Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Silicon Valley loves a founder who fakes it until they make it, and that tolerance is mostly harmless — right up until the product is a medical diagnosis. Theranos is the story of what happens when it isn’t. Elizabeth Holmes, who feared needles and had wanted to be a billionaire since she was ten, sold an irresistible pitch: a credit card–sized device that would draw blood from a single pinprick, feed it to a toaster-sized machine called Edison, and test for over 200 diseases cheaply, in every home. By 2014 the company had reached a $9 billion valuation and signed deals with Walgreens and Safeway. The device never worked.

John Carreyrou on SummaryShelf

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup