBITDAM throughout its financial analysis. Which is rich for a company whose entire (projected) profit model is dependent on explosive customer acquisition, which (to date) has been really, really expensive.

And I just love comments like this hah

This is a firm that registered less than $15 million in revenue last year. PayPal makes $15 million in revenue every five hours. It’s less than most NFL starting quarterbacks made in 2020 — Leo’s former girlfriend’s husband made over twice that.