What Copeland and Griffith said about Billy Evans on Hard Fork

AI summary

Rob Copeland says Billy Evans was “extremely charming” when Copeland called to discuss the startup. He also says Evans presented himself as open to questions, then did not tell him everything he wanted to know. Copeland says his impression at the time was that Elizabeth Holmes had nothing to do with the company, because she was not raised in meetings and was not mentioned in the deck. The transcript identifies Evans’s venture as a blood-testing startup, including a pet blood-testing concept.

Copeland says it was real in the sense that it raised money, but not real in the sense that it had a working product. At about 00:13:01, one speaker says they did not fully buy Evans’s relationship with Holmes and viewed his habit of answering unasked questions as a PR strategy. The transcript does not clearly establish that Erin Griffith was that speaker. Later, Griffith describes a recent Silicon Valley pattern of venture firms backing controversial founders, while saying she had not found many examples involving people actually convicted of fraud.