[SeanAppleby]

I think the point was, if you're going to invest in someone reckless, you might as well invest in a reckless company where at least if they deliver what they claim, the returns will be substantial.

At least if Theranos had delivered what they claimed, they would have had a wildly valuable product. WeWork was always transparently just a middle man for real estate.

WeWork's fall wasn't because they failed to deliver what they promised; it's that what they promised wasn't even that valuable in the first place. That is an even more embarrassing miss for an investor to have bought into than to be wrong about tractability, as valuing a business model should be a VC's bread and butter, whereas tractability is a fundamentally hard and niche problem that's different for every business, and an easier place to be misled.