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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup Kindle Edition
“Chilling ... Reads like a thriller ... Carreyrou tells [the Theranos story] virtually to perfection.” —The New York Times Book Review
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateMay 21, 2018
- File size13644 KB
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Well, there was a reason it always seemed to work, Shaunak said. The image on the computer screen showing the blood flowing through the cartridge and settling into the little wells was real. But you never knew whether you were going to get a result or not. So they’d recorded a result from one of the times it worked. It was that recorded result that was displayed at the end of each demo.Highlighted by 3,679 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
"You will not want to put this riveting, masterfully reported book down. No matter how bad you think the Theranos story was, you'll learn that the reality was actually far worse."
—Bethany McLean, bestselling coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here
"Chilling... Carreyrou tells [this story] virtually to perfection… Reads like a West Coast version of All the President's Men."
—Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times Book Review
"The definitive account of Theranos’s downfall, detailing its motley crew of executives, legal knife fights, dramatic PR stunts, and skullduggery... Offers a lot for foreign-policy wonks... While Bad Blood is worth reading for its own merits—it’s a stunning feat of journalism that reads like a thriller—it also says a lot about Washington’s facile relationship with Silicon Valley. Most D.C. power brokers know next to nothing about science or technology but increasingly view Silicon Valley tech as a deus ex machina for some of the world’s most complicated challenges. Bad Blood offers a sobering warning of where that type of thinking can lead."
—Robbie Gramer, Foreign Policy
"A great and at times almost unbelievable story of scandalous fraud, surveillance, and legal intimidation at the highest levels of American corporate power. . . . The story of Theranos may be the biggest case of corporate fraud since Enron. But it’s also the story of how a lot of powerful men were fooled by a remarkably brazen liar."
—Yashar Ali, New York Magazine
"Even if you didn’t follow the story of charismatic Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes (and the ensuing trainwreck) in the news, you will find yourself zipping through a book that proves once again that fact is stranger than fiction. A stunning look into a high-tech hoodwinking; like a high-speed car chase in a book."
—The New York Post's "28 Most Unforgettable Books of 2018"
"In Bad Blood, acclaimed investigative journalist John Carreyrou, who broke the story in 2015, presents comprehensive evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes... He unveils many dark secrets of Theranos that have not previously been laid bare… The combination of these brave whistle-blowers, and a tenacious journalist who interviewed 150 people (including 60 former employees) makes for a veritable page-turner."
—Eric Topol, Nature
"Engrossing… Bad Blood boasts movie-scene detail… Theranos, Carreyrou writes, was a revolving door, as Holmes and Balwani fired anyone who voiced even tentative doubts… What’s frightening is how easy it is to imagine a different outcome, one in which the company’s blood-testing devices continued to proliferate. That the story played out as it did is a testament to the many individuals who spoke up, at great personal risk."
—Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Science
"In exposing the fudged numbers, boardroom battles and sickening sums of money tossed Theranos’ way, Bad Blood succeeds in highlighting Silicon Valley’s paradoxical blind spot. Insular corporate culture and benevolent media coverage have allowed a monster to grow in the Valley—one that gambles not just with our smart phones or our democracy, but with people’s lives. Bad Blood reveals a crucial truth: outside observers must act as the eyes, the ears and, most importantly, the voice of Silicon Valley’s blind spot."
—B. David Zarley, Paste Magazine's "16 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018"
"Carreyrou blends lucid descriptions of Theranos’s technology and its failures with a vivid portrait of its toxic culture and its supporters’ delusional boosterism. The result is a bracing cautionary tale about visionary entrepreneurship gone very wrong."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred)
"Crime thriller authors have nothing on Carreyrou's exquisite sense of suspenseful pacing and multifaceted character development in this riveting, read-in-one-sitting tour de force.... Carreyrou's commitment to unraveling Holmes' crimes was literally of life-saving value."
—Booklist (Starred Review)
"Eye-opening... A vivid, cinematic portrayal of serpentine Silicon Valley corruption... A deep investigative report on the sensationalistic downfall of multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley biotech startup Theranos. Basing his findings on hundreds of interviews with people inside and outside the company, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Carreyrou rigorously examines the seamy details behind the demise of Theranos and its creator, Elizabeth Holmes… [Carreyrou] brilliantly captures the interpersonal melodrama, hidden agendas, gross misrepresentations, nepotism, and a host of delusions and lies that further fractured the company’s reputation and halted its rise."
