Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Compulsively readable. You know water cooler gossip that's super juicy and trashy? This was like that. About a water cooler I knew nothing about: Theranos and their hyped-up vaporware of magical one-drop blood tests. Others have noted that it's amazing everything got as far as it did.

Briefly: young, blonde, blue-eyed Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford in her second year to pursue an idea to make blood testing cheap, scalable, and democratized. A blood test in every home! The vision of tech “disruption”, she founded a company, got a bunch of illustrious elites on her board (James Mattis! Henry Kissinger!), enlisted her much-older, bullying and brutish boyfriend, Sunny, to be her second in command, and generally kept making giant promises that never materialized. At its best, it seems that Theranos - instead of inventing a new way to test blood using only a single drop from a finger prick - just gerrymandered other companies's machines and engaged in super complicated sleight of hand (fake error screens, fake results).

I was reminded, oddly, a LOT about Kim Philby, the British Cold War double-agent. Philby managed a 30-year-long con of his British colleagues, all the while feeding information to the Soviets. Holmes did something similar (on a much shorter, but not that much shorter (!), timescale - 10ish years?). Many powerful, supposedly intelligent Wise Elders (old white men) fell into her thrall. And I think, like Philby's case, it speaks to the power of our innate ape social hierarchies: if you LOOK the part, you can get very, very far. And once you get sucked into the scam, it's easier (psychologically) to double down rather than admit error.

Anyway, a lot of fun. Reads like a soap opera. SO MUCH DRAMA.