When Theranos C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes was growing up, her neighbor was famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper. A family friend to the Holmeses, Draper’s children grew up playing with Elizabeth. He also, incidentally, wrote one of the first seed checks to Theranos a decade ago, long before it was valued at $9 billion (and later, just $800 million). His Sand Hill Road firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has continued to support Holmes. And he’s still defending the company today, even after a series of critical Wall Street Journal reports revealed that the start-up often relied on generic machines to run its blood tests because its own proprietary Edison machines—the technology that the entire business ran on—didn’t work.

Despite it all, Draper told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in an interview published Thursday night, “nothing’s gone wrong with Theranos.” The venture capitalist compares Theranos to “the way Uber was attacked by taxi drivers, and Bitcoin was attacked by the banks,” he says. “Theranos is being attacked by the powers that be in big pharma, in [Holmes’s] competitors, in the world of medical insurance, the people in government who are going to be very much affected by a really cheap, really effective, wonderful solution.”

In Draper’s view, Big Pharma is terrified of Theranos, and is demanding the government regulate it in ways that it wouldn’t regulate Theranos’s competition. Instead, Draper says, “we should be really focused on the consumer. The consumers love it.” Theranos told regulators earlier this year that it has voided “all” of the blood-testing results from its Edison machines from 2014 and 2015. Tens of thousands of patients may have been given incorrect blood-test results, and their doctors may have administered unnecessary or potentially harmful treatment as a result.

When it comes to Holmes herself, Draper says, “She’s awesome. She’s brilliant, she’s awesome. She’s one of the brilliant female entrepreneurs of the world. We are lucky to have her.” And he doesn’t mince words on John Carreyrou, the reporter responsible for the cascade of critical, investigative coverage into Theranos and Holmes, who has since had her net worth slashed by Forbes from $4.5 billion to virtually nothing: “I hope eventually whoever is pulling the wires for the guy at the Wall Street Journal—I hope they finally cut his wires.” Here’s hoping that Draper’s Theranos optimism gets its own scene in the upcoming Jennifer Lawrence Theranos movie. Somebody give Peter Gallagher a call.