Bad Blood

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, 299 pages

It's a familiar story.  A brilliant college student with a revolutionary idea dropped out of school to start her own business and chase her dreams.  Through hard work and pluck, she managed to impress a series of movers and shakers, earning investment dollars for her company and plaudits for herself.  A decade later, the company was worth billions and she was hailed as a role model for a new generation of girls looking to change the world and get rich in the process.  But there's a twist - it was all a sham.  The company's products never actually worked.  The dream was never more than a dream - and marketing.

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos ("THERApy" and "diagNOSis") in 2003 with the tuition money she saved by dropping out of Stanford.  Wearing a signature black turtleneck in imitation of Steve Jobs, she managed to win the endorsement of influential men and women from Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton with her promise to revolutionize health care with a new technology that would allow quick, easy, cheap, and mobile blood tests.  By 2014, the company was valued at over $9 billion, and in 2015 Holmes was named "Woman of the Year" by Glamour magazine and listed among the "Most Influential People in the World" by TIME.  Later that same year, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou revealed that Theranos was falsifying its results, conducting standard blood tests and then attributing the results to their devices.  After initial denials and threats of lawsuits, the company slowly walked back nearly all of the claims it had made, before collapsing into bankruptcy amid criminal investigations.  Bad Blood is Carreyrou's book-length account of how things reached that point, and how so many people were fooled, cheated, and, in some cases, endangered.

The most remarkable thing about Bad Blood is how sympathetic Holmes remains.  She is presented as a powerfully driven young woman who desired nothing more than to become a billionaire and help people - or, at least, to be seen to be helping people.  She seems to have genuinely believed that if she just wanted it enough - believed it enough - eventually the devices would work, and the multi-billion dollar business she had founded would thrive.  This spiraled into new age megalomania - at one point, Holmes told employees that they were working on the "best thing humans have ever built" and at another that they were "building a religion."  Carreyrou skillfully weaves the personal stories of Theranos insiders into the bigger picture, creating a rich and compelling narrative.