BAD BLOOD

 

BAD BLOOD

(Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)

Authour : John Carreyrou

Publisher : (1^st  in USA) Alfred A.Knopf  (2^nd  in UK) Picador; Pages : 339

 

Excerpts :

( ) The one thing Mosley wasn’t sure he completely understood was how the Theranos technology worked. When prospective investors came by, he took them to see Shaunak Roy. Theranos’s cofounder Shaunak had a Ph.D in chemical engineering and had worked together with Elizabeth in Robertson’s research lab in Stanford.

Shaunak would prick his finger and would transfer the few drops of blood to a white plastic cartridge the size of a credit card. The cartridge would slot into a rectangular box, called a reader, the size of a toaster. It extracted a data signal from the cartridge and beamed it wirelessly to a server that analysed the data and beamed back a result. That was the gist of it.

( ) Mosley’s unease with all these claims had grown since that morning’s discovery. For one thing in his eight months at Theranos, he’d never laid eyes on the pharmaceutical contracts. Every time he inquired about them, he was told they were “under legal review”. More important, he’d agreed to those ambitious revenue forecasts because he thought the Theranos system worked reliably.

( ) After some discussion, the four men reached a consensus: they would remove Elizabeth as CEO. She had proven herself as too young and inexperienced for the job. They called in Elizabeth to confront her with what they had learned and informed her of their decision. Over the course of the next two hours, Elizabeth convinced them to change their minds. Brodeen was reminded of an old saying: “When you strike at the King, you must kill him.” They had struck at the King, or rather the Queen, and she had survived.

( ) Like most people, Greg had been taken aback by Elizabeth’s deep voice when he’d first met her. He soon began to suspect it was affected. One evening she lapsed into a more natural sounding young women’s voice. She seemed to have momentarily forgotten to turn on the baritone. He concluded that the deep voice was used to get people’s attention and be taken seriously.

( ) Part of the problem was that Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable or unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product. The minilab Greg was helping build was a prototype, nothing more. It needed to be tested thoroughly and fine tuned, which would require time. Most companies went through three cycles of prototyping before they went to market with a product. But Sunny was already placing orders for components to build one hundred minilabs, based on a first untested prototype.

( ) The biggest problem of all was the dysfunctional corporate culture in which it was being developed. Elizabeth and Sunny regarded anyone who raised a concern or an objection as a cynic and a nay-sayer. Employees who persisted in doing so were usually marginalized or fired. With time, people devised ways to manage Sunny. Arnay figured out that if he sent an e-mail longer than five hundred words, Sunny didn’t have the patience to read it and would stay off his back for several weeks.

( ) One setback was of Elizabeth’s doing, who insisted that the minilab cartridges remain a certain size but kept adding more assays to them. The different classes of blood tests required vastly different methods. Once the blood sample was used to perform an immunoassay, there usually wasn’t enough left for the completely different set of lab hematology assay required. By diluting the sample to get enough volume was no good for some tests.

( ) Theranos’s Board of Directors now had Shultz, Mattis, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defense William Perry, former Senate Arms Service Committee Sam Nunn, former navy admiral Gary Roughead.

( ) To counter negative Glassdoor reviews about the company, Sunny Balwani made sure that there was a steady flow of fake positive reviews which he ordered members of the HR department to write. For one negative review he flew into a rage and went on a witch hunt. Interrogation was so mean that he made several female employees cry. He never found the culprit.

( ) The story published in WSJ on 15^th Oct 2015 was devastating and sparked a firestorm. TV talk shows began discussing it, Fortune publication immediately carried it on their email to readers. In Silicon Valley it became the talk of the town.

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My take :

Elizabeth Holmes started a company Theranos claiming to make a machine that would make blood testing faster and easier; leading to the company being valued at more than USD 9 billion. What was kept hidden was that the machine didn’t work.

          It took the author John Carreyrou of WSJ lengthy investigation amidst severe threats to expose it. The book is very enjoyable and exposes the secrets and lies in such Silicon Valley startups.

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Subject type : True Story

Narrative Style : Descriptive

Readability : Excellent

Reader’s Interest : Keeps readers spellbound; their interest alive & very strong

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