Today I want to riff [totally off the top of my head] about something which totally intrigues me - the comparison between Elizabeth Holmes and Steve Jobs. The former is in court on charges of fraud and the latter died with the reputation of a great visionary. I suggest that neither one of them is guilty as charged. Jobs was not a visionary and Holmes is not a fraud.
Let me do a rudimentary comparison between these two movers and shakers [see photo].*
Jobs began a start-up in a garage which then became a factory in Cupertino that flew the Jolly Roger at full mast. He was labelled a visionary by an adoring media. But he was never a visionary - he was too practical to be what that label suggests. He was first, second, and last a business man. And as such he excelled at taking a good idea and turning it into a money making business venture. He did precisely that at Apple 1.0. He fail to do it at Next Inc. But he recovered to do it all again at Pixar. And then he did it, yet again, at Apple 2.0. At this core, Jobs was a brilliant marketer of consumer products to the masses. For example, he used his famous "think different" marketing campaign to imply that Apple Inc is the new home of the crazy ones who change the world - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sMBhDv4sik His pitch to a consumer is you are one of the crazy ones if you have an Apple Computer on your desk. Was Jobs a fraud when he implied that only the crazy ones of our times use an Apple Computer? Surely not... He was merely pushing a business idea that Apple products are different [and in many ways superior] to those of their competitors. I contend that Jobs was never a visionary - like the crazy ones - but, rather, he worked extremely hard to match great ideas with the human brilliance needed to produce the unification of a typewriter, a slide rule, and an easel.
Holmes had a vision while still a student at Stanford University. Her vision was to replace the blood testing industry with a simple box. This black box [kept that way due to trade secrets] would take a spot of blood from a pin-prick on a human finger and run diagnostics on it for up to a hundred different indicators of disease. WOW! Now that is a vision. Jobs had nothing like that when he began selling his friend's computer circuit boards for twenty bucks to a local retailer. Holmes had the type of vision that threatened to discombobulate a global industry. This was the equal of the vision that George Orwell presented in his novel 1984, or the one presented by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, or the one JFK presented when he told the world that the US would send a man to the Moon and bring him back safely within a decade. These were not the crazy people that Jobs displayed in his advertisement - these were visionaries whose insights into the future would eventually come to pass. Elizabeth Holmes had a big hairy vision of our future which she set out to make come true. And the truth is that the first through the wall always gets bloodied [for context and an accurate quote see Money Ball].
Direct consumer blood testing was her vision eighteen years ago and over the next decade or so it will slowly become a reality [see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IQ0oQEsaqk ]. Naturally many folks [all around the world] love to paint Elizabeth as "the wicked witch" - but maybe, just maybe, they have badly mislabelled her. Perhaps, Elizabeth was an extraordinary young women with a big vision, a huge ambition to succeed, and the guts to move quickly in a world that is stagnating under the impost of more and more government regulations. It is possible that Elizabeth did not defraud her investors but rather that she was totally let down by the people who gave her hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue her dream. I do not know the truth about Elizabeth Homes [or her company Theranos] and I doubt I ever will. However I do know, for sure and certain, that she was a lonely visionary and not a brilliant business person like Steve Jobs.
Every hour of every day we hear the whaling howls of the haters who fill our heads with toxic thoughts. Clearly we need less of these creatures and more of those who seek to emulate Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes. Compare a world of haters with a world where a few extraordinary humans are allowed to make life better for all of us.
Richard.
*. Postscript..... See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYPwXTvSWo8&t=319s
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