from Hacker News

Presentations and pitch decks by failures and frauds

by oyster143 on 4/28/23, 4:43 PM with 34 comments

  • by tylerhou on 4/28/23, 5:00 PM

    Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:33YqNE...

    But the slides themselves aren't in Google's cache.

  • by revelio on 4/28/23, 5:01 PM

    > Fraud and corporate collapses were always part of business landscape, but they became more frequent and severe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries

    Is this actually true? No citation is given and my gut sense was that corporate collapses used to be far more frequent. Think railroad manias, tulip bubbles, wildcat banks. If anything economic conventional wisdom has lately become that there aren't enough corporate collapses due to the flood of endless cheap money propping up zombie firms that endlessly lose money.

    The Theranos deck is interesting though. Even the first slide appears to be a word salad that makes no sense. "Our immediate goal is to become the standard for improving the efficacy and risk/benefit and safety profile of every therapy"? That's an (over-broad) mission statement, not an immediate goal. Then slide 3 "Theranos Today" they're talking about assumed future deals not the state of the company in the present, and somehow "Existing deals: $120M - $1.5Bn in revenue"!?

    Then a bunch of graphs that look like they must have come from a real patient but nothing is stated about what's really happening.

    Also, "Drivers for success: management and culture" lol.

  • by manv1 on 4/28/23, 6:29 PM

    These look exactly the same as the ones by firms that became successful!
  • by axus on 4/28/23, 6:10 PM

    The Arthur Andersen slides from WorldCom use colors to indicate if an accounting process is "Effective" or "Ineffective", but these archived slides are in black & white so the results are ambiguous. In my imagination, it's showing all green.
  • by ansible on 4/28/23, 7:35 PM

    Apparently, there is an attempt to run Fyre Festival again:

    https://variety.com/2023/music/news/fyre-festival-sequel-bil...

    This was announced shortly after Billy McFarland got out of jail on fraud charges related to the first one.

    I'd like to believe that people are not nearly stupid enough to put money towards this again. But the way the last decade has gone, who knows?

  • by rasz on 4/29/23, 6:55 PM

    Missing Meredith Perry and her uBeam trying to sell idea of ubiquitous wireless charging. Tedtalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c Analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1R9IQF0Y9s

    "for each technological hurdle deemed insurmountable by the experts I

    would spend just a few hours thinking about the problem from a variety of

    approaches so I was able to solve problems when the PhD experts couldn't

    with just a few hours of really simple research every single argument over why

    the technology couldn't work has been indisputably wrong has taught me to be

    skeptical of experts the expertise represented a narrow way of looking at things

    engineers are inherently linear thinkers and tend to take a very binary approach

    to solving problems as a non expert I had an advantage because I could look at

    a problem from different angles because I just didn't know it was possible by

    thinking outside the box by thinking around corners you can out think the top

    thinkers and now eight months later I have four of the top ultrasonic

    engineers in the world working for me we're working with me

    it's going to work and it's going to be awesome and I can't wait to give the

    middle finger and smiled all the engineers that criticize the crap out of me"

    Spoilers: She is a fraud, it never worked, one of the ultrasonic engineers she boasted about hiring even ran a blog debunking her claims https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com. >$20 million from Andreessen Horowitz/Mark Cuban/Marissa Mayer down the crapper. At least it didnt manage to IPO.

  • by agnosticmantis on 4/28/23, 6:53 PM

    The presentations and pitch decks were probably the only successful part of these businesses. So these may actually provide good lessons for people with legitimate businesses.
  • by spamizbad on 4/28/23, 4:59 PM

    Arguably the best pitch decks of all time. If you can sell turds to financial elites you're at the top of your game.
  • by karol on 4/28/23, 6:44 PM

    Why not train a ML engine on them to find more?
  • by AirMax98 on 4/28/23, 5:01 PM

    Site is unfortunately down.