—Kirkus
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
November 17, 2006
Tim Kemp had good news for his team.
The former IBM executive was in charge of bioinformatics at Theranos, a startup with a cutting-edge blood-testing system. The company had just completed its first big live demonstration for a pharmaceutical company. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos’s twenty-two-year-old founder, had flown to Switzerland and shown off the system’s capabilities to executives at Novartis, the European drug giant.
“Elizabeth called me this morning,” Kemp wrote in an email to his fifteen-person team. “She expressed her thanks and said that, ‘it was perfect!’ She specifically asked me to thank you and let you all know her appreciation. She additionally mentioned that Novartis was so impressed that they have asked for a proposal and have expressed interest in a financial arrangement for a project. We did what we came to do!”
This was a pivotal moment for Theranos. The three-year-old startup had progressed from an ambitious idea Holmes had dreamed up in her Stanford dorm room to an actual product a huge multinational corporation was interested in using.
Word of the demo’s success made its way upstairs to the second floor, where senior executives’ offices were located.
One of those executives was Henry Mosley, Theranos’s chief financial officer. Mosley had joined Theranos eight months earlier, in March 2006. A rumpled dresser with piercing green eyes and a laid-back personality, he was a veteran of Silicon Valley’s technology scene. After growing up in the Washington, D.C. area and getting his MBA at the University of Utah, he’d come out to California in the late 1970s and never left. His first job was at chipmaker Intel, one of the Valley’s pioneers. He’d later gone on to run the finance departments of four different tech companies, taking two of them public. Theranos was far from his first rodeo.
What had drawn Mosley to Theranos was the talent and experience gathered around Elizabeth. She might be young, but she was surrounded by an all-star cast. The chairman of her board was Donald L. Lucas, the venture capitalist who had groomed billionaire software entrepreneur Larry Ellison and helped him take Oracle Corporation public in the mid-1980s. Lucas and Ellison had both put some of their own money into Theranos.
Another board member with a sterling reputation was Channing Robertson, the associate dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering. Robertson was one of the stars of the Stanford faculty. His expert testimony about the addictive properties of cigarettes had forced the tobacco industry to enter into a landmark $6.5 billion settlement with the state of Minnesota in the late 1990s. Based on the few interactions Mosley had had with him, it was clear Robertson thought the world of Elizabeth.
Theranos also had a strong management team. Kemp had spent thirty years at IBM. Diane Parks, Theranos’s chief commercial officer, had twenty-five years of experience at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. John Howard, the senior vice president for products, had overseen Panasonic’s chip-making subsidiary. It wasn’t often that you found executives of that caliber at a small startup.
It wasn’t just the board and the executive team that had sold Mosley on Theranos, though. The market it was going after was huge. Pharmaceutical companies spent tens of billions of dollars on clinical trials to test new drugs each year. If Theranos could make itself indispensable to them and capture a fraction of that spending, it could make a killing.
Elizabeth had asked him to put together some financial projections she could show investors. The first set of numbers he’d come up with hadn’t been to her liking, so he’d revised them upward. He was a little uncomfortable with the revised numbers, but he figured they were in the realm of the plausible if the company executed perfectly. Besides, the venture capitalists startups courted for funding knew that startup founders overstated these forecasts. It was part of the game. VCs even had a term for it: the hockey-stick forecast. It showed revenue stagnating for a few years and then magically shooting up in a straight line.
The one thing Mosley wasn’t sure he completely understood was how the Theranos technology worked. When prospective investors came by, he took them to see Shaunak Roy, Theranos’s cofounder. Shaunak had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. He and Elizabeth had worked together in Robertson’s research lab at Stanford.
Shaunak would prick his finger and milk a few drops of blood from it. Then he would transfer the blood to a white plastic cartridge the size of a credit card. The cartridge would slot into a rectangular box the size of a toaster. The box was called a reader. It extracted a data signal from the cartridge and beamed it wirelessly to a server that analyzed the data and beamed back a result. That was the gist of it.
When Shaunak demonstrated the system to investors, he pointed them to a computer screen that showed the blood flowing through the cartridge inside the reader. Mosley didn’t really grasp the physics or chemistries at play. But that wasn’t his role. He was the finance guy. As long as the system showed a result, he was happy. And it always did.
