No, because they didn't deliver anything early on, manually or otherwise. "Dont do crimes and fraud" is another great bit of advice IMO.
Even healthcare isn't immune from market considerations. Might have been a good idea for regeneron to have done more market research before developing praulent for example.
no, they failed because they failed. If she'd won some of her gambles she'd be a hero.
My go-to ex-post example is FedEx, whose founder took their last month's payroll to Vegas, and won big enough to keep the business going. I was taught about that in business school (as an example of entrepreneurial spirit). Founders who do bad things and lose are convicted of fraud (and gambling with your employees' payroll is definitely fraud). Founders who do bad things and win are hailed as heroes.
Tell the ceo of Novartis that winning the gamble of hiding that data was falsified for their recently approved drug makes him a hero. The drug is successful and scientifically the falsification fo the data didn't matter. But that doesn't mean that his reputation isn't getting dragged through the mud right now for condoning lying to the FDA
Having read the riveting book Bad Blood it seems Theranos failed for two reasons:
1. Elizabeth Holmes concocted a product that defied the laws of chemistry and physics and couldn't actually be built. She refused to relax constraints like size/packaging that may have made it plausible.
2. She engaged in fraud in the hopes that eventually #1 would be solved and created a culture without transparency that further hampered the product from ever working.
This wasn't a case of a gamble that didn't pay off. This was a case of an infeasible idea, poorly executed, and compounding the issue with outright fraud. No startup advice necessary to avoid this.
Tell that to the ceo of uber, who built a multi billion dollar company (even after the recent underperformance) but also did some bad things, and then got kicked out of his own company for doing those bad things.
Success isn't a guarantee of your sins being forgiven at all
How many people do you know that can spin up an $76 billion dollar business from scratch? Damned few. His board let him make mistakes while providing little or no guidance.
I see Uber's problems more as a failure of the board to govern than solely the fault of the founder.
So, Theranos? (I swear, if I had a quarter for every company that had "good product-market fit", I'd have...a lot of quarters. Possibly all of them.)
Advice isn't terribly useful if you can only evaluate it after you've taken it, or not.
P.S. Think I can get VC funding for my corner fruit cart?