I finished listening to the Audiable version of Bad Blood, and it was stunning! I cannot believe that this company did not raise red flags left, right and centre. The truth, of course, was that it had. But because of NDAs, information silos, FOMO among executives and the inner circle culture of super wealthy, Silicon Valley etc., the flags weren’t picked up. More than that, all you have to do is look at the two public whistle-blowers to know why the scam went on for so long!
The whistle-blowers were young, and one of them was Tyler Shultz. Yeah, Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos still managed to make his life a hellish nightmare in the short run, but he’s was still Tyler Shultz, and he was going to land on his feet long term. The same wouldn’t have been true of the Indian employees on skilled migration visas.
I think Theranos is a cautionary tale that goes beyond entrepreneurial culture. Be optimistic but don’t be blind to reality. Also, we need to stop worshipping the dropouts. I mean, yes, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out, when they dropped out they 1) had their respective business ideas, 2) had the necessary skills or could teach themselves the skills they needed to make Microsoft and Facebook a success.
Steve Jobs spent a lot of time auditing classes after he couldn’t continue with the university. I understand it was a money issue in his case. Also, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak as his partner and Wozniak was a brilliant engineer. Finally, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped out of PhD programs!
You can’t teach yourself medical science. Elizabeth Holmes also didn’t have a Steve Wozniak character by her side. Besides which, what she wanted to do needed scientific and technological breakthrough to become a reality. I read a few comments that suggested that Holmes’s fixation on the bells and whistles. Stuff like the font on the website or the look and feel of the Edison Machine was her channelling her boundless energy into tasks that she could do because she didn’t have the technical know-how to work in the lab.
She wasn’t a Steve Jobs, but she might have been an Elon Musk if, like him, she stayed in school and got a technical education. The saddest part is that many still believe Elizabeth Holmes was unfairly treated. They think she did nothing wrong. She’s blindly defended by many women, but her defenders are wrong! She hurt people.
I am not going to speculate whether she set out with good intentions and then went down the wrong path. That’s not important. What is important is how she went about doing business was not a good way to achieve anything. She hurt patients, she hurt her employees, including Ian Gibbons who committed suicide. Indeed, Ian Gibbons’s story made me the saddest because he stayed with Theranos because his work defined his life. So he couldn’t walk away, even when he was suffering, because, without his work, he felt he was nothing.
