Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

I had never been as engrossed in a non-fiction book as I was with this one; there were so many jaw-dropping passages within the book.

This is the story of Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes, who was heralded as the next (female) Steve Jobs / Bill Gates for ‘revolutionising' the blood-testing industry by inventing (or attempting to invent) a device that could run “hundreds of tests” with a small pin-prick of blood. Despite the regulations governing the industry, and the usual demand for peer-reviewed studies and scientific data, Elizabeth Holmes, with the help of her partner-boyfriend, the much older Sunny Balwani, managed to dupe CEOs (including of Safeway and Walgreens), investors (Rupert Murdoch among them), the government (high-ranking military officers included), politicians (she rubbed shoulders with the Clintons and even attended Obama's events), and highly respected older individuals (former Secretary of State George Schultz comes prominently to mind), for a dozen years on the viability of her (non-viable) products through a combination of charm and charisma (Elizabeth's), legal bullying (mostly of staff who were made to comply with harsh confidentiality clauses), inspection blind-siding (inspectors were only allowed into certain sections of the laboratories), and (eventually) damaging shortcuts (the labs did not follow proper procedures, and patient results were often inaccurate).

It's also a telling tale of how easily we can be duped by the media (Forbes and Fortune helped catapulted her image, because the editors themselves fell into her “reality-distortion-field”) and by the endorsement of people who are generally held in high esteem by the society we live in (George Schultz, for example, believed in her until right up to the end, even estranging his own grandson in his beliefs).

Elizabeth Holmes remains a fascinating character. It's tempting to believe she started out with truly noble intentions, but then got snared herself in her own hype and ambition (she saw herself as the next Wunderkind and, growing up upper middle class, wanted to be rich), and that of her product's potential (how does that quote go? if you repeat a lie over and over, people will believe you?). I'm pretty sure Silicon Valley hasn't seen the last of her, and the world certainly hasn't seen the last of people like her, who weave such a compelling smoke-screen around themselves, that very few people are able to see through the tales. We are human, and we all want to believe the Wizard of Oz is real.

The story itself is well-laid out, taking us step by step on Theranos's incredible journey from being just another start-up to what was considered the darling of the tech world (at its highest point, Theranos's stock was valued at US$10 billion). There's plenty of end-notes, for the diligent reader who likes to follow the trail of breadcrumbs, but this also means the main narrative doesn't get bogged down with too much facts and technical details.