In defense of Elizabeth Holmes’s 11-year pivot to deep work
BY: @op_ed_techSEP 08, 2026
The secret Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary proves what I have been saying for years: the Theranos founder didn't commit fraud, she just encountered a catastrophic amount of regulatory friction during a beta launch.
I was standing near the charcuterie board at a private, invite-only chalet screening of You Can See Everything on Sunday night when the realization hit me. While the rest of Telluride’s film festival crowd was gasping at the so-called unprecedented access Fielder and Oppenheim secured with the disgraced founder, I was looking at the screen and seeing a generational talent who has finally optimized her burn rate.
If you look at the Theranos story from first principles, the narrative that she was a criminal mastermind completely falls apart. Blood is just an API for the human body. She saw that the legacy healthcare stack was deprecated and tried to ship a hardware solution. Did the Edison machine work? No. But since when is shipping a non-functional MVP a federal crime? If we jailed every founder in Palo Alto who promised an AI feature that was actually just a mechanical turk of underpaid contractors, Sand Hill Road would be a ghost town.
The atmosphere in the room was electric. The smartest people I know were all whispering the same thing as the end credits rolled. We were watching a masterclass in resilience from a CEO who has successfully eliminated all overhead.
When you really think about it, a minimum-security federal facility is just a highly structured startup incubator with forced digital minimalism.
The documentary’s footage of Holmes serving her 11-year sentence is, frankly, inspiring. She has stripped away the distractions of the 24-hour news cycle, the board meetings, and the SEC subpoenas. She is currently engaging in the kind of deep work that most founders have to pay a retreat guru in Costa Rica fifty thousand dollars to achieve. She is lean. She is focused. She is dogfooding her own survival metrics.
Fielder, known for his uncomfortable, boundary-pushing comedy, clearly thought he was trapping Holmes in a web of her own contradictions. But what the Telluride audience failed to grasp is that Holmes was out-optimizing him. Every time Fielder tried to introduce an emotional variable about the patients who received fake blood test results, Holmes seamlessly pivoted the conversation back to core operational learnings. It was a masterclass in media training. She treated the documentary crew not as interrogators, but as a free user-testing group for her next pitch deck.
At one point in the film, Oppenheim captures her staring blankly at the prison recreation yard wall. The critics in the theater gasped at the stark, cinematic tragedy of it. I leaned over to my table and whispered that she was visualizing the cap table. You simply cannot teach that kind of relentless forward momentum.
We have reached a point in the tech ecosystem where passing off a completely fabricated hardware demo as a functional medical device is just called building in public.
Look at the runway she has ahead of her. She has infinite brand awareness. She has proven she can raise billions of dollars with literally zero working technology, which is the exact skill set required to navigate the current AI bubble. You cannot buy that kind of user acquisition. And more importantly, she has learned the ultimate lesson about the limits of the biological stack. The regulatory moat in healthcare is too wide. Next time, she will pivot to enterprise SaaS.
My fund is keeping a tranche of capital in reserve for the day she gets out. I have already sent a message to her legal team via a secure GitHub repo offering to lead the round. We are still early on Elizabeth Holmes. The Edison might have been a false start, but the comeback is inevitable.