I don’t believe it has become the norm.

We’re talking about fraud about medical results over technology that essentially violates basic principles.

Honestly it’s kind of astounding Theranos ever became so hyped. The mythology of Silicon Valley and the glorification of shady shit probably helped. Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.

Y Combinator and Paul Graham glorified this kind of fake it until you make it bullshit. Reddit was an early Y Combinator startup. So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.

(Obviously they were not directly involved in Theranos)

Yeah —- the fake it till you make it, ghost-in-the-machine strategy has these as extreme outcomes. AI companies whose devices are in fact human-level intelligent because they are being remote-managed by teleworkers, etc.

Delve (YC W24) was a great example of this going badly wrong really recently, but honestly I think the cavalcade of startups using a fork of someone else's open source wrapper around someone else's cloud AI are not far off.

After all, if you have no real secret sauce at all because your supplier's cloud LLM is basically capable of everything you're claiming as a feature with just the thinnest amount of tool-calling, should anyone be investing in you at all, even just to acquihire?

This "succeed at all costs" culture isn't a Valley thing, it's an American thing. Look at our President.

> So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.

Interesting comparison to compare the "standard" software fraudulence of fudging your activity numbers to Theranos' fraud.

I think when it comes down to it, it's a false equivalence - one is a temporary measure done to overcome an inherently short-term critical mass limitation, the second is an indefinite fraud trying to paint an impossible company as real.

"Fake it till you make it" is a legitimate and almost necessary strategy for an early-stage startup, I wouldn't conflate it with Theranos' fraud.

> Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.

That's not the biggest problem by far. They started out catering to literal pedos, look into the r/jailbait controversy.