Ben Popper: This was the year the tide went out in tech, and we learned who was swimming naked. After five years of ever larger funding rounds, the market threw some cold water on the party. From Dropbox to Square to Snapchat, a lot of "unicorns" failed to live up to their sky-high valuations.
The poster child for this was Theranos, a company which claimed to have invented a revolutionary new technology that could identify diseases with just a pinprick of blood. It achieved a nearly $9 billion valuation and its iconoclastic founder graced numerous magazine covers. The only problem was, its technology and business didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
