I&#x27;m consistently surprised at the low bar for due diligence in startup funding. In my personal experience, it goes something like &quot;send us a business plan, pitch deck, three customers (that you handpick) for us to talk to, the legal paperwork, and maybe some bank records but not usually&quot;. I always assumed investors required credentials to Google Analytics or Mixpanel or iTunes analytics or whatever to actually verify that the usage numbers are what founders say they are, yet I&#x27;ve never had an investor do that or even heard of it being done. It&#x27;s completely baffling to me that Theranos can raise ~$700M w&#x2F;o any third party testing or diligence.<p>This article suggest it&#x27;s because Holmes is &quot;enthralling&quot; and investors had an &quot;exaggerated faith in the power of medical testing&quot;. Faith and charisma are very abstract concepts, but data and testing aren&#x27;t, so why rely on the former instead of the latter? As Deming said, &quot;In God we trust; all others must bring data.&quot;