Bad Blood: How a startup deceived Silicon Valley

Every once in a while, someone bold and resilient comes along and changes what we had once perceived as reality. Steve Jobs was one of them. He revolutionised computers, digital music, and mobile phones. Like other luminaries, his visions have inspired other CEOs and startups.

Elizabeth Anne Holmes, a brilliant woman, was an entrepreneur and the founder CEO of Theranos. She believed that her company could revolutionise the existing blood testing markets the same way Apple revolutionised technology. Cloaked in her charisma, her innovation had everyone fooled. By the time it was revealed to be a scam, the company had already amassed a large number of high profile investors.

John Carreyrou's Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup tells us the inside story of Elizabeth Holmes who was once hailed as the next Steve Jobs. The reader might find the title keeping some similarities with two popular pop songs: Taylor Swift's song from the album 1989 and Neil Sedaka's from Overnight Success. Both are about deception and failed promises.

The extent to which Carreyrou went to investigate this case allows for a degree of lucidity that is almost unparalleled. The story is a well-conceived narration from different perspectives and people from all sorts of moral and psychological juxtapositions.

Holmes grew up in a humble American family and early on she knew she wanted to be a successful entrepreneur. Even in her formative years, when a family member asked her the age-old question: what she wanted to be when she grew up, Holmes quickly chirped, "I want to be a billionaire." She eventually became one when Theranos achieved unicorn status in Silicon Valley.

Holmes dubbed her technology the "iPad of blood testing." Her selling pitch was to swiftly monitor the drug dosage in order to prevent patients from overdose and to detect the nature of diseases as early as possible. The magical technology seemed to be too good to be true. And it was; the results that have been pitched to gain investors were fabricated.

Later when the truth came out from Carreyrou's reports and multiple investigations, the flying fortress of Theranos cascaded like a meteor along with CEO Holmes. The way the company maintained its fraudulent secrets through intimidation and fear among its present and former employees were covered by Carreyrou in great detail.

Bad Blood provides a front-row seat to the history of harassment and culture of fear encouraged by Holmes and her erstwhile partner and COO of Theranos, Ramesh Balwani. Both Holmes and Balwani maintained a toxic workplace with both having insufficient knowledge about the technology they were making and developed the culture of firing staff regularly.

Carreyrou found that Holmes had been manipulative since the beginning and Balwani was just a pawn. There was a vain attempt to silence the threat and intimidation that former employees had to endure via a non-disclosure clause.

Carreyrou presented Holmes' intentions as to become a de facto cult leader rather than a scammer. She was successful for the most part in reaching her goal but her constant paranoia with secrecy and control set her on a warpath with almost everyone who tried to either compete or express differing opinions. Her downfall began when Carreyrou started publishing his findings.

A riveting, page-turning, non-fiction thriller, this book is a one-sided manifestation of Theranos and Holmes, although the reader never gets to see the reason for Holmes' deceptive claims.

The author did dive deep while talking to the former employees of Theranos, but we get to see fewer narratives with doctors and patients who gave and received false results.

Holmes wanted to sell a defective technology in the highly regulated field of blood testing and diagnostics. Her wish of becoming the next Steve Jobs got the best out of her. The initial passion that Theranos was based on did not see the light of day. It is perhaps terribly difficult to become "somebody" when they are ill-intentioned.  

Holmes is now facing multiple federal charges of fraud originating from allegations that she schemed to fool the startup's investors, its doctors and its patients while knowing that its test results were inaccurate and unreliable.

The author of this book, John Carreyrou, is a French-American journalist. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked for The Wall Street Journal. Carreyrou hosts a podcast named Bad Blood: The Final Chapter, available on Apple Podcasts. This book has been an inspiration to HBO's new documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. A movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes has been in the works since 2016.