Look at facebook. 1.23 billion active daily users? Really? And this is published in financial and technical press with precious little skepticism. FB must be happily counting every single incidental embedded bit of javascript that phones home from a facebook logo on an otherwise unrelated site count as an active user. And then some. One in 6 people on the _planet_. Every day. Think about the boldness of saying that with a straight face. But the hype machine is happy to keep echoing that claim.

Well the stakes are a lot lower when it's social media or something. Theranos' problem was that it tried to take the Silicon Valley mentality to medicine, and as we've seen there's a little agency called the FDA that doesn't give a damn how hot or well funded you are. They will crush you into dust if you try to play games.

Are "active daily users" humans checking a Facebook app? Or the app checking in with Facebook?

That's not true. I'm pretty sure they only include people who has some interaction with the app, in phone the app needs to be in foreground.

> There's so much pressure to be immediately profitable

One of Silicon Valley's problems continues to be that there is so little pressure to build a profitable business from early on. It's the exact opposite, they overwhelmingly encourage reckless behavior to chase growth over profit, resulting in almost exclusively extreme binary outcomes (as desired by the VCs).

I'm not sure that's true. It's very easy to build a failed business, but to build an overly hyped failed business, you need a taste of success to point to as indicating you are on a rocket ship ride to trillion dollar valuation.

It's pretty damn easy to create a fictious $100 million transaction with other insiders, then gloss over the details on the balance sheet.

> It's very easy to build a failed business, but to build an overly hyped failed business, you need a taste of success to point to as indicating you are on a rocket ship ride to trillion dollar valuation.

What does that have to do with Silicon Valley VCs intentionally forcing extreme binary outcomes because they are willing to burn down 98 companies to get 2 huge homeruns? There's no debate to be had, we have a lot of actual data in regards to the industry, which numerous prominent VC firms routinely publish. We also have multiple bubbles worth of history in regards to VC behavior and the general day to day crunchbase or VC funding news type information. There's a non-stop 20+ year history of Silicon Valley VCs doing exactly what I've described, leaving a vast parade of thousands of dead formerly multi-million dollar start-ups in their wake.

> It's pretty damn easy to create a fictious $100 million transaction with other insiders, then gloss over the details on the balance sheet.

I have no idea what you're talking about or how that pertains to what I said.

I think you are actually agreeing with me to some extent, that SV is based (partly? Largely?) on funny money.

I'm just pointing out that in addition to that, insider dealing and cooked books play a greater role in the funny money economy than anyone likes to talk about.

All the more credit to the show Silicon Valley. They illustrated the fake user scenario quite well.

My (limited) contact with the VC biotech world is more than enough to stay well away from it. It is, by and large, scientifically bankrupt outside of more traditional pharma and ag stuff.