The Theranos Saga and Bad Blood
I first heard about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos when the Wall Street Journal article came out in the beginning of its rise to fame. As a fellow needle-hater, Elizabeth was easy to empathize with. Her mission was my mission. Over the years, positive news about Theranos was popping up everywhere. When the pinprick testing at Walgreens started, I signed up. Giddily, I drove to a Walgreens at Palo Alto, only to have the most painful blood testing experience ever. The nurse had to squeeze my finger intensely to ooze out the blood. Not fun, not going through this again. The test results were all over the map. I discarded them and got another test done the old-fashioned way. Lucky for me.
A couple of years later, the Theranos booth at Stanford Computer Science Alumni was swarming with people and I applied only to get a rejection email soon after. Oh well. Lucky again.
When the WSJ exposé came out, I was in shock like everyone else. This couldn’t be. I’d put Elizabeth on a pedestal. For her to have duped everyone this way, who knows what else is a house of cards. I thought I knew the story. Then I read a glowing review of the Dropout 5-part podcast series and checked it out. It was an eye-opener. I devoured it in 2 days. It was structured and the story arc was compellingly laid out. On the opposite end, HBO’s The Inventor: Out for Blood documentary was intensely disappointing. It was all over the map, and compared Elizabeth to Einstein in the sense that everyone fakes it until they make it and then they’re a genius. That’s a charitable and naive viewpoint. I could not relate at all.
And then I got to reading the full story in Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, which the podcast is based on. It has been thoroughly researched and put together extremely well. More details than you want to know, I was blown away by many of the revelations. How Sonny kept bullying the employees and courted a bunch of yes-men who were trapped by their work visa and couldn’t afford to lose their jobs. How they put random words in presentations to Sonny to see if he would catch them. The tricks they came up with to get him off their back. The star, of course, is Elizabeth Holmes. Her upbringing, her ability to enchant pretty much anyone who came in contact, her Apple worship, her constant lies and bullying of every employee, hire and fire incidents. It’s hard to believe all this actually happened. The story of Ian Gibbons, the Chief Scientist, is heart-breaking. If not for bravado and courage of the primary whistleblowers, Tyler Schultz and Erika Cheung, the full story may never have come out.
The epitome of truth being stranger than fiction. Highly recommended.