If you look at the track record of Musk, you can see that he promises something futuristic and delivers something conventional but with improvements that's still desirable.
Haven't Holmes imitated Jobs but Musk, today she could have been a success story. She should have still promised all your tests from a single drop of blood and keep claiming that it's coming next year and deliver classical machines but with greatly improved usability, integration with the modern hospital management system and fart jokes. They even had a prototype that worked some of the time for some of the test, sell it at an outrageous price and warn the users that all the tests should be repeated on a traditional machine because this is a beta device.
Also She shouldn't have relied on people from the establishment for PR, she should have partnered with popular-science YouTubers. Just send them a machine to play with, they wouldn't know if the machine is any good - they will be grateful for having access to such a device and make it the cool way of testing your blood.
I think where we can all agree that Musk is a genius is in seeing where billions of public funds are going to flow, and then positioning himself to be in a position to profit.
That was a key difference between Theranos and Tesla/SolarCity.
Imagine if Elizabeth Holmes had gotten just a bit luckier with timing and had been around when the COVID pandemic occurred. Not only would she have launched a highly-futuristic COIVD test, but also received billions of funding with nearly no oversight. She almost certainly would have negotiated to receive proactive immunity from the government, like the vaccine manufacturers did.
Good point. I like to think that people ultimately have good intentions and maybe even the guy from WeWork could have had make it work somehow if they had a bit more integrity and actually tried to kick the can down the road until they can deliver something with value. When you can stay alive for long enough you greatly improve your chances for a great timing. Had Holmes survived till 2020, she might have become a success story with the testing during the pandemic.
Delivering something useful is important. Holmes failed on that, She should have delivered something like regular test machines with a design that resembles something from the sci-fi culture and would have been off the hook for the delays and failures.
Maybe she should have done re-skinned Siemens machines. The original Tesla Roadster was based on Lotus Elise.
Haven't Holmes imitated Jobs but Musk, today she could have been a success story. She should have still promised all your tests from a single drop of blood and keep claiming that it's coming next year and deliver classical machines but with greatly improved usability, integration with the modern hospital management system and fart jokes. They even had a prototype that worked some of the time for some of the test, sell it at an outrageous price and warn the users that all the tests should be repeated on a traditional machine because this is a beta device.
Also She shouldn't have relied on people from the establishment for PR, she should have partnered with popular-science YouTubers. Just send them a machine to play with, they wouldn't know if the machine is any good - they will be grateful for having access to such a device and make it the cool way of testing your blood.