The story of collapsed healthcare start-up Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes fits into a popular Silicon Valley genre: ‘Fake it till you make it’. The fact that it does is set to form a major – and, for other tech companies and investors, discomforting – part of the disgraced CEO’s defence over the coming weeks.
FITYMI does have a more positive side where it describes an approach to personal empowerment and optimistic positivity: behave like the person you want to be, and gradually you will turn into that person. Holmes herself leveraged the concept, most notably adopting a Steve Jobs polo neck-led uniform to look like a tech mover-and-shaker some time before she was declared a billionaire and, according to former fellow students at Stanford University, lowering her voice so that it had a more powerful register.
But the trial – and the alleged $700m fraud over which Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani have been charged...