Interesting Vanity Fair Article on Theranos Strangely Injects Race and Sex into Issue.

I love these postmortem articles on "where it all went wrong" with various companies. This one by Vanity Fair was on Theranos. It was a great article full of the kind of behind the scenes stuff I like. But this part I found strange.

It generally works like this: the venture capitalists (who are mostly white men) don’t really know what they’re doing with any certainty—it’s impossible, after all, to truly predict the next big thing—so they bet a little bit on every company that they can with the hope that one of them hits it big. The entrepreneurs (also mostly white men) often work on a lot of meaningless stuff, like using code to deliver frozen yogurt more expeditiously or apps that let you say “Yo!” (and only “Yo!”) to your friends. The entrepreneurs generally glorify their efforts by saying that their innovation could change the world, which tends to appease the venture capitalists, because they can also pretend they’re not there only to make money. And this also helps seduce the tech press (also largely comprised of white men), which is often ready to play a game of access in exchange for a few more page views of their story about the company that is trying to change the world by getting frozen yogurt to customers more expeditiously. The financial rewards speak for themselves. Silicon Valley, which is 50 square miles, has created more wealth than any place in human history. In the end, it isn’t in anyone’s interest to call bullshit.

So in this paragraph he adds white men over and over to imply some sort of bias I guess. Since the CEO was a white woman the white men were supposed to be enchanted with her or something? I have no idea why this little bit was injected into the article over and over. Does he imply that if the tech press was comprised mostly of Asian women they would have caught her? Or if the venture capitalists were all Uighur men they would not have invested a cent with her?

It is almost as if an article about a Hip-Hop music company kept adding black male over and over to imply something. I guess this guy is implying that race had something to do with this issue when it clearly does not. It was the case of a person who was overly secretive heading a company that made crazy "Silicon Valley claims." The person was then found out by a white male named John Carreyrou. I guess white male Nick Bilton the author of the article has some problem with white males. Or maybe it was a Vanity Fair editorial decision to race-bait like this.