Author:: John Carreyrou
Full Title:: Bad Blood
Tags:#media/book
- themes::
- theme 1
- Summary::
- summary 1
* highlights from 2021-02-08
* evangelizing was what successful startup founders did in Silicon Valley. You didn’t change the world by being cynical. ([Location 122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=122))
* 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. ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=131))
* The chemistry work was handled by a separate group made up of biochemists. The collaboration between that group and Ed’s group was far from optimal. Both reported up to Elizabeth but weren’t encouraged to communicate with each other. Elizabeth liked to keep information compartmentalized so that only she had the full picture of the system’s development. ([Location 353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=353))
* Ellison might be one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of some $25 billion, but he wasn’t necessarily the ideal role model. In Oracle’s early years, he had famously exaggerated his database software’s capabilities and shipped versions of it crawling with bugs. That’s not something you could do with a medical device. ([Location 385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=385))
* Elizabeth would present increasingly rosy revenue projections based on the deals she said Theranos was negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, but the revenues wouldn’t materialize. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=591))
* “When you strike at the king, you must kill him.” Todd Surdey and Michael Esquivel had struck at the king, or rather the queen. But she’d survived. ([Location 848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=848))
* Sunny always blamed the wireless connection, ([Location 1184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1184))
* Sunny didn’t know or understand any of this because he had no background in medicine, much less laboratory science. Nor did he have the patience to listen to the scientists’ explanations. It was easier to just blame the cellular connection. ([Location 1197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1197))
* “I won’t accept this!” he shouted. Seth shouted back, deadpan, “I have news for you, sir: in 1863, President Lincoln freed the slaves.” ([Location 1269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1269))
* Those were supposed to be for research purposes only and to have no bearing on the way patients were treated. But encouraging someone to rely on a Theranos blood test to make an important medical decision was something else altogether. ([Location 1293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1293))
* “We can’t not pursue this,” he said. “We can’t risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.” ([Location 1450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1450))
* Theranos had cleverly played on this insecurity. As a result, Walgreens suffered from a severe case of FoMO—the fear of missing out. ([Location 1454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1454))
* Laboratories all over the world had been using these instruments for decades. In other words, Theranos wasn’t pioneering any new ways to test blood. Rather, the miniLab’s value would lie in the miniaturization of existing lab technology. While that might not amount to groundbreaking science, it made sense in the context of Elizabeth’s vision of taking blood testing out of central laboratories and bringing it to drugstores, supermarkets, and, eventually, people’s homes. ([Location 1556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1556))
* Emphasizing the system’s size first and how it worked later was putting the cart before the horse. But Elizabeth wouldn’t budge. ([Location 1568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1568))
* NEPOTISM AT THERANOS took on a new dimension in the spring of 2011 when Elizabeth hired her younger brother, Christian, as associate director of product management. Christian Holmes was two years out of college and had no clear qualifications to work at a blood diagnostics company, but that mattered little to Elizabeth. What mattered far more was that her brother was someone she could trust. ([Location 1588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1588))
* The Frat Pack endeared itself to Sunny and Elizabeth by working long days. Sunny was constantly questioning employees’ commitment to the company—the number of hours a person put in at the office, whether he or she was doing productive work or not, was his ultimate gauge of that commitment. At times, he would sit in the big glass conference room and stare out at the rows of cubicles trying to identify who was slacking off. ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1606))
* Elizabeth seemed to have this exaggerated image of him as an all-seeing and all-knowing being. A month or two after Jobs’s death, some of Greg’s colleagues in the engineering department began to notice that Elizabeth was borrowing behaviors and management techniques described in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple founder. They were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’s career she was impersonating. ([Location 1626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1626))
* GREG’S HONEYMOON PERIOD at Theranos ended when his sister applied for a job at the company. After interviewing with both Elizabeth and Sunny in April 2011, she received an offer to join the product management team the following month but decided to turn it down and stay with her employer, the accounting firm PwC. The next day, a Saturday, Greg was at the office working. Elizabeth was there too but wouldn’t acknowledge his presence, which he found odd since she usually made a point to, especially on weekends. The following week, Greg stopped being invited to her brainstorming sessions with Kent. It dawned on him that she’d taken his sister’s decision personally and that he was now paying the price for it. ([Location 1633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1633))
* Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product. The miniLab Greg was helping build was a prototype, nothing more. It needed to be tested thoroughly and fine-tuned, which would require time. A lot of time. Most companies went through three cycles of prototyping before they went to market with a product. But Sunny was already placing orders for components to build one hundred miniLabs, based on a first, untested prototype. It was as if Boeing built one plane and, without doing a single flight test, told airline passengers, “Hop aboard.” ([Location 1684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1684))
* Sunny called the cops. Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser quietly pulled up to the building with its lights off. A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.” ([Location 1740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1740))
* His arrogance was infuriating. And yet Safeway was still hesitant to walk away from the partnership. What if the Theranos technology did turn out to be game-changing? It might spend the next decade regretting passing up on it. The fear of missing out was a powerful deterrent. ([Location 1902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=1902))
* “It’s a folie à deux,” he said. Tony didn’t know any French, so he left to go look up the expression in the dictionary. The definition he found struck him as apt: “The presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another.” ([Location 2290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=2290))
* Rochelle was overwhelmed with grief but she found the strength to call Elizabeth’s office and left a message with her assistant informing her about Ian’s passing. Elizabeth didn’t call back. Instead, later that day, Rochelle received an email from a Theranos lawyer requesting that she immediately return Ian’s company laptop and cell phone and any other confidential information he might have retained. ([Location 2359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=2359))
* When she inquired about the basis for the claim about Theranos’s superior accuracy, Kate learned that it was extrapolated from a study that had concluded that 93 percent of lab mistakes were due to human error. Theranos argued that, since its testing process was fully automated inside its device, that was grounds enough to say that it was more accurate than other labs. ([Location 2461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=2461))
* With time, some employees grew less afraid of him and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span. ([Location 2598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=2598))
* Since the miniLab was in no state to be deployed, Elizabeth and Sunny decided to dust off the Edison and launch with the older device. That, in turn, led to another fateful decision—the decision to cheat. ([Location 2654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=2654))
* The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. Copies of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s famous novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy who finds his destiny by going on a journey to Egypt, had been placed on every chair. Still visibly angry, Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Sunny put it more bluntly: anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.” ([Location 2739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=2739))
* In the case of the syphilis test, it was so wide that more samples had been deemed equivocal than the Edisons had correctly identified as positive. ([Location 3040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=3040))
* 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,” the retired general gushed. ([Location 3259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=3259))
* was true that Elizabeth’s uncle, Ron Dietz, had died eighteen months earlier from skin cancer that had metastasized and spread to his brain. But what she omitted to disclose was that she had never been close to him. To family members who knew the reality of their relationship, using his death to promote her company felt phony and exploitative. Of course, no one in the audience at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts knew this. Most of the one thousand spectators in attendance found her performance mesmerizing. ([Location 3303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=3303))
* It was all beginning to make sense: Holmes and her company had overpromised and then cut corners when they couldn’t deliver. It was one thing to do that with software or a smartphone app, but doing it with a medical product that people relied on to make important health decisions was unconscionable. ([Location 3600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=3600))
* Calling the Journal a “tabloid,” she vowed to take the fight to the paper. ([Location 4327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=4327))
* What we hadn’t fully anticipated was her willingness to tell bald-face lies in a public forum. Not just once, but again and again during the half-hour interview. In addition to continuing to insist that the nanotainer withdrawal had been voluntary, she said the Edison devices referred to in my stories were an old technology that Theranos hadn’t used in years. She also denied that the company had ever used commercial lab equipment for finger-stick tests. And she claimed that the way Theranos conducted proficiency testing was not only perfectly legal, it had the express blessing of regulators. ([Location 4347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=4347))
* Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief. ([Location 4565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=4565))
* 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. ([Location 4650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=4650))
* Employees who worked at the office complex in Newark were discouraged from using the gym there because it might lead them to mingle with workers from other companies that leased space at the site. ([Location 4660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=4660))
* 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 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. ([Location 4669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078VW3VM7&location=4669))