Bad Blood Quotes

“When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“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.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“The way Theranos is operating is like trying to build a bus while you’re driving the bus. Someone is going to get killed.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“It was as if Boeing built one plane and, without doing a single flight test, told airline passengers, “Hop aboard.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“In one of their last email exchanges, he recommended two management self help books to her, 'The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't' and 'Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work', and included their links on Amazon.com. He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part: 'good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“No, Dad, I’m not interested in getting a Ph.D., I want to make money.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Would you rather be smart and poor or dumb and rich? The three engineers all chose smart and poor, while the Frat Pack voted unanimously for dumb and rich. Greg was struck by how clearly the line was drawn between the two groups. They were all in their mid- to late twenties with good educations, but they valued different things.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Well, there was a reason it always seemed to work, Shaunak said. The image on the computer screen showing the blood flowing through the cartridge and settling into the little wells was real. But you never knew whether you were going to get a result or not. So they’d recorded a result from one of the times it worked. It was that recorded result that was displayed at the end of each demo.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“It’s not a huge deal,” he said. “Just don’t go anywhere you’re not supposed to be and remember to smile and wave to the man in the bushes outside your house when you leave for work.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“We turned to my questions about the Edison. How many blood tests did Theranos perform on the device? That too was a trade secret, they said. I felt like I was watching a live performance of the Theater of the Absurd.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“One evening, as they wrapped up a meeting in her office shortly after he joined the company, she lapsed into a more natural-sounding young woman’s voice. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she told him as she got up from her chair, her pitch several octaves higher than usual. In”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“While Elizabeth was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Sunny was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Arnav flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Sunny might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“It just feels like you want us to give you the formula for Coke in order to convince you that it doesn’t contain arsenic,” King said.

“Nobody’s asked for the formula for Coke!” Jay replied, annoyed.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“And Elizabeth was so persuasive. She had this intense way of looking at you while she spoke that made you believe in her and want to follow her.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“FoMO—the fear of missing out.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Elizabeth incorporated the company as Real-Time Cures, which an unfortunate typo turned into “Real-Time Curses” on early employees’ paychecks. She later changed the name to Theranos, a combination of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Since the miniLab was in no state to be deployed, Elizabeth and Sunny decided to dust off the Edison and launch with the older device. That, in turn, led to another fateful decision—the decision to cheat.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“the company was just a vehicle for Elizabeth and Sunny’s romance and that none of the work they did really mattered. 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.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“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.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“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.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“After some discussion, the four men {the board] reached a consensus: they would remove Elizabeth as CEO. She had proven herself too young and inexperienced for the job. Tom Brodeen would step in to lead the company for a temporary period until a more permanent replacement could be found. They called in Elizabeth to confront her with what they had learned and inform her of their decision.
But then something extraordinary happened.
Over the course of the next two hours, Elizabeth convinced them to change their minds.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Sunny and Elizabeth’s boldest claim was that the Theranos system was capable of running seventy different blood tests simultaneously on a single finger-stick sample and that it would soon be able to run even more. The ability to perform so many tests on just a drop or two of blood was something of a Holy Grail in the field of microfluidics. Thousands of researchers around the world in universities and industry had been pursuing this goal for more than two decades”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“Toward the end she boasted, “I’m not afraid of anything,” adding after a brief pause, “except needles.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup