An inspiring step forward
(Said in my new deep-fake voice)
Hello LFP readers, old and new! I’ve had subscribers trickle in from more excellent newsletters recently, so I should probably level set: this is a middlebrow obsession with business, culture and startups, and I occasionally rant about brand failures (see below.) But we try to have fun here, ya know?
I also drop workbooks and how-to’s for founders and creatives, so stick around for that, if you want to get your hands on the next one. And welcome!
A bloody mess
So I’m fresh off a summer newsletter sabbatical, and I’m proud to report my valuable time off was spent consuming all things Elizabeth Holmes. I ran through The Dropout — the TV show and the podcast — then moved on to Bad Blood so I can Hoover up details from the trial like so much schadenfreudian cocaine. I might rewatch The Inventor when I’m done because my name is Phoebe and I am an addict.
I could talk all day about EH and Theranos but what I’d like to examine here is what makes this such a wonderful terrible story: There is the rocketship to fame, a celebrity CEO who deceived the world’s richest and otherwise astute investors (mostly men) like a femme fatale in a Patagonia vest, and the hubris of everyone involved.
The internet likes a woman’s success story, but it creams itself for her failure story. Holmes was the quintessential girlboss — confident, connected, took “fake it til you make it” as far as it could go — and ate shit because of it. What’s most infuriating to me (so, naturally I go back for more) is all the misallocated potential.
If those men wanted to feel good about backing a female founder, why couldn’t they have invested in women tech founders who put in the work and built expertise before slickly courting hundreds of millions? What if a fraction of the cash that Theranos beer-bonged down its throat went to, say, any number of legitimate femtech startups instead?
There might be some real innovation in women’s reproductive health rather than what we have today: 150+ identical period-tracking apps.
And finally, what if Holmes’s confidence was more right-sized, less deluded, and it enabled her to make smaller bets, read the signals, and iterate until she built a viable product and a sustainable business? In short, what if she didn’t have to play the tech bro’s game by taking an outsized risk and blitzscaling by any means necessary?
I’m saying this with the frustration of Kanye West pleading for his underfunded genius: Who is going to invest in qualified women and grant them time and space to build something durable? Maybe Serena?
Dressed for excess
A recent Broadsheet edition that was dedicated to Hill House’s $20 million funding round gave me an idea: stories like this should have nepo disclosures!
Similar to how people want fashion magazines and the Kardashians to be transparent about doctoring their photos to look thinner and prettier, every story about an “entrepreneur” with a rich dad should include that info, so as not to erode the self-esteem of their readers (the ostensible audience for Broadsheet being women business owners and executives) or make them feel like they’re doing it wrong.
Since Fortune failed on this front, I’ll fix it for them:
“Nell of course is the daughter of Bob Diamond — former CEO of Barclay’s whose massive wealth enabled Nell to focus on these adult-size American Girl doll dresses, and connected her with other financial backers.”
Unrelated fashion note: Aside from some genuinely pretty prints (love a strong floral) I find this cottagecore/farmgirl aesthetic deeply ironic as a first-generation American. Like, if I showed up to my grandma’s house in a nap dress she’d definitely yell at me about how she didn’t claw her family out of southern Italy just so I could spend $150 to look like I fell off a zucchini truck. (May she Rest In Peace and never know I’ve worn nothing but these muumuus caftans for the past two years.)
Only one recommended read this week:
I haven’t been reading much internet but I am almost finished with The Candy House by Jennifer Eagan, which is just as mesmerizing as Goon Squad, and also its sequel in a way. Her fictionalized future of consumer tech and social media is completely believable and terrifying, if you’re up for that sort of thing.
Til next time!