Press Space to continue
Curated tech Twitter/X posts on AI, startups, and product development—signal without the doomscroll, updated on weekdays.
Press Space to continue
Press Space to continue
Much truth to this… the goal of these events was originally “demo or die,” but TED did a 180 and moved winning a demo from “that’s fucking sick! I can’t wait to get my hands on that” to “I was so moved” [ hand on chest, teardrop] Every demo had to have an “emotional hook,” typically from a tragedy from the founder's childhood. The founder watched their parent die, or a child suffer, and that’s why they were building… THIS!!! The demo-or-die concept was always grounded in a live demo of…
One of the things that hasn’t been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes: She was created in the era of the Ted Talk Entrepreneur. Between 2011-2015 (after the release of the Social Network), there was an entire apparatus built around “Child Prodigies”: college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations, etc. I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as “faking it ‘til you make it.” But Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the Ted Talk Era came to an end and people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook—and in the most scrutinized field there is: medical technology. When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.