Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou

“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.

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t and Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work,

“I have news for you, sir: in 1863, President Lincoln freed the slaves.”

“IT are like lawyers, avoid them as long as possible.” That kind of approach sounded to Hunter like a recipe for problems.

“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.”

Theranos had cleverly played on this insecurity. As a result, Walgreens suffered from a

severe case of FoMO—the fear of missing out.

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.

but at least things were now clear: the ball was in Theranos’s court.

Boies charged clients nearly a thousand dollars an hour and was reputed to earn more than $10 million a year.

Fuisz presumed that Gibbons was a legitimate scientist and that, like most scientists, he was an honest person.

Ian nodded. “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.”

Or at least that was the idea. But in this instance, things didn’t go quite as planned.

There was also Spotify, the music streaming service that in November 2013 raised $250 million at a price per share that valued the whole company at $4 billion.

I am sorry if this email sounds attacking in any way, I do not intend it to be, I just feel a responsibility to you to tell you what I see so we can work towards solutions. I am

invested in this company’s long-term vision, and am worried that some of our current practices will prevent us from reaching our bigger goals.

One of them was from Michael Jordan: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Another was from Theodore Roosevelt: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

“The way Theranos is operating is like trying to build a bus while you’re driving the bus. Someone is going to get killed.”

Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.