Reflection on Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

               This book is a thrilling account of the lies of Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 years old to create a company (Theranos) that would invent blood testing devices the size of a phone that would only require a fingerprick of blood rather than an intravenous needle. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. The technology wasn’t there. Despite that, Elizabeth Holmes allowed whatever sort of complex she has to pus her into bigger and bigger lies about her company until it all came crashing down in 2016. This book is a really exciting and detailed account of her attempts to cover up her lies, silence her critics, and swindle multi-millionaires and multinational companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

               Holmes was able to fool a lot of people through various techniques. She imposed intense security regulations on the company, hiring bodyguards and forcing employees to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. While this was seemingly to hide the incredible technology that she had as a trade secret, it was actually to hide the lack of technology and that her multi-billion-dollar company was based on nothing at all. During demonstrations, Theranos would place the finger-stick sample of the visiting VIP in their “miniLab,” wait until they left the room, and then take the sample out to run on a modified commercial analyzer. While Tharons claimed they could use blood from finger-pricks, they needed blood drawn intravenously. While they said that they could do dozens of tests at once, they could only do a few and needed to do them separately. Their lies cost their partners, Safeway and Walgreens, millions of dollars.

               The book is really thrilling, especially the last few chapters when the author starts to tell the story of how he met all the people involved in the scandal. The book tells the tale of Theranos through the perspective of employees who quit or were fired and it’s interesting how they all had pieces of information but needed somebody like Carreyrou to put it all together. Seen individually, it was unclear, but when Carreyrou viewed the whole picture from afar, it came into focus.

Miscellaneous:

• Something I’ve been trying to think of lately is how to describe the importance of patience. I know that patience is a virtue and my gut always told me it was good, but I couldn’t describe it until I read this passage in the book: “Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Sunny off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than five hundred words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Sunny simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails.” There’s a great example of how an impatient manager can be bad for business.
• One astounding thing is that Rupert Murdoch, who invested in Theranos, was able to take the $150 million he invested as a tax write-off. How the fuck is it possible that you can invest all that money, lose it, and still end up fine? Doesn’t that just encourage people to make bad investments?