They Still Live in the Shadow of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes

Female entrepreneurs said they were constantly compared to Ms. Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, who faces trial soon.

SAN FRANCISCO — When Alice Zhang set out in 2018 to raise funding for her drug discovery start-up, investors kept asking her about Theranos, the blood testing start-up led by the entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes that had collapsed in scandal. Others asked, too. At a Stanford University event, the organizers wanted Ms. Zhang to talk about Theranos. One adviser told her that when her start-up came up in conversation, people responded by cracking jokes about Ms. Holmes. Ms. Zhang was initially confused. Her start-up, Verge Genomics, uses artificial intelligence to aid the discovery of therapeutic drugs. That was completely different from Theranos’s business of marketing blood testing machines as a diagnostic tool. Ms. Holmes had also been accused of criminal fraud. Ms. Zhang had not.