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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2018
This book is a mixture of jaw dropping hubris, charisma run amok, and the gullibility of those who should know better.
For those unfamiliar with this story, the short version is: Elizabeth Holmes, 19 years' old, drops out of Stanford to form a company and then raises hundreds of millions of dollars based on her vision of how a single drop of blood tied to proprietary technology could revolutionize medical diagnostics. The original vision became an almost beside the point issue to keeping everyone, including her board members and employees, in the dark about failure - and failure it was.
The long story, this book, explains how the company, Theranos, valued at something like $9B at it's height in 2012 and 2013, went to zero because the technology Elizabeth was selling to investors didn't actually exist. Frightening in its scope, Elizabeth Holmes presented herself as a brilliant inventor, scientist and entrepreneur, a photogenic genius out to make people's lives better.
The private Elizabeth, paranoid and secretive, created a bizarre work environment where highly educated, qualified professionals were fired for attempting to explain something she needed to know but didn't want to hear, or to express any opinion counter to her own. She then threatened them, sending many into debt defending lawsuits made from whole cloth. Installing her boyfriend as overseer, neither of them having any scientific qualifications or training, neither had real interest in building a team to work towards a shared vision. Hundreds of millions of investor money were swallowed up with no resulting innovation. At first, they obscured, then they lied and kept right on lying.
Although investors always risk disappointment, it's doubtful many expected a company with hundreds of millions of dollars to work with accomplishing nothing at all. Unlike Bernie Madoff, who kept his scam close to the chest, Theranos hired specialists, at one time as many as 800 employees, and then refused to let them work together.
John Carreyrou, relentless in his pursuit of this story, stood up to the constant threats and produced brilliant research and what should be a cautionary tale for future board members, employees and investors, encouraging them to do some rudimentary investigation before taking the "Well, he drank the kool-aid, so it must be good," attitude, but they probably won't.
For those unfamiliar with this story, the short version is: Elizabeth Holmes, 19 years' old, drops out of Stanford to form a company and then raises hundreds of millions of dollars based on her vision of how a single drop of blood tied to proprietary technology could revolutionize medical diagnostics. The original vision became an almost beside the point issue to keeping everyone, including her board members and employees, in the dark about failure - and failure it was.
The long story, this book, explains how the company, Theranos, valued at something like $9B at it's height in 2012 and 2013, went to zero because the technology Elizabeth was selling to investors didn't actually exist. Frightening in its scope, Elizabeth Holmes presented herself as a brilliant inventor, scientist and entrepreneur, a photogenic genius out to make people's lives better.
The private Elizabeth, paranoid and secretive, created a bizarre work environment where highly educated, qualified professionals were fired for attempting to explain something she needed to know but didn't want to hear, or to express any opinion counter to her own. She then threatened them, sending many into debt defending lawsuits made from whole cloth. Installing her boyfriend as overseer, neither of them having any scientific qualifications or training, neither had real interest in building a team to work towards a shared vision. Hundreds of millions of investor money were swallowed up with no resulting innovation. At first, they obscured, then they lied and kept right on lying.
Although investors always risk disappointment, it's doubtful many expected a company with hundreds of millions of dollars to work with accomplishing nothing at all. Unlike Bernie Madoff, who kept his scam close to the chest, Theranos hired specialists, at one time as many as 800 employees, and then refused to let them work together.
John Carreyrou, relentless in his pursuit of this story, stood up to the constant threats and produced brilliant research and what should be a cautionary tale for future board members, employees and investors, encouraging them to do some rudimentary investigation before taking the "Well, he drank the kool-aid, so it must be good," attitude, but they probably won't.