***
Elizabeth was back from Switzerland a few days later. She sauntered around with a smile on her face, more evidence that the trip had gone well, Mosley figured. Not that that was unusual. Elizabeth was often upbeat. She had an entrepreneur’s boundless optimism. She liked to use the term “extra-ordinary,” with “extra” written in italics and a hyphen for emphasis, to describe the Theranos mission in her emails to staff. It was a bit over the top, but she seemed sincere and Mosley knew that evangelizing was what successful startup founders did in Silicon Valley. You didn’t change the world by being cynical.
What was odd, though, was that the handful of colleagues who’d accompanied Elizabeth on the trip didn’t seem to share her enthusiasm. Some of them looked outright downcast.
Did someone’s puppy get run over? Mosley wondered half jokingly. He wandered downstairs, where most of the company’s sixty employees sat in clusters of cubicles, and looked for Shaunak. Surely Shaunak would know if there was any problem he hadn’t been told about.
At first, Shaunak professed not to know anything. But Mosley sensed he was holding back and kept pressing him. Shaunak gradually let down his guard and allowed that the Theranos 1.0, as Elizabeth had christened the blood-testing system, didn’t always work. It was kind of a crapshoot, actually, he said. Sometimes you could coax a result from it and sometimes you couldn’t.
This was news to Mosley. He thought the system was reliable. Didn’t it always seem to work when investors came to view it?
Well, there was a reason it always seemed to work, Shaunak said. The image on the computer screen showing the blood flowing through the cartridge and settling into the little wells was real. But you never knew whether you were going to get a result or not. So they’d recorded a result from one of the times it worked. It was that recorded result that was displayed at the end of each demo.
Mosley was stunned. He thought the results were extracted in real time from the blood inside the cartridge. That was certainly what the investors he brought by were led to believe. What Shaunak had just described sounded like a sham. It was OK to be optimistic and aspirational when you pitched investors, but there was a line not to cross. And this, in Mosley’s view, crossed it.
So, what exactly had happened with Novartis? Mosley couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone, but he now suspected some similar sleight of hand. And he was right. One of the two readers Elizabeth took to Switzerland had malfunctioned when they got there. The employees she brought with her had stayed up all night trying to get it to work. To mask the problem during the demo the next morning, Tim Kemp’s team in California had beamed over a fake result.
***
Mosley had a weekly meeting with Elizabeth scheduled for that afternoon. When he entered her office, he was immediately reminded of her charisma. She had the presence of someone much older than she was. The way she trained her big blue eyes on you without blinking made you feel like the center of the world. It was almost hypnotic. Her voice added to the mesmerizing effect: she spoke in an unusually deep baritone.
Mosley decided to let the meeting run its natural course before bringing up his concerns. Theranos had just closed its third round of funding. By any measure, it was a resounding success: the company had raised another $32 million from investors, on top of the $15 million raised in its first two funding rounds. The most impressive number was its new valuation: one hundred and sixty-five million dollars. There weren’t many three-year-old startups that could say they were worth that much.
One big reason for the rich valuation was the agreements Theranos told investors it had reached with pharmaceutical partners. A slide deck listed six deals with five companies that would generate revenues of $120 million to $300 million over the next eighteen months. It listed another fifteen deals under negotiation. If those came to fruition, revenues could eventually reach $1.5 billion, according to the PowerPoint presentation.
The pharmaceutical companies were going to use Theranos’s blood-testing system to monitor patients’ response to new drugs. The cartridges and readers would be placed in patients’ homes during clinical trials. Patients would prick their fingers several times a day and the readers would beam their blood-test results to the trial’s sponsor. If the results indicated a bad reaction to the drug, the drug’s maker would be able to lower the dosage immediately rather than wait until the end of the trial. This would reduce pharmaceutical companies’ research costs by as much as 30 percent. Or so the slide deck said.
Mosley’s unease with all these claims had grown since that morning’s discovery. For one thing, in his eight months at Theranos, he’d never laid eyes on the pharmaceutical contracts. Every time he inquired about them, he was told they were “under legal review.” More important, he’d agreed to those ambitious revenue forecasts because he thought the Theranos system worked reliably.
If Elizabeth shared any of these misgivings, she showed no signs of it. She was the picture of a relaxed and happy leader. The new valuation, in particular, was a source of great pride. New directors might join the board to reflect the growing roster of investors, she told him.
