Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

In 2003 a 19-year-old Stanford dropout named Elizabeth Holmes started a company called Theranos. She claimed she was going to change the world. Gone would be the days of needles and vials of blood being drawn from a person’s arm for Holmes had invented a new technology that allowed for a blood tests to be run on a few drops of blood pricked from a finger. Sounds great, right! Afraid of needles, have collapsing veins – no problem, all it takes is prick of your finger. Even better, this amazing machine would be relatively small and portable so it be used in say in a war zone or your local drug store, or maybe even some day in people’s homes. Not only that, but Holmes’ invention would be able to test for multiple things at once. 

It was truly an amazing idea. The problem was it wasn’t real. The technology never worked in any reliable manner. Nevertheless, over the next dozen years Holmes raised millions of dollars and got well-known business leaders and powerful politicians to back her. John Carreyrou explains how Holmes and Sunny Balwani, got away with this amazing scam for so long. And it was a scam, because again the technology never actually worked the way Holmes claimed. Investors lost their money. One man lost his life. Many people received erroneous test results. John Carreyrou explains it all in this fascinating quick read, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.

The thing that fascinated me the most about this story was how many people thought to be extremely intelligent and discerning were enthralled by Elizabeth Holmes and her claims. No doubt she is smart, and according to many, very charming. The thing that I could never get pass however, is that she is a college dropout with no education or formal training in medicine or engineering. I personally have little understanding of the science involved in testing blood. It is precisely because I know so little about the subject that I would only trust and expect someone selling a medical device to have studied medicine. Yet neither Holmes, nor Balwani, nor the famous people on the company’s board of directors had any medical or other scientific training. Still Holmes was able to convince people to invest in her company and trust her based on a little more than an idea and a promise of a better tomorrow. 

The other part of the story I found interesting was how people reacted when they realizing that Holmes wasn’t living up the claims she made about Theranos, and then how they responded to pressure from Holmes and Balwani and their team of lawyers. We would all like to believe we would have the courage to stand up and call the liars and scammers out. In Bad Blood Carreyrou shows how that is often harder to do than one might think. Employees who left Theranos were bullied. They were followed. They were threatened with lawsuits if they dared tell what they knew. Still several employees resisted. They tried to spread the word about what was really going on at the company. It was not easy but thank goodness for their courage and bravery. And thanks to Carreyrou for his reporting. Without it who knows how long this company would have continued doing what it did.