Medical technologies that directly impact people’s health and ultimately life itself-such as was purported to exist with Theranos-should not be treated the same as a Smartphone, app or platform for commercial exchange. It highlights the problematic ways for-profit, market-driven technology and consumer products sectors guided purely by use or instrumental value such as profitability have become the templates for assessing technologies designed for humanity that contribute to things with intrinsic value. This case also raises the specter of which ideologies and approaches guide the investment decisions of venture capitalists. Based on our research, we suggest that the real focus should be on the entrepreneurial ecosystems and those gatekeepers and actors who perpetuate a culture that vastly rewards hubris and sensational-but-unsupported claims of founders rather than transparency, honesty, due diligence, and sustainable environmental, social, and governance practices. The media’s hyper focus on this case indeed may be driven by a widespread case of culturally systemic, misogynistic Schadenfreude. While many have lamented the downfall of what was previously lauded as the Silicon Valley glass ceiling breaking with the success of a multi-billionaire female founder, we find the overt focus on a single woman problematic. We suggest that the media scrutiny and analyses of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos stand in remarkable contrast to Adam Neumann and WeWorks - these cases read in parallel reveal deep flaws in the ways investors make emotional decisions based too much upon gendered charisma, overconfidence, and hyper-masculine styles and behaviors of founders rather than solid business analyses. Yet looking at the fact that male founders received 97.6 percent of overall venture funding in 2020, according to Crunchbase, we see a much deeper problem beyond the ‘pipeline’. Such an approach assumes that the decision-making and investment-making system in place is meritocratic. Holmes doesn’t do justice to the myriad ways individual, organizational and institutional sexism take shape in Silicon Valley.Īs we argue in my book c0-authored with Banu Ozkazanc-Pan, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A Gende r Perspective and elsewhere, simply investing in more women is not going to resolve the systemic issues that disadvantage women in Silicon Valley and beyond. As researchers who examine gender and business, we find that the media coverage of Ms. In recent months, she has been featured prominently across several podcasts, documentaries and news feeds as her trial continues following a dozen federal fraud charges. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos and the Need for Reforming Silicon ValleyĮlizabeth Holmes, the founder and former CEO of Theranos, has become one of America’s most recognizable names as a female entrepreneur, both as an object of fascination and the target of much derision.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |