Workplace

Juicero. Quibi. Theranos. What do you do if there’s a flop on your resume?

According to an ex-Theranos employee and a lifelong talent executive

An illustration of three hands holding up three resumes.

Some tech executives claim that having a failed startup on the resume reveals a healthy appetite for risk and a hungry bent towards exploration and creativity.

Illustration: Mykyta Dolmatov/Getty Images Plus; Protocol

The tech industry is a notorious graveyard for once high-flying startups that are now defunct, extinct, disgraced or simply ran out of funding and quietly went gentle into that good night. Startup churn is par for the course in Silicon Valley, with over 70% of startups failing, according to CB Insights.

In the process, however, some companies are more publicly shamed than others.

Quibi. Cambridge Analytica. MoviePass. Juicero. We’ve mostly forgotten about these spectacular failures, but do you know who hasn’t forgotten them? The people who worked there. Say you have the bad fortune of having one of these names on your resume: What do you do?

Barry Hamory knows the dilemma firsthand. For two years, he was a recruiter at Theranos. In fact, he was the company’s first recruiter, hired by Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes themselves. “I kind of built the entire hiring apparatus there and hired almost every recruiter we had,” Hamory said.

Hamory was lucky. His time at Theranos has since panned out to become more amusing cocktail party banter than truly uncomfortable conversations with potential employers. That might have had something to do with his perfectly timed exit. He left in 2014, many months before The Wall Street Journal exposed shortcomings with Theranos’ technology. “I had moved on before all the negativity came out,” he said.

When Hamory first started at Theranos in March of 2012, he was totally onboard. “[Balwani and Holmes] were really amazing when I first met them, especially that first year there …They were very dynamic,” he said. The company was exciting, and the growth was phenomenal. “I really thought I was going to be working with the next Steve Jobs,” he said of Holmes.

Then about a year into his tenure, he started getting hints that things were perhaps not as rosy as they seemed. “There were a lot of internal rumors,” and “turnover was just dizzy,” he noticed. He said Holmes went from being “very personable” to walking through the building with a security guard and entering through a secret entrance to avoid talking to any employees. “Something wasn’t right.”

That was when Hamory gave his notice. He remembers his father-in-law telling him he had made a mistake. Holmes had just been on CNBC, and the company had reached its peak $9 billion valuation. At the time, recruiters were calling him left and right about job opportunities. He secured his next job as a senior technical sourcing recruiter at Schneider Electric pretty easily.

After the news broke, the reception started to change. Hamory remembers being introduced at a new job based in Sunnyvale and hearing people laugh and snicker when his time at Theranos was mentioned. People started asking him questions about his experience there: “What was that all about? Is it all true?”

Today, Hamory is a senior talent acquisition sourcer for Cargill, one of the nation’s largest global food corporations, where he’s worked since 2019. When he first interviewed for the job, his hiring manager had never even heard of Theranos. The company is based in Minnesota and culturally far removed from Silicon Valley. “It doesn’t really make the news out there,” he said.

Despite his insistence that the reputation hasn’t marked him, he did take Theranos off his LinkedIn profile shortly after Protocol contacted him. He said he was spooked because another person had contacted him through LinkedIn that same week.

“I don’t think anybody would ever hold you accountable for decisions made by senior management,” Hamory said. He feels that he was shielded from a lot of the backlash because, as a recruiter, he wasn’t a technical decision-maker. He has observed more-senior colleagues who have experienced more difficulty finding a job post-Theranos.

As a recruiter himself, Hamory sees both sides of the equation. He recommends people who have a smear on their resume frame the experience in terms of the skills they picked up and the lesson they learned. “Approach it as a positive,” he said. Talk about what made that job interesting, what you learned from it and how it made you stronger.

Here’s how he said he would frame his experience in conversations with potential employers: “I’ve always been a risk taker. When I joined Theranos, it was a really exciting, dynamic company … I feel I did a good job in hiring people. I didn’t obviously know all that was going on behind the scenes because I was in talent. I mean, that’s the god-honest truth.”

As a recruiter, Hamory said there are no companies that he would never hire someone from. In some instances for technical recruiting, managers will tell him they don’t like a company’s technology or feel that it’s weak. “That will kind of sway me,” he said, but not necessarily a company’s reputation.

“The nature of the failure matters,” said Chris Toy, CEO of MarketerHire, a talent platform that matches startups with marketers. So something relatively embarrassing like Juicero is going to be less shameful than, say, an election-interference scandal at Cambridge Analytica. He also recommends that people focus on breaking down their work experience to “skills and expertise” rather than on the company itself.

“Startups fail all the time,” Toy added, and recruiters are more focused on “the story of your resume.” Were you at the company for years before it blew up? Did you do good work during that time? He doesn’t recommend that people take those names off their resume “unless it’s going to cost you the interview.” Once you’re in an interview, “you can handle it,” because you have the opportunity to explain and put your time there into context.

According to Toy, companies that use MarketerHire’s platform will on occasion filter out certain companies on candidates’ resumes, though not because of reputation. Sometimes, an early-stage startup might not want to hire someone who has only had experience at big tech companies, because they wouldn’t have the right skill set to work at a smaller startup.

Some tech executives even claim that having a failed startup on the resume is a good thing, revealing a healthy appetite for risk and a hungry bent towards exploration and creativity rather than taking the safe route. One CEO even seeks out failed startups on prospective candidates’ resumes as a sign of an “independent mind” and someone he’d want on his team.

Another ex-Theranos employee, Grace Ko, who worked on formulating reagents and is now a junior frontend developer at a cybersecurity company, wrote in a message to Protocol, “... most of my colleagues from Theranos were rather in demand. It’s because there’s a lot to learn from people who worked at a company that almost made it but didn’t, organization and technology wise. I mostly focused on the positive side of the experience as mine really was a good one, despite how the media portrays the company.”

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins