Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou

The chemistry work was handled by a separate group made up of biochemists. The collaboration between that group and Ed’s group was far from optimal. Both reported up to Elizabeth but weren’t encouraged to communicate with each other. Elizabeth liked to keep information compartmentalized so that only she had the full picture of the system’s development.

Ellison might be one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of some $25 billion, but he wasn’t necessarily the ideal role model. In Oracle’s early years, he had famously exaggerated his database software’s capabilities and shipped versions of it crawling with bugs. That’s not something you could do with a medical device.

Hewett’s conviction when he’d arrived at Theranos was that microfluidics didn’t work in blood diagnostics because the volumes were too small to allow for accurate measurements.

he’d worked as an analyst at a Washington, D.C., firm that advised corporations about best practices.

That should be on a resume- I advise corporations about best practices

Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed.

It was all beginning to make sense: Holmes and her company had overpromised and then cut corners when they couldn’t deliver. It was one thing to do that with software or a smartphone app, but doing it with a medical product that people relied on to make important health decisions was unconscionable.

Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry.