For the affirmative: Holmes was a Stanford student; the company was located in Palo Alto; she grew up idolizing Steve Jobs and thought she was emulating his approach; early investors were Tim Draper (personally or via DFJ? It’s not clear to me), Ellison and ATA.
For the negative: Draper’s investment was a super-early, “family and friends” investment when the company was just a “promising idea”, kinda like a YC investment, and he didn’t invest again; Ellison isn’t a VC and was also just excited by the concept and the founder; other than Draper, none of the main SV VCs invested - i.e., Sequoia, KP, Bessemer, Graylock, Benchmark, Accel, General Catalyst, Index, etc, or even any smaller ones with any pedigree (ATA was a new firm in 2004 and is now defunct, and never had any repute); most of the funding, even quite early, and especially later, came from sources outside SV, eg Murdoch, politics figures, and other non-SV investment firms - you just wouldn’t raise funds from those kinds of sources if you were making it as a conventional Silicon Valley startup.
The "D" in DFJ is Draper, which I mentioned. (DFJ has renamed itself to "Threshold.") I missed ATA.
DFJ/Threshold did the seed round, $500k, but doesn't seem to have invested afterwards. ATA did B, at $9.1M, and was a minority investor in C, which totaled $28.5M; Ellison was the C lead and there was a third.
In short, maximum for DFJ, ATA, and Ellison from those three rounds is <$40M. (Rupert Murdoch did A, $5.8M.)
Theranos raised a total of $1.4B. $40M, aka <3%, is in the noise, and the fact that it was early not late says that SV wasn't interested.
