Hi, welcome to your Weekend!
The Valley is small and memories are long. I’ve heard countless versions of that old venture capital saw. And true enough, it sometimes seems like Silicon Valley is one clubby, insular, gossip-addled village.
That’s why it can feel so disorienting when the outside world gets interested in Valley business. As TI Weekend staffer Josh Duboff writes this week, Hollywood’s been doing a whole lot of tech parachuting lately. There are at least eight star-driven vehicles based on real-life tech sagas that are currently being adapted into prestige TV series and feature films. In some sense, Hollywood’s fascination with tech isn’t surprising—the industry and its most notorious and charismatic figures aren’t just local concerns anymore. They’re linchpins in popular culture.
As the never-ending Theranos trial comes to a climactic conclusion in the coming weeks, the next made-for-Hollywood tech scandal is likely just around the next corner. In fact, it may be even closer that that. Which brings us to this week’s cover story on troubled health-tech unicorn Modern Health...