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.