By John Carreyrou
Elizabeth Holmes, and her ambitions, driven by a unquenchable zeal to be an impact on this world, guided by misinterpreted examples and accompanied by the fear of failure.
This is simply the one line description of how Holmes found her path to an epic scandal.
Bad blood – is John Carreyrou, WallStreet Jounal‘s attempt to accumulate and unleash the facts of Theranos, a startup that aims to performs most of the tests on blood with just a prick in the finger, rather than venous draws (using needle at the vein).
Holmes starts off as a Stanford dropout from chemical engineering. She wants to do big in business, and finds silicon valley as the perfect hub to work towards her dream. She draws inspiration from Steve Jobs, though he works in a completely different field, where unkept promises don’t cost lives of people.
With every chapter of the book, I was appalled to see what extent was Holmes ready to pursue when she was faced by a hurdle towards her goal.
The one that affected me the most was Ian Gibbons incident. It is brutal, how they brushed off Gibbons and continued to work as if nothing changed.
Like a ponzi scheme, forming a pyramid of lies, it is sometimes to see how Holmes and her ex-boyfriend Sunny were brave enough to go this far into deceiving investors with tons of money collected on promises that can never be delivered.
True to the name, the book was devastatingly portraying how a bit of confidence and some set up stereotypes can take you far enough, costing lives along the way.
Every page was something even more impactful than the earlier.
It is a must-read if you are more interested in corporate politics, how venture capitalists can fail and some background stories of lawsuits that are brought out in US courts. For me, it was Elizabeth Holmes’ mind that intrigued, how she managed to believe when clearly the world was against it.
Ironically, she stated the same in an interview.
Lit Loom 