Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

There were times when I had to step away from this book because I got so angry at how terribly employees and patients were treated. It's truly frightening that this could happen.

A wild fake-it-until-you-make-it scan ride. It's scary to learn what charisma can achieve in the startup. Fantastic investigative journalism in book form by the reporter who exposed Theranos in the first place.

This book is an extremely thoroughly sourced and researched exposé on the entire unholy cluster that was Theranos. While it goes into the things you would expect of such a book - the way Theranos mistreated and terrorized its employees, the lack of standards in Theranos labs, the irresponsibility on the part of everyone involved in allowing Theranos to conduct testing on real people and give them totally fake and misleading test results, the constant goalpost moving and number-inflating on the part of Elizabeth Holmes and her co-conspirators... what really struck me about this was just how hard Holmes and her lawyers worked to keep the story from getting out. Spending millions on legal protection, threatening people's careers and families, attempting to smear Carreyrou... every action made was a poor one driven entirely by self-serving interest not in the company or its product but in the reputation of Elizabeth Holmes. Every single thing about this was in service to her and her ego. It's astonishing.

Equally astonishing is just how much trust and money people are willing to put in when they are approached by a young, attractive, wealthy, white woman with a dream. Theranos fleeced very powerful, very wealthy people, even after clear concerns were being raised about the business, its products, and its methods. And even yet people chose Holmes over reason. Repeatedly. It's really something else.

This book felt like an oversized editorial on Los Angeles Times. The story itself is very interesting, it's a good thriller and definitely a page-turner, but instead of focusing on the tons of people Theranos hired and fired, I think the author should have focused on Elizabeth and Sunny, building their characters more and also a few key employees at Theranos. I would also split the book into 2 story lines: one of Theranos and Elizabeth (her biography, deals and trials and investigations at Theranos) and the second about people working at Theranos and how it all happened from the inside.
I'm giving 3 stars for the writing, 5 for the story and 5 for John Carreyrou's professionalism and the courage of his sources and the first Theranos whistleblowers.

What a wild ride. This excellent piece of investigative journalism reads like a spy thriller.

In this era where corporate greed and hubris run roughshod over real people's lives, it's immensely satisfying to read a story where this behavior results in harsh punishment and complete humiliation. It's refreshing to see disregard for patient safety in favor of profits be treated with the harshness deserved when human lives are at risk. As a bonus it's nice to see horrible people like Kissinger and Mattis tainted by their association with this fraud.

I might have to subscribe to the WSJ to read their coverage of the upcoming criminal case against Holmes and Theranos.

While the subject matter is a complex combination of chemistry, engineering, and business practices, it's written accessibly enough for a history major with no scientific or business training to understand and appreciate. But I can imagine a reader with any background in those subjects would find the book even more gripping than I did.

A chilling nonfiction read I was unable to put down.

Absolutely riveting, and a great example of what journalism is supposed to be. I've been aware of the Theranos saga over the last couple years so I was interested to get the full scoop in long form, but wow. It was hard to put down. As in I didn't. Highly recommended if you're interested in Silicon Valley drama, human nature and how not to run a startup. Also recommended for those who enjoy train wrecks.

One takeaway I want people to pay attention to is how risky it is to rely on the knowledge of someone else when it comes to technical/scientific processes or devices. It's crazy that with all the red flags about feasibility it took so long for people to catch on to the fact this device could not possibly do what she claimed it could do. On the other hand, I work with small businesses in a technical space and I see the same semi-blind trust that can lead to wasted funds or worse. If you're investing in a business or even just paying someone to do your website, please do enough research to understand rudimentary principles. It's really hard to make good decisions if you don't understand at least some of the technical process behind things. I also believe a competent vendor should be able to explain their product or service in layman's terms. If they can't, or they refuse, it's a red flag.

This is also a rather extreme example of the importance of the business rule: “under-promise and over-deliver.” And, you know, honesty. Also that.

Fascinating book. My one complaint is that I find it baffling that the book implies if not outright states multiple times that Holmes got away with it for so long because she is a woman, and people wanted a “female steve jobs” which seems hard to buy (source: I've been a woman for 23 years and counting). Also I kept waiting for the book to say more about corporate culture but there was maybe one line about “startup culture”. I don't think Holmes is much different from her idols, or rather I think the main difference is that she was a scammer that put peoples lives in line, of course - But her treatment of employees (which arguably resulted in the death of one), her obsession with success I find it hard to believe that is unique to her.

Henry Kissinger writes a birthday limerick, a megalomaniac plays at 4-dimensional patent application, and they're not even the principal criminals detailed in Carreyrou's investigation into Theranos' amazing scam.

Obviously the major takeaway from this book is the vaporware applied to medicine is a chilling novelty of Silicon Valley's questionable moral culture, but I wonder if the most stunning revelation of Carreyrou's research is how Palo Alto seems to nurture world-class psychopathy as a business virtue. Nearly every major player selected in this story is an elite, privileged douchebag. No doubt Elizabeth Holmes is a marquee villain, but so much of this story is about the rank and file weakness of character in pursuit of glory that animates Silicon Valley.

