Elizabeth Holmes drank too much of Steve Job's Kool Aid by her 1984 managerial style & her halo effect.
Shuttered that her vaporware company could have done more damage.

Fans of John Carreyrou's Bad Blood will definitely want to read Nick Bilton's follow up story in Vanity Fair (April 2019). If it is possible to see Elizabeth Holmes as even more troubled than Carreyrou presents, Bolton has done so in this compelling piece. The saga continues.

This is a crazy story. A classic example of truth being stranger than fiction. It is shocking what Elizabeth Holmes got away with. This is a high interest read with a good pace.

When you finish reading this book, you will be mad. Mad that a young woman (Elizabeth Holmes) who had a brilliant idea - simplify blood testing - could never make it work and continuously lied to investors and merchants who wanted to jump in. Mad that the woman was an absolute control freak who tried to steer the conversation in her direction. Mad that any employee would deign to try to improve the machine, or even take up independent projects not related to the business, was seen as disloyal. Mad that otherwise smart people were lied to, including Bill Clinton and Jim Cramer. And mad that a million blood tests had to be nullified because the machine gave incorrect readings, often false negatives to the ill, but even worse false positives to people who were perfectly healthy.

When the scam was finally exposed in a series of articles in the "Wall Street Journal" written by the author of the book in 2015, many well meaning people lost billions, not the least of whom was Rupert Murdoch, who just happened to own the newspaper that ran the stories. As the book went to print, the SEC had charged the company (now officially defunct), and Holmes was facing charges as an individual. A documentary has been done on HBO and a film version is in the works (as I write this). The lesson is a well worn one - if it's too good to be true, it usually is. If people had just done their due diligence, Holmes would have been exposed as a fraud almost from the get-go. This is a story of a terrible scam that stretched out for 15 years and endangered people's lives. It should be mandatory reading for any business or law ethics course.

The rise and fall of Theranos is a cautionary tale about how smart money can be dumb. Overlooking clear warning signs of a vapourware product, investors and roll-out partners deceived themselves in their desire to be part of the “next big thing” in Silicon Valley and health care. The book is based on many interviews with past employees and people who had dealings with its bizarre founder. It provides a fascinating chronological story from their perspective, which perhaps benefits from hindsight. What the book lacks is any analysis of the founder’s psychology (white collar sociopath?) or of why so many people were fooled into thinking the company’s technology was possible.

Do you ever wonder how corporate fraud starts, gets exposed, and in the aftermath how the all the players lives are affected? Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou offers such a glimpse into corporate fraud and all its ugliness.

Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, Carreyrou, exposes the wrong doings of Theranos, a medical blood-testing Silicon Valley startup company that had its beginnings in 2004 and came to an abrupt end in 2017. After receiving his first tip in February 2015, Carreyrou worked diligently to uncover the players, backgrounds, and legal intimidations that contributed to the conning of investors, employees, and patients as it related to Theranos and what their devices were and were not capable of providing in blood-testing devices. Theranos was fully exposed to the public on October 15, 2015, with the publication of Carreyrou’s first of many front page exposes in the Wall Street Journal.

This book takes the reader through a comprehensive journey starting with the idea and creation of Theranos by Elizabeth Holmes, a 19 year-old Stanford dropout. Holmes started with a great idea and tricked some of the most powerful investors in the US into investing in her company despite the blood-testing devices never accurately working. When she brings her lover, Sunny Balwani, on board as second in command, things go from bad to worse.

This book chronologically tells the entire story of Theranos from start to finish and how the company went from being worth $9 billion to $0. Carreyrou’s writing is factual and riveting. I enjoyed how by simply stating the facts and not analyzing the psyche of Holmes and Balwani, Carreyrou allows the reader to be amazed and dumbfounded on how the two top executives were able to keep this charade going for as a long as it did. I found this book to be a truly captivating read.

I had heard of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes at the time. I had thought the WSJ was picking on, and trying to take down Theranos. I had no idea there was fraud to this extent. And what a house of horrors to work in. Sunny Balwani sounds like a monster and Elizabeth Holmes a convincing conwoman. I am not sure if she was naïve about her product, or just doing an outright con. Great, but maddening reading.

NYT Notable Books of 2018

This book is about the tragedy of Theranos and the founder of Theranos - Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos was a company primarily founded on the idea developing technology to perform a wide range of blood tests from one drop of blood taken from a finger stick rather than the conventional blood draw venously. Eventually, the company also has ambitions to become a lab service company analyzing blood draws using its own and other commercially available instruments. Although the vision was very attractive and the founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was very attractive, it was not achievable by current technology or perhaps not ever. Therein lies the conflict. The company seems to have rooted out all employees that questioned whether the vision was attainable. The company also enlisted a board of directors that had no independent basis to assess the company's technology, products, and services. This made for disastrous outcome for customers, investors, and employees. Even those employees that quit, such as Tyler Schultz, was hounded by the aggressive legal tactics of David Boies to the tune of at least $400,000. The last part of the book is the story of the story which goes to illustrate the aggressive legal tactics of Theranos and its lawyers. After one reads the book, it is worthwhile to view the various presentations given by Elizabeth Holmes available on UTube. In hindsight it is amazing the mendacity of the CEO. Without the book, it is easy to see how non-experts in the field could be taken in by the vision, the confidence, and presentation by Elizabeth Holmes. I predict that at some point in the future, we will be seeing Elizabeth Holmes again. I wish that the author would have spent some more time on the technical barriers that make this vision not practical.

Amazon.com Customer reviews
4.8 out of 5 stars 1,402 reviews
5 stars “Impossibly too good to be true.”
How did a 20 something dropout woman manage to bs her way for a decade (!), impressing not only Secretaries of State and Defense - George Shultz, Kissinger, one of the countries top lawyers Boies and a distinguished professor of chemistry at Stanford for 10 full years!
Elizabeth Holmes and her crooked boyfriend never answered the technical questions and fired anyone who disagreed with their dishonesty - how in the world did it take so long to get out?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 stars “Fascinating, horrifying, richly detailed account of corporate ambition gone awry.”
Couldn’t put this book down. A horrifying true story of a driven entrepreneur whose only overriding goal was to become insanely rich. And she would do anything, any unimaginable thing, to get there.

Elizabeth Holmes leveraged her family's high profile connections to draw in early investors and supporters, who weren’t very inquisitive on details, nor skeptical in nature. Drawing on the good name and reputation of these early supporters, she was able to build an impressive roster of other supporters with stellar reputations in tech and venture capital circles. Then it was just a matter of stage managing the house of cards she was building.

Her product demonstrations were outright theater, staged managed illusions worthy of David Copperfield. Theranos employees in on the ruse were assured it was just temporary, until the actual product could be perfected and the results repeatable. That day would never come. Their suspicions, proven to be correct, was that it was too good to be true.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 stars “Would give this 10 stars"
This is a real life thriller, the story of someone who is a true diabolical movie villain. Holmes is portrayed vividly as a paranoid sociopath who could also be disarming, charmingly manipulative, utterly ruthless and devoid of conscience. This is a tale of corporate greed and lack of regulatory oversight gone all awry.

Without a trace of guilt or regret, she induced powerful tech workers to leave lucrative careers at other major tech firms, giving up millions in stock options, to come work for Theranos, knowing the whole thing would collapse one day. When skeptical board members asked to see data affirming the effectiveness of their product, Holmes would defer, saying those papers were in perpetual legal review. Some employees, when they were no longer useful to her, or deemed disloyal, were immediately and unceremoniously marched out.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 stars “A company so corrupt it bordered on evil.”
Remember the John Grisham book "the Firm"? Exciting and suspenseful stuff, right? But couldn't really happen, could it? Well here's the real thing: Theranos. A company so corrupt it bordered on evil. Hundreds of well-meaning employees kept in check by
1. a steady diet of a charismatic leader's lies and propaganda
2. tremendous restrictions on communication within the firm
3. threats that employees would be bankrupted personally by vicious lawyers if they ever stepped out of line.
A gripping and cautionary tale about the danger of the mix of charisma and lies. I couldn't put it down.