Author: John Carreyrou
# of Pages: 300 (hardback)
Genre: Non-fiction, Biography
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
Review: The first time I heard about Elizabeth Holmes, it was a Reddit post talking about how she faked a deep voice for pretty much her whole career. I watched a video, was mildly amused by how unnatural it sounded (especially knowing it was already fake, and then moved on with my day.
Fast forward to 2021/2022, Holmes is in all the headlines. I didn't know anything about Theranos and why exactly she was on trial other than running a scam startup and that she was going to great lengths to push back the trial and avoiding going to prison to serve her sentence. I meant to read this book during all of that hype, but didn't get around to it until now coincidentally when there's been a lot of other tech CEO headlines have to plentiful. Crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried recently was sentenced for his own type of fraud, and CEO Sam Altman was ousted from his position at OpenAI for not being trustworthy (exact reason still TBD), and CEO Kyle Vogt of Cruise stepped down not long after the company lost its license to test self-driving cars after one of their vehicles struck a pedestrian.
Now I know the extent of the scam that Holmes created with Theranos, thanks to Bad Blood. I appreciate Carreyrou doing his due diligence to create a full picture of the scam company. There are many perspectives (employees, potential investors, FDA and military officials) to show all the signs that led to the revelation that Theranos never got passed the "dream" stage for Holmes, despite her promises of having a working product.
The various perspectives seemed overwhelming at first - each person is introduced to the reader with a bit of background which became exhausting when new people were introduced every chapter. Some of these people mentioned again - some are unimportant after supplying their experiences to the pool. Carreyrou did a pretty good job at reintroducing people as their names came up again in later chapter, so I didn't have much of a problem following what was going on (the hardest name to remember was Carreyrou's since he talks in first person about himself, but other characters might mention his last name).
What was a little harder to follow was some of the domain specific details. If the reader doesn't have as much background in these areas, it could be slower going reading through the explanations of what's happening in the "development process" (if we can even call it that) of the Theranos products, and this doens't even include the different approvals (patents, license, etc.) of which the average person is likely unfamiliar with.
Although it's not the most gripping nor the most fun nor the most easy to read nonfiction book I've read, it's definitely more readable than many nonfiction books out there (especially since this is one is more of a biography than autobiography, with the former running the risk of sound too textbook).
If you're interested in this book, I would recommend giving it a read since it goes over the case in great detail. My only major wish for this book is for it to have been written later to cover the trial period.
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