Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, A Thoughtful Review by Gayatri Aryan
““You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.” Are you a fan of True Crime novels? We are excited to share the next installment of our mother daughter book review series. Today’s woman dreamer, Gayatri Aryan, pens a compelling review of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. The book follows the rise and fall of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup headed by Elizabeth Holmes. Check out Gayatri’s review below! (and if podcasts are your thing, check out the audio version as well!)
Title: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
By John Carreyrou
Genre: True Crime
Publication Date: May 2018
Prefer the audio version? Check out the audio recording?
“You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.”
Background: In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. A turning point came in 2015, when a member of The Wall Street Journal's investigative reporting team (John Carreyrou) broke open the real story of Theranos, prompting broader scrutiny into the blood testing startup that landed Holmes in a federal courtroom over criminal fraud charges. Just last month, Holmes was sentenced to 11.25 years in prison with 3 years of supervised release.
So, how does one review a crime investigation book without judging the people at the center of the crime. Let’s try!
Bad Blood starts with a frightening chronicle of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. She cast a hypnotic spell on even seasoned investors, refining an attractive pitch about a little girl who was afraid of needles and who now wanted to improve the world by providing faster, better blood tests.
Her beguiling concept was that by a simple prick — drawing only a drop or two of blood — Theranos could perform a full range of blood tests in walk-in clinics and, ultimately, people’s homes. The premise was scientifically dodgy, then known microfluidics principles just wouldn’t support it. Theranos’s technology was neither ready nor able to perform the tests promised. Many of the patients who were part of Theranos trials at the clinics actually had their blood drawn from commonly-used needles. Audaciously then, most of these tests were graded not by Theranos’s proprietary technology, but by routine commercially available equipment.
The author’s description of Holmes as a manic leader who turned coolly hostile when challenged hits the nail on the head. Holmes was delusional of grandeur, distancing anyone presenting facts that didn’t align with her reality and just couldn’t cope with the messy realities of bioengineering. Wrapped in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to mirror her idol Jobs all the while preaching that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees that didn’t “drink the kool-aid” were let go ruthlessly.” Secrecy was omnipresent, to the point that it hindered progress.
Even for a private company like Theranos, disclosure is the foundation of American capitalism — the “sanitizer” that allows investors to gauge a company’s prospects. Based on Carreyrou’s tenacious reporting, not even Enron lied so freely.
The question of how it got so far — more than 800 employees and a paper valuation of $9 billion — is fascinating and will be studied in business school classes for years. Shouldn’t the first line of defense have been the advisory board?