The one-night-only exhibition was located down a narrow alley across the street from San Francisco’s courthouse and county jail and one block past the cluster of bail bond services. Once inside, behind a velvet rope, there awaited the infamous Theranos centrifuge that promised to scan for more than a thousand diseases from a single blood drop. Mounted on the wall behind the toaster-size device were two well-known photographs of Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s disgraced CEO, who is now behind bars, one of them from the cover of Forbes in 2014. Beside the Theranos exhibit stood the Juicero, a $400 internet-connected drink machine that turned $8 packets of fruity mixtures into fresh-squeezed-tasting juices. The only trouble? Consumers could bypass the gadget and squeeze the Juicero packets’ contents into a glass themselves, a discovery made only after investors had pumped more than $120 million into the company. These were just 2 of the 33 exhibits at the Repository of Ill-Advised Ventures (RIAV), a museum pop-up that took place last weekend, appropriately, at the Question Mark Tavern and its event space upstairs, next to Aladdin Bail Bonds.
“It’s less about failure and more about [how] somebody should have corrected something at some point,” says RIAV founder Robbie Ostrow, referring to the businesses whose products and tchotchkes make up his collection. “I don’t want to be mean-spirited, although sometimes it is a little bit mean-spirited.” Ostrow, a 32-year-old software engineer, has been assembling his repository since 2015. He buys some items himself, usually on eBay, while others have been donated, often from friends who worked at the now-shuttered companies. Ostrow has no intention of building a permanent display, although he’d be happy to lend objects to other institutions, like San Francisco’s Museum of the Human Web, where three RIAV treasures will be exhibited in an upcoming show.
At the door, guests to the free pop-up were given genuine, unused admission bracelets to the notorious 2017 Fyre Festival, the (falsely) advertised multiday luxury event on a private island that materialized in stranded attendees and prison time for its founder. Inside the Question Mark’s bar area, a looping slideshow of RIAV’s collection—about 100 items—showed on large screens while a playlist of songs, including “Take the Money and Run,” by Steve Miller Band, and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” by the Who, played on repeat. About 100 bracelet-wearing guests drifted back and forth between the complimentary food and drinks downstairs and the museum upstairs.
One standout item that sparked laughter was a tote bag with a logo for Lay’s Wow potato chips. “I remember them coming out. Here’s the miracle, fat-free potato chip, and then six months later I was like, Ooh,” says visitor Sarah Roberts, a museum curator, of the digestion problems caused by olestra, an ingredient in the snack. She cringes recalling the term brown staining, the brand’s name for the side effect, which it disclosed in TV commercials.
Across the room was another popular object, albeit of a serious nature: a Florida voting machine from the contested “hanging chad” presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. While too young to have voted in 2000, Kevin Lo, a twentysomething consultant to power and utilities companies, says the three-walled enclosure with a ballot and perforating pen was his favorite: “It was such an iconic election that triggered a lot of different events. It is cool to see that artifact here.”
Jonathan Kula, a 27-year-old software engineer (also too young to have voted in 2000), was similarly struck by the Florida voting machine. “At Stanford, there’s this computer science course that everyone takes where they have to solve the hanging-chad problem,” he says.
Much of the pop-up represented Silicon Valley, a place famous for the idea of faking it until you make it and where failures (at the expense of investors and consumers) are readily forgiven. But Ostrow, who grew up in Hillsborough and graduated from Stanford, says the items he’s gathered suggest “a lot more faking it than is reasonable.” He points to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list as sometimes including grifter founders: “There’s a fine line between being a really good marketer and telling the truth.”
The AI bubble, in many ways, was the elephant in the room. A glimpse of irrational exuberance was demonstrated by an exhibit of AI consumer devices and Ostrow’s snarky placards describing them: a Friend AI pendant (“an AI companion gadget with no companionship”), Rabbit R1 (“the future of personal computing for about two days”), and Humane AI (“also the future of personal computing for about two days”).
Many attendees were working for AI companies and seemed aware of the potential for “This time it’s different”–type thinking and the problems that come from it. “I think many entrepreneurs are riding the coattails of the AI boom where it’s like if you just speak AI in the direction of investors, it’s like, Oh, here’s the money for you,” says Kula. “When I look at the Friend pendant, I’m kind of like, Cool idea, I guess, but then I look at it again and think, That’s really sad.”
Other exhibits included ephemera of well-known fraudsters, like a fabric swatch from the suit of investor Bernie Madoff and a signed piece of artwork by Anna Sorokin (a.k.a. Anna Delvey). An adjacent room was devoted to cryptocurrency, specifically swag (T-shirts, hoodies, backpacks, caps, even a cycling jersey) from FTX, a digital-currency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried that proved to be a house of cards.
Earlier in the evening, before the upstairs room became crowded and louder than Pink Floyd’s “Money” blasting from the speakers, Ostrow joked about his hopes for the evening: “I’m hoping to get at least one person to come who, in the future, will be found out to be running some kind of fraudulent venture themselves.”
And before the night was over, his wish may have come true—well, sort of. Ostrow was presented with a new item: a fancy, insulated travel mug bearing the logo of a startup named Delve. While not yet shut down, the AI firm was in hot water as it faced accusations of falsely claiming its customers are compliant while generating fraudulent audit reports and fabricating evidence. Ostrow placed it on a shelf below a helmet and playing cards from the failed XFL football league.•
Blaise Zerega is Alta Journal's editorial director. His journalism has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio (deputy editor and part of founding team), WIRED (managing editor), the New Yorker, Forbes, and other publications. Additionally, he was the editor of Red Herring magazine, once the bible of Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, he has helped lead teams small and large to numerous honors, including multiple National Magazine Awards. He attended the United States Military Academy and New York University and received a Michener Fellowship for fiction from the Texas Center for Writers.
