Theranos trial: Female founders see comparisons to Elizabeth Holmes

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Good morning, Broadsheet readers! New York’s Kathy Hochul helps tie a record for female governors, a mysterious health incident delays the VP’s trip to Vietnam, and investors are still asking female founders about Elizabeth Holmes . Have a wonderful Wednesday.

– The Holmes Effect. At Fortune’s 2019 Most Powerful Women Summit—the last time we gathered in person!—I moderated a discussion with a group of female founders. It was lively conversation that touched on a range of issues, but there was one moment that stood out—the moment someone mentioned disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

The founder in question was Julia Cheek, then-CEO of Everlywell (she’s now chief of Everly Health), a home medical-testing startup (which has since flourished, reaching unicorn status in late 2020). Cheek told us that she regularly gets asked about and compared to Holmes—to the point where colleagues and advisors suggested she dye her hair to try to differentiate herself from the Theranos founder. (Cheek was and is blonde, as is Holmes.)

The fact that the two companies have major differences, including the fact that Everlywell did not then make its own tests, as Theranos claimed to do, hadn’t been enough to avoid the references, said Cheek. The root of the problem, she said, is that with so few women running venture-backed companies, one “bad actor” can loom large. “It’s challenging because you are compared to this very, very small sample, she said. “There’s 20 other male founders who are also inventing new blood-testing technology, and you don’t hear about them.”

Well, turns out Cheek isn’t alone. In the New York Times, (Fortune alum!) Erin Griffith speaks to a number of women leading science-based companies and finds that the Holmes comparisons haunt many—and not just other young, blonde white women in the testing industry. “I could see no similarity besides the fact that we’re both women in the hard-science space,” Alice Zhang, founder of drug discovery start-up Verge Genomics, tells Griffith.

So, what should we make of this persistent Holmes Effect? Obviously the comparisons are wildly unfair to these founders—and what’s really galling is how superficial they are. Holmes is far from the only founder-turned-pariah; I’m sure entrepreneurs of both genders are now facing hard questions when they try to start, say, a co-working space (a la WeWork’s Adam Neumann), and fair enough. But the clueless “pattern matching” of attaching Holmes’s baggage to any woman in science or healthcare, or fixating on something as silly as broad similarities in appearance is just plain lazy. Science is about experimenting, gathering data, and rigorously testing your hypothesis—not falling back on assumptions. If investors are looking to put their money behind a science-based company, perhaps they should remind themselves of those fundamentals.

Kristen Bellstrom
kristen.bellstrom@fortune.com
@kayelbee

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Editor’s note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Julia Cheek is now founder and CEO of Everly Health.

The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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