Bad Blood

By John Carreyrou - Read: January 15, 2024 - Rating: 10/10

This is the story of the dramatic rise and fall of Silicon Valley's once hottest startup. It is extremely well narrated by Carreyrou, who, notably, faced intense pressure from the company while reporting on the story.

The severity of the actions taken Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani is hardly believable. This book feels surreal. It is certainly the most spectacular failure of the Fake It Until You Make It mantra ever, by far.

There are many lessons to be learned from not ruining a company. Bad Blood is undeniably one of the best books I have ever read.

My Notes

  • Fear is not a wise emotion to lead with.
  • Privilege does not shield anyone from exceeding legal boundaries.
  • Employees are the foundation of any company; a toxic culture will never withstand tough times.
  • Trust in employees is essential; monitoring every mouse click does not foster trust.
  • Beware of FOMO, especially in investments and startups.
  • Diligence and coherence could have prevented such a disaster. Knowledge and expertise in the field are essential.
  • Managing a company with excessive much ego can be very harmful.

A few quotes that reveal just how ridiculous or mind-boggling the culture inside the company was.

Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.

By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery.

Sunny and Elizabeth’s boldest claim was that the Theranos system was capable of running seventy different blood tests simultaneously on a single finger-stick sample and that it would soon be able to run even more. The ability to perform so many tests on just a drop or two of blood was something of a Holy Grail in the field of microfluidics. Thousands of researchers around the world in universities and industry had been pursuing this goal for more than two decades.

The way Theranos is operating is like trying to build a bus while you’re driving the bus. Someone is going to get killed.

In one of their last email exchanges, he (Alan Beam) recommended two management self help books to her (Elizabeth Holmes), 'The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't' and 'Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work', and included their links on Amazon.com. He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part: 'good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you.'

Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house.

When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind."