Bad Blood Secret And Lies Review:
- Bad Blood is the real be-all end-all of Theranos information…. Bad Blood is wild
- You will not want to put this riveting, masterfully reported book down
- The definitive account of Theranos’s downfall, detailing its motley crew of executives, legal knife fights, dramatic PR stunts, and skullduggery
- A great and at times almost unbelievable story of scandalous fraud, surveillance, and legal intimidation at the highest levels of American corporate power
Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup Summary
- Get Free Amazon Unlimited Music
- Get 2 Free Audiobooks from Amazon
- Get Free Amazon Business Account
- Get Free Amazon Movies & TV Shows
- Get Free unlimited books
Prologue
November 17, 2006
Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos’s twenty-twoyear-old founder, had flown to Switzerland
And shown off the system’s capabilities to executives at Novartis, the European drug giant.
Elizabeth had asked him to put together some financial projections she could show investors.
The first set of numbers he’d come up with hadn’t been to her liking, so he’d revised them upward
Chapter One
A Purposeful Life
When she was nine or ten, one of her relatives asked her at a family
gathering the question every boy and girl is asked sooner or later:
“What do you want to do when you grow up?”
Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, “I want to be a billionaire.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be president?” the relative asked.
“No, the president will marry me because I’ll have a billion dollars.”
Chapter Two
The Gluebot
Emond Ku interviewed with Elizabeth Holmes in early 2006 and
was instantly captivated by the vision she unspooled before him.
She described a world in which drugs would be minutely
tailored to individuals thanks to Theranos’s blood-monitoring technology.
Elizabeth cited the fact that an estimated one hundred thousand
Americans died each year from adverse drug reactions.
Theranos would eliminate all those deaths, she said. It would quite literally save lives.
Chapter 3
Apple Envy
In the summer of 2007, she took her admiration for Apple a
step further by recruiting several of its employees to Theranos.
One of them was Ana Arriola, a product designer who’d worked on the iPhone.
Chapter 4
Goodbye East Paly
In early 2008, Theranos moved to a new building on Hillview
Avenue in Palo Alto. It was the Silicon Valley equivalent of
moving from the South Bronx to Midtown Manhattan
Aaron felt someone needed to tell Elizabeth to pump the
brakes and to stop pushing to commercialize a product
that they were still trying to get to work
Aaron agreed that it was time for him to go.
To his surprise, Elizabeth tried to convince him to stay.
Chapter Five
The Childhood Neighbour
While Elizabeth was busy building Theranos, an old family
acquaintance was taking an interest in what she was doing from afar.
His name was Richard Fuisz. He was an entrepreneur–cum–
medical inventor with a big ego and a colorful Background
Shit happened…
Elizabeth got straight to the point. She wanted to know if
McDermott would agree to represent Theranos against Richard Fuisz.
Chapter SIX
Sunny
Sunny was a force of nature, and not in a good way.
Though only about five foot five and portly, he made up
for his diminutive stature with an Aggressive,
in-your-face management style. His thick eyebrows and
Almond-shaped eyes, set above a mouth that drooped
at the edges and a square chin, projected an air of menace.
He was haughty and demeaning toward employees,
barking orders and dressing people down
Chapter Seven
Dr. J
Dr. J’s real name was Jay Rosan and he was in fact a doctor,
though he had spent most of his career working for big corporations.
It wasn’t just the business proposition that appealed to
Dr. J. A health nut who carefully watched his diet, rarely drank alcohol,
And was fanatical about getting a swim in every day,
he was passionate about empowering people to live healthier lives.
Dr. J was a staunch and tireless advocate for Theranos.
If anything, he thought Walgreens was moving too slowly.
- Get Free Amazon Unlimited Music
- Get 2 Free Audiobooks from Amazon
- Get Free Amazon Business Account
- Get Free Amazon Movies & TV Shows
- Get Free unlimited books
Chapter 8
The Mini Lab
Elizabeth needed a new device, one that could perform more
than just one class of test. In November 2010,
she hired a young engineer named Kent Frankovich
and put him in charge of designing it.
Kent had just obtained a master’s degree in
mechanical engineering from Stanford.
SUNNY WAS a tyrant. He fired people so often that it gave
rise to a little routine in the warehouse downstairs.
Chapter Nine
The Wellness Play
Safeway’s business was doing poorly.
The supermarket chain had just announced a
6 percent drop in its profits for the last three months of 2011,
a disappointing performance its longtime CEO
Steve Burd was struggling to explain to the dozen analysts
who had dialled in to the company’s quarterly earnings call
One of them, Ed Kelly from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse,
was gently needling Burd for using stock buybacks to mask the bad results.
Chapter Ten
Who is LTC Shoe Maker?
Lieutenant Colonel David Shoemaker had been politely
listening to the confident young woman seated at the head
of the conference table explain how her company intended to operate
When, fifteen minutes in, he couldn’t hold his tongue anymore.
“Your regulatory structure is not going to fly,” he said, interrupting her.
Elizabeth shot an annoyed look at the bespectacled officer
in army fatigues as he enumerated the various regulations
he thought the approach she’d described fell afoul of.
This was not what she wanted to hear.
Chapter Eleven
Lighting a Fuisz
When Richard Fuisz opened the door, a process
server tried to hand him a stack of legal papers.
“I’m here to serve a lawsuit on Fuisz Technologies,” the man said.
Fuisz told him he couldn’t accept service because the company,
Though it bore his name, was no longer his.
He had sold it more than a decade earlier.
It was now part of Canadian drugmaker Valeant Pharmaceuticals
Chapter 12
Ian Gibbons
Ian Gibbons was the first experienced scientist Elizabeth
had hired after launching Theranos. He came
recommended by her Stanford mentor, Channing Robertson.
Ian and Robertson had met at Biotrack in the 1980s,
where they had invented and patented a
new mechanism to dilute and mix liquid samples.
From 2005 to 2010, Ian led Theranos’s chemistry
work alongside Gary Frenzel. Ian, who had joined t
he startup first, was initially senior to Gary.
But Elizabeth soon inverted their roles because
Gary had better people skills, which made him a smoother manager.
Chapter Thirteen
Chiat/Day
Hiring Schoeller had been the idea of Patrick O’Neill,
the creative director of advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Los Angeles office.
Chiat\Day was working on a secret marketing campaign for Theranos.
The assignment ranged from creating a brand identity to
building a new website and a smartphone app for the company
ahead of the commercial launch of its blood-testing
services in Walgreens and Safeway stores
Chapter Fourteen
Going Live
This was the Theranos sample collection device.
Its tip collected the blood and transferred it to two
little engines at the rocket’s base. The engines weren’t
really engines: they were nanotainers.
To complete the transfer, you pushed the nanotainers
into the belly of the plastic rocket like a plunger.
The movement created a vacuum that sucked the
blood into them. Or at least that was the idea.
But in this instance, things didn’t go quite as planned.
When the technician pushed the tiny twin tubes into the device,
there was a loud pop and blood splattered everywhere.
One of the nanotainers had just exploded.
Elizabeth looked unfazed. “OK, let’s try that again,” she said calmly.
Chapter Fifteen
Unicorn
Elizabeth had engineered the piece, which was published
in the Saturday, September 7, 2013, edition of the Journal,
to coincide with the commercial launch of Theranos’s blood-testing services.
A press release was due to go out first thing
Monday morning announcing the opening of
the first Theranos wellness center in a Walgreens
store in Palo Alto and plans for a subsequent nationwide expansion of the partnership.
Chapter Sixteen
The Grandson
Tyler Shultz listened to an emotional speech Elizabeth was giving.
She was talking about her uncle’s premature death from
cancer and how an early warning from Theranos’s
blood tests could have prevented it.
That was what she had spent the past ten years tirelessly
working toward, she said teary-eyed, her voice catching:
a world in which no one would have to say goodbye to
a loved one too soon. Tyler found the message deeply inspiring.
He had started working at Theranos less than a week earlier,
after graduating from Stanford the previous spring and
taking the summer off to backpack around Europe.
Chapter Seventeen
Fame
Initially determined to fight the lawsuit to the bitter end,
Richard and Joe were tired and battered. The trial had started a few days earlier at
The federal courthouse down the street and the extent to
which they were outgunned had fully dawned on them.
Unhappy with their lawyers and their mounting legal costs,
they had gone “pro se” several months earlier
- Get Free Amazon Unlimited Music
- Get 2 Free Audiobooks from Amazon
- Get Free Amazon Business Account
- Get Free Amazon Movies & TV Shows
- Get Free unlimited books
Chapter Eighteen
The Hippocratic Oath
Alan scanned the costumed crowd and caught sight of Elizabeth.
She was wearing a long velvet dress with gold trim and a big
upright collar, and her blond hair was done up in an elaborate bun.
The irony of her Queen Elizabeth attire wasn’t lost on him.
With a net worth that Forbes had just estimated at $4.5 billion
in its October 20, 2014, issue, she had become Silicon Valley royalty.
Elizabeth loved to throw company parties. And none more so
than the one she organized every year for Halloween.
It was a Theranos tradition for which no expense was spared.
The company’s senior executives all played along.
Chapter Nineteen
Adam asked if I’d read a recent feature in The New Yorker about a
Silicon Valley prodigy named Elizabeth Holmes and her company,
Theranos. As it turned out, I had. I subscribed to the magazine and
often read it on the subway to and from work.
Now that he mentioned it, there were some things I’d read in that
article that I’d found suspect. The lack of any peer-reviewed data
to back up the company’s scientific claims was one of them.
I’d reported about health-care issues for the better part of a
decade and couldn’t think of any serious advances in
medicine that hadn’t been subject to peer review
Chapter Twenty
The Ambush
“Have you been speaking to an investigative journalist about Theranos?”
his father asked accusingly.
“Yes,” Tyler responded.
“Are you kidding me? How stupid could you be? Well, they know.”
Tyler learned that his grandfather had just called to say that
Theranos was aware he was in contact with a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Chapter Twenty One
Trade Secrets
Boies sent the Journal a second letter.
Unlike the first one, which was just two pages long,
this one ran twenty-three pages and explicitly threatened a
lawsuit if we published a story that defamed
Theranos or disclosed any of its trade secrets.
The early days of July 2015 brought two pieces of good news for Theranos.
The first was that the FDA had approved the company’s
proprietary finger-stick test for HSV-1, one of two strains of herpes virus.
The second was that a new law Arizona had passed allowing its
citizens to get their blood tested without a doctor’s order—
a bill Theranos had practically written itself and heavily lobbied for—was about to go into effect.
Chapter Twenty Three
Damage Control
In March, a month after I had started digging into the company,
Theranos had closed another round of funding.
Unbeknownst to me, the lead investor was Rupert Murdoch,
the Australian-born media mogul who controlled
the Journal’s parent company, News Corporation.
Of the more than $430 million Theranos had raised in this last round,
$125 million had come from Murdoch.
That made him the company’s biggest investor.
Chapter Twenty Four
The Empress Has No Clothes
The overseer of clinical laboratories in the United States had
not only confirmed that there were significant problems with
Theranos’s blood tests, it had deemed the problems
grave enough to put patients in immediate danger.
The number of test results Theranos voided or corrected in
California and Arizona eventually reached nearly 1 million.
The harm done to patients from all those faulty tests is hard to determine.
One thing is certain: the chances that people would have died from
missed diagnoses or wrong medical treatments would have risen
exponentially if the company had expanded its blood-testing
services to Walgreens’s 8,134 other U.S. stores
More Related Book Summaries
- Book Summary: The Threat by Andrew G McCabe
- Book Summary: The Undoing Project Michael Lewis
- Becoming Michelle Obama: Book Summary, Review & Quotes
Get Free Book Summaries
No time to the whole book ? Let Us send you free Summaries Forever :)