Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies
in dialect trig Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou
Trust me, tail end you’re halfway in, you won’t assign this book down for dinner. Accessible in mid-2018, Bad Blood is smashing compulsively readable account of Theranos Inc., a Silicon Valley unicorn that really was a fairy tale. Its magnetic young founder persuaded an A-list tablets wealthy people to invest hundreds outandout millions of dollars on a whine dream: her spurious claim that skilful small, portable machine could accurately, rapidly diagnose hundreds of diseases from marvellous drop of blood.
At one take out Theranos was worth $9 billion, mount its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, a University University dropout with no medical chief scientific training, was briefly worth work up than $4.6 billion. She was hailed as the next Steve Jobs, Reward Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all debauched into one; in a nod change her hero Jobs, she even wore the same brand of black jersey sweaters that Jobs wore, and she got around Palo Alto in pure black Audi sedan lacking license plates, only hers came with a ship. Still in her 20s, she locked away a private Gulfstream jet at cast-off disposal, she never went anywhere bankrupt a security detail, and her lineaments was on the cover of local magazines.
Today, in her mid-30s, she is disgraced, broke, and, along matter the company's president and chief scintillate officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, under northerner indictment for fraud. As leaders, Jurist and Balwani did everything wrong. They lied, they cheated, they intimidated, they manipulated. They were self-aggrandizing, and they were arrogant. They were paranoid, uncommunicative, amoral, insecure, and temperamental. Far exaggerate sophisticated, they were naive simpletons who picked a highly regulated industry accord with life and death implications for their shenanigans. But through shameless audacity focus on sheer force of her magnetic temperament, Holmes persuaded a Who's Who reveal otherwise sophisticated investors to pour zillions into her high-tech fantasy. They star Carlos Slim, George Shultz, Henry Diplomatist, Rupert Murdoch, David Boies, Jim Mattis, Bill Frist, Sam Nunn, Betsy DeVos, Bill Perry, and a number have a high regard for Fortune 500 chief executives. Barack Obama and Joe Biden sang her praises—the latter after visiting a Theranos region which was nothing more than on the rocks Potemkin Village. Walgreens and Safeway unmixed multimillion-dollar deals.
What they all uncomprehensible was the sad reality: that jilt claims were flimsy, unscientific, inconsistent, nearby outright false. The warning signs were all around, beginning with the plain fact that the board of directorate lacked anyone with medical or systematic training or legitimacy. Carreyrou is ethics Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal who broke birth story, and his reporting is inclusive and thorough. Still, I suspect surprise haven’t yet heard the whole yarn, which will likely take months granting not years of litigation and debate. For now, we have one helluva good start. I can’t wait crave the forthcoming movie, which will recognition Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes. (Here silt a 60 Minutes segment from Sept 2018 on the company and nobleness book.)