Happy Women’s History Month! John Carryrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup taught me a new phrase – folies á deux – a shared psychosis by two people in close proximity. Elizabeth Holmes and her (secret) boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, ran the company she founded like their own fiefdom. They enforced Elizabeth’s version of reality, kept information siloed, and silenced anyone who questioned or criticized them.
I do not know if Elizabeth Holmes started out with good intentions and then was derailed by her own ego and delusions, or if she set out to make a lot of money and knew she was running a shell game the whole time. Whatever the truth, she is an inspiration for young girls who dream of making technological advances and aren’t willing to do the foundation work to make their dreams come true, so they grift instead.
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.
To be fair, Elizabeth Holmes did do a lot of work. She worked very hard convincing people that she was the real thing, keeping her employees from understanding that her device didn’t work, mythmaking and intimidating anyone who might even think about questioning her. I remember hearing about her and Theranos several years ago and mostly thought she was very young. When the stories of Theranos as a fraud came out and I was not surprised. Not because a very young woman couldn’t possibly be smart enough to create the technology she said she was creating, but because I have become jaded by too many miracles being revealed as shams. And why shouldn’t a young woman create and head up a multi billion dollar sham? She kept it going for almost 15 years. Imagine what she could have done if she had put as much effort into actually creating the kind of technological revolution she was selling?
Elizabeth Holmes is a bad person. I say this not because she made promises she couldn’t keep, or tried to emulate Steve Jobs, or affected a baritone. She’s a bad person because she froze out, intimidated and harassed anyone who offered constructive criticism or questioned her, and she was awful to her employees. She surrounded herself with people who were willing to lie to her and for her. She bullied and allowed bullying on her behalf. I got an eye twitch listening to Holmes’ expectations of her employees and the way she froze out and fired anyone who disagreed with her. Her boyfriend and COO, Sunny, was her enforcer. When things got bad, Elizabeth broke up with him and fired him. Never give your loyalty to a person who is willing to lie to everyone else.
Carreyrou seems to have thoroughly researched Theranos. Considering that he was constantly threatened with legal action and his sources were being watched and threatened, he had to have every detailed pinned down and confirmed. I thought the book was a great piece of long form investigation, but I do wish he had looked more at the systems that allowed Holmes and Balwani to escape scrutiny for so long. One thing that annoyed me was Carreyrou constantly harping on Elizabeth’s affected baritone voice. Having been a young women who needs older men to take her seriously, Elizabeth’s affectation made complete sense to me.