TL;DR Theranos, uBeam and Energous have all figured out how to bilk investors by exploiting their well-known tendency to &quot;invest in teams not products&quot;. Hired some great engineers? That&#x27;s good enough for us; we don&#x27;t need to check whether your science is snake oil or not.<p>The bosses of Energous are especially slick. They went for IPO early and started paying themselves huge salaries. At the point when the market might have started asking questions like, &quot;Why is there still no product?&quot; they headed off trouble by adding a bunch of reassuringly big names to the board.