Are those attitudes really that popular on HN? Most of the comments I see are pretty cycnical about emerging technologies and longshot bets.

The thing is, after she got that $200k in branded VC capital from family friend Tim Draper, Holmes went knocking on the doors of all the big silicon valley VC firms and all the big bio-sciences VC firms. They consulted with blood scientist type people who informed them device had zero chance of living up to it's promise. All of them said "Sorry Elizabeth, we must politely decline your invitation to flush our money down the toilet."

The money she did get after that seed funding was from fly-by night wannabe VCs, and the bandwagon effect took off from there. Who did their due diligence? Nobody. I'm not shedding any tears for Rupert Murdoch, but there were hedge fund managers in charge of people's pensions who gave Theranos 100s of millions of dollars without looking into what it was they were spending other people's money on. It baffles me that anyone that stupid can get to be in charge of that much money in the first place.

Every time I bring up the impostor syndrome overdiagnosis and “no one knows what they’re doing” meme in the context of Theranos, the replies take umbrage at the reference, and insist that HNers and VCs in SV saw through Theranos the whole time.

Which is true! But also, very beside-the-point.

The point is, that some people really are impostors. Some people really don’t know what they’re doing, in a much deeper sense than the usual “oh I struggled over a judgment call yesterday while doing 90% of my job the routine way”.

From the inside, it’s hard to know whether you have excessive self doubt, or you’re an Elizabeth Holmes. And it’s a pretty freaking important distinction to make.

The HN/SV mentality I’m criticizing is the one that jumps straight to “oh that’s impostor syndrome” rather than giving concrete tests for whether the self-doubt is justified. Who swears that every expert engineer, manager, and businessperson occupies the same epistemic state that Holmes felt, who equates the occasional judgment call with knowing nothing about the core problems of the domain you’ve entered.

So yeah, you called Theranos early on. Good for you!

Now, for your victory lap, stop telling the next 100 Holmeses to double down on their “faking it” on the way to the inevitable “making it”. Help them determine whether they’re a Holmes or just worrying too much.

There's a HUGE difference between self doubt and others peoples doubting you. One is inflicted on our self without evidence while the other is inflicted by others, often with evidence.

Impostor syndrome is caused because you believe you aren't good enough, but how can you know that when you are still new in a domain? Why would someone that better in that domain would pay you to works on that? Because he has evidences that suggest that you can do what's required in that job.

Now if experts tell you that your idea already exist and doesn't works for X, Y, Z, it's no longer self doubt.... it's actively ignoring evidences.

> So yeah, you called Theranos early on. Good for you!

Which make it no longer a self-doubt.

Faking until you make it was never about faking results or evidences, it's about faking confidence. Confidence is a great motivator, it's a great way to push beyond, but it doesn't replace real evidence.

The real issue here is that theses VC didn't require more than confidence to invest that much money. The fact that plenty of expert called out that scam early on show how an easy due diligence weren't done correctly.

Thank you!!

I think what the parent means is that it is indeed very popular on many tech sites where career discussion occurs to overstate imposter syndrome and imply that solid competence without imposter syndrome does not exist, everyone is just faking it.

Imposter syndrome is a real phenomenon and successful people are mere mortals who should not be put on pedestals. But it's possible to attribute too much to these factors. And dishonesty (faking it) should not be where you turn.

I’ve been on this site forever and I remember the early Theranos articles were highly skeptical or had as little information about what they were actually doing as this site has primarily programmers and software people, not as much people in bio.

Regardless faking state-funded health experiments in a heavily regulated industry has nothing to do with fail fast mentality of the software world either (just like how everyone here criticized that personal banking startup who tried that in the heavily regulated finance industry). We have nothing to defend here.

Yeah, prediction is really hard and even here on HN people sometimes don't see the value of a good thing, as in the case of DropBox etc.

I'm going to take a bit of a different tack on this. I've worked in a lot of startups and never once have I worked in a company where the founder knew what they were doing from a technical sense. I'm sure they exist, but they aren't common.

What most successful founders are good at is running a business. However, I'll be really clear on this: there are 2 necessary things without which you will fail. First you need someone on staff that does know what they are doing. If you are good at recognising that person, then you've got some potential to be a good founder. Second you need to be flexible in your vision. Because, as founder, you probably don't know what you are doing.

One of the best companies, in that regard, that I worked at was Corel. Michael Cowpland was an engineer, but I've talked with him a few times and I'll just say that I've never been that impressed with his technical grasp of the situation. However Corel's first product was a SCSI card. It failed. Then they built a graphics card. To go with the graphics card they made a graphics demo. That demo became Corel Draw. Cowpland had a great ability to know when the spaghetti was sticking to the wall (and he threw great gobs of the stuff against the wall, let me tell you!). They just dropped everything and poured everything into Draw. Great move.

The "fake it till you make it", in successful circles, means to stall long enough for your development team to actually build something you can sell. Now, I will say that committing fraud as a way to stall is a stupid, stupid move, but not something I haven't seen before. One place I worked at we were late to demo our product at a show, so we bought the competitor's product, stuck it under the pedestal and then wired it up through an empty box which was supposed to be our hardware. People were astounded at how quickly we had caught up to the competition! BS stuff like that happens all the time and especially if you are young, it would be easy to think "Oh, everybody is doing it. It will be alright. We'll succeed before anyone notices".

I don't know enough about Theranos or Holmes to say anything intelligent, but being a founder is a very different job than being a developer. What I lovingly refer to as "blowing sunshine up everyone's ass" is a big part of the job. Your core competencies are really different and have to be geared more towards evaluating people rather than evaluating things. At the same time you have to be an anchor of calm in the middle of chaos, because if you start to freak out, then everybody else will to. A lot of the advice given to founders can easily be misinterpreted when seen in a different context and I think that may be what's frustrating you. Having said that, being an entrepreneur is a career that attracts more than it's fair share of people who are not suited for that career...

Not to imply that Holmes only faked it as much as the other examples you mentioned, but it's also different significantly in the fact that she faked it in a field that demands regulatory approval and is that much closer to being limited by the laws of nature than a pure software company. You can maybe fake it but at the least you should be smart enough to know what's physically possible and what's not.

There's a difference between faking a computer graphics tool and a product that people's health actually depends on. These industries should (and fortunately, do) have different approaches to risk-taking.

This is such a great post and summary, thank you.