Bad Blood - Summarized for Busy People: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup: Based on the Book by John Carreyrou

By Goldmine Reads

This book summary and analysis was created for individuals who want to extract the essential contents and are too busy to go through the full version. This book is not intended to replace the original book. Instead, we highly encourage you to buy the full version.

Bad Blood offers the complete inside story behind Theranos—the Silicon Valley health technology company involved in the largest case of corporate fraud since Enron. It was written by Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, the journalist who continued to fight for the truth in the face of great adversity.

Back in 2014, the charismatic Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, was widely considered as the female counterpart of Steve Jobs. She was a teenage Stanford dropout who had established a startup whose ambitious claim was to develop cutting-edge technology capable of revolutionizing the present blood testing systems in the medical industry. Prominent figures such as Tim Draper and Larry Ellison had invested on Theranos, which once reached a valuation of $9 billion after selling shares in a fundraising round. At this point, Elizabeth Holmes' net worth was estimated to be around $4.7 billion. All eyes were on Elizabeth Holmes and her company, but the main problem was yet to be solved: Theranos' technology was a fraud.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Goldmine Reads
• Release date: Mar 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386251156

Book preview

CHAPTER 1: A PURPOSEFUL LIFE

As a child, Elizabeth Anne Holmes knew that she wanted to become a successful entrepreneur when she grew up. Her parents, Christian and Noel Holmes, had cultivated this ambition. After all, both of her parents have come from very wealthy families.

Christian Holmes was a descendant of Hungarian immigrant Charles Louis Fleischmann who established the Fleischmann Yeast Company. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Fleischmanns rose to become one of America’s most affluent families. Dr. Christian Holmes, Elizabeth’s great grandfather, married Betti Fleischmann and founded the Cincinnati General Hospital and the medical school in the University of Cincinnati.

Noel Holmes’ father was a West Point alumni who proposed and executed the shift of the military force from draft-based to voluntary. In the early 1970s, Noel’s father became a high-ranking official at the Pentagon.

It was Elizabeth’s father and the history of his predecessors that would influence her greatly. For Christian, or Chris, education was of utmost importance. His father and his grandfather had lived extravagantly, but their fortunes had run out because of alcoholism and failed marriages. Chris blamed them both for exhausting their family’s riches.

Elizabeth Holmes didn’t exactly fit in during her high school years. Her family had to relocate to Houston for her father’s work at Tenneco. She and her siblings were sent to the most impressive private school in the area. Although Elizabeth had aced all her subjects, she remained among the less popular crowd and suffered from a type of eating disorder. She did, however, establish a social footing when she dated the son of an orthopedic surgeon well-known in