It is absolutely staggering how far you can get in life if you're a cute blonde girl with no shame and the ability to remind powerful men of their daughters. The Theranos technology literally never worked, but that didn't stop Walgreens from putting it in their stores or people like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis from supporting Elizabeth Holmes (including one board member believing her word over his own grandson who worked in the lab, which is just heartbreaking to me). This is a fascinating story, particularly the last third or so, which is all about how hard Theranos fought to keep the author from writing his first article exposing the fraud.

(Also, someone who practices civil law will have to tell me if David Boies's actions in this whole thing are considered ethical - taking shares in a company and a seat on the board as payment certainly seems sketchy to me, but it's certainly not my area.)

I have a lot of respect for John Carreyrou's work and tenacity in bringing Elizabeth Holmes' fraud to light. The story is a fascinating one, and the book is definitley worth reading, however I feel like it could have been summed up more concisely, perhaps in reading Carreyrou's original Wall Street Journal pieces.

It just became really depressing to read all of the ins and outs Theranos structure, the rate of firings, the many different ways the supposedly ground breaking technology didn't work, the lengths they went to hire lawyers and private investigators to prevent whistle blowers. After awhile I found myself skimming since it was years and years of repeated heinous corporate practices. There's no real satisfaction in learning why Holmes and her partner Balwani acted like such megalomaniacs, similar to how detectives interviewing sociopaths must feel frustrated when asking “Why did you commit this crime,” often there's just no answer to be found.

This is a very well written book. The narrative is perfect. You don't feel that what you're reading is a third-person account of the events described. Its pretty much like a page turner novel.
Kudos to the investigative journalism. I've definitely become a fan of the author now.

Fascinating read. I am still trying to wrap my mind around how Elizabeth Holmes was able to con so many people. The book goes through the story step by step which did make it feel like it was plodding along at times. Well researched and interesting, though.

So so so good. It's a page turner. Solid writing and insanely gripping story.

Fantastic. A real page turner. As good as the classic Barbarians at the Gate

Holy smokes. Explosive story, every page was a new revelation and a scandal of its own. Could hardly put it down.

The Theranos story is so fascinating. Carreyrou paces the book evenly, slowly building his case. I borrowed this from a clinical chemist who plays (per him) a bit role in the story, appearing in a couple sentences within the book. When I returned his copy, the two of us sat in his office just marveling at how things progressed so far. Within my own little clinical chemistry domain, CLIA looms like a Greek god – all-powerful and all-knowing. Should we accidentally make a typo in our data, CLIA will send bolts of lightning to destroy us. The idea that a lab somehow became CLIA-certified with such significant variance in their data even before the straight-out fraud is almost unbelievable.

In addition, this seems like any doctor in their right mind would know what to make of Theranos. My best friend who works with silicon valley startups asked me about it several years ago, when I was still in residency, and I told her that the problem with capillary draws was hemolysis (blood cells splitting) and that you could never get some accurate results do that - and that's baked in to the blood draw, before you even get to the machinery. Any doctor worth their salt knows this.

So this is an almost fantastical story about how someone by force of personality alone paraded out technology that everyone knew was impossible, and somehow, without ever really inventing anything became a billionaire running laboratory testing in clinical labs on patients. It's pretty serious and scary stuff.

While reading it, I couldn't help but be amazed by the number of smart, well-educated people who were at least temporarily a party to this, often bullied by fancy lawyers and nondisclosure agreements. I think there's a lot here about how much the assumptions of civil society are really what keep us in check more so than institutions like CLIA or CAP. Once someone starts operating in bad faith, it's pretty scary how far they can get. On the other hand, Theranos was pretty much brought down by Carreyrou assisted by a pair of early-twenty-somethings who felt they had to speak out. So I think there's also a lot here about the importance of protecting whistle-blowers and the media.

Rating: 8.6/10

Going into this book, I had a rough outline of the Theranos story. Billion-dollar Silicon Valley startup Theranos and its charismatic founder Elizabeth Holmes were embroiled in controversy over whether their groundbreaking blood testing technology actually worked. I knew Theranos had been publicly embarassed by John Carreyrou after his brutal expose in the Wall Street Journal. What really hit home after reading this book was the extent of Theranos's deceit. For more than a decade, Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend/COO Sunny Balwani were deceiving regulators, investors, and eventually patients themselves.
I really enjoyed the amount of detail Carreyrou has documented here, like specific employees's conversations with Holmes. It was a bit hard to keep track of all the names of employees or confidential sources and the like, but that's been the case for the last few nonfiction books I've read. I listened to this book in audiobook form and really enjoyed the medium. Normally, I would've spent maybe a week or two reading this but in audio form, I was able to devour it in two or three days. Overall, I loved the book and was incredibly engrossed in the drama of a unicorn company collapsing into controversy and ultimately, irrelevancy.