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.

Part of the problem was that Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product.

Inability to distinguish between prototype and real product !

Sunny called the cops. Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser quietly pulled up to the building with its lights off. A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.”

Wow, crazy

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.”

French idea - 2 people In relationship sharing same idea.

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

:) choose your role models wisely !

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.

So true and relevant.