Mosley saw an opening to broach the trip to Switzerland and the office rumors that something had gone wrong. When he did, Elizabeth admitted that there had been a problem, but she shrugged it off. It would easily be fixed, she said.
Mosley was dubious given what he now knew. He brought up what Shaunak had told him about the investor demos. They should stop doing them if they weren’t completely real, he said. “We’ve been fooling investors. We can’t keep doing that.”
Elizabeth’s expression suddenly changed. Her cheerful demeanor of just moments ago vanished and gave way to a mask of hostility. It was like a switch had been flipped. She leveled a cold stare at her chief financial officer.
“Henry, you’re not a team player,” she said in an icy tone. “I think you should leave right now.”
There was no mistaking what had just happened. Elizabeth wasn’t merely asking him to get out of her office. She was telling him to leave the company—immediately. Mosley had just been fired.
Product details
- ASIN : B078VW3VM7
- Publisher : Vintage; 1st edition (May 21, 2018)
- Publication date : May 21, 2018
- Language : English
- File size : 13644 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 353 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #44,461 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a nonfiction author. His first book, "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup," chronicles Silicon Valley's biggest fraud. Please direct any speaking queries to speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com
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Customers find the book fascinating and easy to follow. They appreciate the deep research and insight into the country's influential media. Readers describe the pacing as fast and urgent. They also praise the functionality as excellent and brilliant. In addition, they say the characters are amazing and charismatic. However, some customers feel the deception is beyond crazy and delusional.
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Customers find the book fascinating, excellent, and easy to follow. They say the author tells the story with spellbinding skill and detail. Readers also describe the story as unbelievable, masterful, and detailed.
"This book presents a fascinating account of a real-life story that is still unfolding...." Read more
"...Excellent reporting and a highly recommended read!" Read more
"...And everyone bought it.Bad Blood was a fast and exciting read, and relatively easy, worth mentioning because there's a reasonable..." Read more
"...the many other dimensions, but this presentation is a well presented self-contained effort...." Read more
Customers find the book thoroughly researched, well-written, and educational. They say it provides much information and insight about our country's influential media. Readers also mention it's the best investigative book they have read so far.
"...relatively easy, worth mentioning because there's a reasonable amount of science in there...." Read more
"...This book also provides much information and insight about our country's influential media, legal system, and attorneys...." Read more
"...This is a case of some incredible, risk-taking journalism...." Read more
"...Overall, however, this is an important book from an important author. Hundreds of thousands of people took the phony Theranos blood test...." Read more
Customers find the book fast-paced and urgent. They also describe the story as stunning and serious. Readers appreciate the exceptional service and shipping speed.
"...of his way to praise her integrity: “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics – personal ethics, managerial ethics,..." Read more
"...But a lot of what happens is also stunning and very serious. I often shook my head incredulously...." Read more
"...properly and what follows is a great tale of deviation, lying, intimidation (what was done to many employees of the company is disturbing) and..." Read more
"...of fraud and not only makes it more exciting and thrilling but also sobering and pragmatic.I would highly recommend this to anyone...." Read more
Customers find the book excellent, brilliant, and shocking. They say it does a good job of walking them through the rollercoaster journey.
"...5 - Fantastic. Life-altering. Maybe only 30 in a lifetime.4 - Very good.3 - Worth your time.2 - Not very good.1 - Atrocious." Read more
"...This is his first book, and it does not disappoint. It is a suspenseful read that I tore through in just a few days...." Read more
"...The book doesn’t disappoint. Now I’m going to listen to Carreyrou’s podcast." Read more
"Absolutely perfect book. This book is a true thriller that has all the elements needed to provide hours of page turning...." Read more
Customers find the character development fascinating, amazing, and charismatic. They say the portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes is riveting, even-handed, and devastating. Readers also mention the book is an indictment of the cult of personality so prevalent in Silicon Valley.
"...It involves a cast of characters so unique and events so beyond the norm that it is not an exaggeration to say that they are probably beyond the..." Read more
"...into a fantastically written tale of greed, deception, and larger than life characters (especially Ms. Holmes)...." Read more
"...The portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes is riveting, even-handed, and in the end devastating, although she remains a kind of enigma even to the author...." Read more
"...I finished it in two days.My main criticism is the revolving door of characters...." Read more
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Customers find the book deceptive, delusional, and unethical. They also say it's fraudulent from the get-go. Readers mention some simple facts are wrong and some parts are hard to believe.
"...Obviously the leadership of Theranos were abject failures...." Read more
"...One must ask; why not? This seems to be a case of true distortion of reality. The question is; why?5...." Read more
"...were obvious, the best people leaving was obvious, the technical failures were obvious, the lack of a cohesive business plan was obvious, and yet......" Read more
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The story is about the rise and fall of the company Theranos, founded in 2003 by the 19 years old Stanford Dropout Elizabeth Holmes. The company’s objective, which it later falsely claimed to have achieved, was to revolutionize blood tests by only requiring very small amounts of blood taken by finger stick; and the tests could be performed and the results obtained very rapidly using small automated devices developed by the company. Holmes was CEO and she ran the company with her boyfriend Sunny Balwani, who had the title President. Although not learning much about science, engineering or medicine during her two years at Stanford, her charm, ambition, and deceit were able to raise hundreds of millions from venture capitalists and private investors. She was also able to persuade experienced executives of established businesses to partner with her company, including the CEO of Safeway and the Board of Directors of Walgreens. She convinced famous political and military names to serve on Theranos’ Board of Directors, including former Secretaries of State George Schulz and Henry Kissinger, Four Star General James Mattis, former Senator Sam Nunn, to name but a few. Although dropping out in her second year, her former Stanford Chemical Engineering Professor Channing Robertson stated in an article about Theranos and its CEO: “You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.” When Fortune Magazine’s legal correspondent Roger Parloff talked to Shultz and Mattis about Elizabeth, Shultz said: “Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation. I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity: “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics – personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” Kissinger told New Yorker journalist Ken Auletta that Holmes had an "ethereal quality." "She is like a member of a monastic order,"
It is perhaps fortunate for America that the Soviet Union/Russia did not have a charming person of similar caliber when the above three gentlemen were serving their country in their respective high positions in the U.S. Government.
While Elizabeth was perhaps the ultimate person of authority in the company, Sunny was mostly in charge of running its everyday operation. Their leadership style included: demanding complete loyalty, complete secrecy, intimidation, and deceit. According to the book, earning projections were not based on realistic estimates, inaccurate blood test results were not made known, machines designed in-house failed to work most of the time. Folks who raised doubts about the company’s operation were fired. Employees who could not live with the thought that patients may be harmed chose to resign.
For more than a decade, the company was riding high. By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company. The downfall began in October 2015, when the author of this book published a "bombshell article", detailing how the company’s Edison device gave inaccurate results, and revealing that the company had been using commercially available machines made by other manufacturers for most of its testing. Sanctions and other adverse actions by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services soon followed, as well as a lawsuit filed by Arizona for violation of the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act. In 2016, Walgreens and Capital BlueCross announced a suspension of Theranos blood tests from the Newark lab. On June 15, 2018, Holmes and Balwani were indicted on multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Due to Covid-19, the trial of Elizabeth was delayed for a year. It began on August 31, 2021. Looks like the trial for Sunny would not take place until 2022. The ending of this saga is nowhere in sight.
On September 4, 2018, Theranos announced in an email to investors that it would cease operations and release its assets and remaining cash to creditors after all efforts to find a buyer came to nothing. Most of the company's remaining employees had been laid off on the previous Friday, August 31.
Perhaps all of this could have been avoided if Elizabeth had taken a course on Leadership before she dropped out of Stanford. The first thing one learns in Leadership 101 is: A leader without integrity will ultimately fail.
Elizabeth Holmes should go down in history as one of the biggest con artists if we are to believe the author of this “ can’t put it down” investigative report. She drops out of college because she has a vision to revolutionize the laboratory experience in medicine. No more blood draws with nasty needles. All labs would be done with a small amount of blood collected from a finger stick! Amazing! And no one investing in the company asked someone with expertise in medicine and laboratory work if this sounded feasible. The story is recounted of her strong arm tactics, her obfuscation, and downright lies, for years! She created a company, Theranos, that at one point was valued in the billions...with a capital B!
This list of those she wrapped around her finger should give you pause. A list of powerful, smart men.
“One after another, she wrapped people around her finger and persuaded them to do her bidding. The first to fall under her spell was Channing Robertson, the Stanford engineering professor whose reputation helped give her credibility when she was just a teenager. Then there was Donald L. Lucas, the aging venture capitalist whose backing and connections enabled her to keep raising money. Dr. J and Wade Miquelon at Walgreens and Safeway CEO Steve Burd were next, followed by James Mattis, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger (Mattis’s entanglement with Theranos proved no obstacle to his being confirmed as President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense). David Boies and Rupert Murdoch complete the list, though I’ve left out many others who were bewitched by Holmes’s mixture of charm, intelligence, and charisma.”
The invented machines did not work for the most part, but like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtains, this was hidden secretly and the illusion was presented at every turn. Old technology was used in place of the “Edison” or mini lab presented as the means for this revolution. Doubters were fired, threatened, or charmed into submissiveness. Patients were put at risk, as laboratory studies form the basis of much decision making in medicine. (I am a physician, so I have some skin in this.) The results were very frequently wrong, to the point of some patients being sent to emergency rooms because of the life threatening results reported.
The author doggedly pursued this story and brought the house down with what he uncovered with the help of ex-employees.
I think what happened here is happening on a wide scale in society. Hype. Hype to gain power and money and prestige. Hype to hide emptiness and fraud. They have a term for it in the tech world evidently.
“THE TERM “VAPORWARE” was coined in the early 1980s to describe new computer software or hardware that was announced with great fanfare only to take years to materialize, if it did at all. It was a reflection of the computer industry’s tendency to play it fast and loose when it came to marketing. Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle were all accused of engaging in the practice at one point or another. Such overpromising became a defining feature of Silicon Valley. The harm done to consumers was minor, measured in frustration and deflated expectations.”
“Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry.”
But remember and I quote again:
“But it’s crucial to bear in mind that Theranos wasn’t a tech company in the traditional sense. It was first and foremost a health-care company. Its product wasn’t software but a medical device that analyzed people’s blood. As Holmes herself liked to point out in media interviews and public appearances at the height of her fame, doctors base 70 percent of their treatment decisions on lab results. They rely on lab equipment to work as advertised. Otherwise, patient health is jeopardized.”
Hype. Vaporware. Lying? Are we tolerating untruths because we so want to believe? Are we too susceptible to charismatic liars?
Questions we should ask ourselves before we invest in activities that are potentially harmful. Questions to be asked before we propel people to positions of outrageous power.
Excellent reporting and a highly recommended read!
Top reviews from other countries
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I was 2 years late actually to read this fascinating “business thriller”. I was awed by the initial success story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, touted as the next Steve Jobs. And from 2016 onwards the dirty details started coming out about Theranos and the whole saga of its Silicon Valley deception that featured the greatest stalwarts of the VC community, the Academia, the federal government, the Military, the R&D researchers. How Walmart and Safeway were taken for a ride. The greatest names in Law got involved.
John Carreyrou “Bad Blood” is fabulous. If you haven’t read it then please do. Dec 2021, the first sentence was out in the case, and much more is due. It’s a story of how greed is always not good and how charm, charisma and cunning can come together to fool some of the “best minds”. Its "fake-it-till-you-make-it" at its worst!. From Zero to Billions to Zero.
Bill Gates had recommended this in his yearly booklist in 2019. In his words – “ ‘Bad Blood’ tackles some serious ethical questions, but it is ultimately a thriller with a tragic ending. It’s a fun read full of bizarre details that will make you gasp out loud.”
Reviewed in India on February 3, 2022
I was 2 years late actually to read this fascinating “business thriller”. I was awed by the initial success story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, touted as the next Steve Jobs. And from 2016 onwards the dirty details started coming out about Theranos and the whole saga of its Silicon Valley deception that featured the greatest stalwarts of the VC community, the Academia, the federal government, the Military, the R&D researchers. How Walmart and Safeway were taken for a ride. The greatest names in Law got involved.
John Carreyrou “Bad Blood” is fabulous. If you haven’t read it then please do. Dec 2021, the first sentence was out in the case, and much more is due. It’s a story of how greed is always not good and how charm, charisma and cunning can come together to fool some of the “best minds”. Its "fake-it-till-you-make-it" at its worst!. From Zero to Billions to Zero.
Bill Gates had recommended this in his yearly booklist in 2019. In his words – “ ‘Bad Blood’ tackles some serious ethical questions, but it is ultimately a thriller with a tragic ending. It’s a fun read full of bizarre details that will make you gasp out loud.”







