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

Book preview

BAD BLOOD

Summarized For Busy People

Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Based on the Book by John Carreyrou

Goldmine Reads

Copyright © Goldmine Reads

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Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENT

BAD BLOOD

ABOUT THIS BOOK SUMMARY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1: A PURPOSEFUL LIFE

CHAPTER 2: THE GLUEBOT

CHAPTER 3: APPLE ENVY

CHAPTER 4: GOODBYE EAST PALY

CHAPTER 5: THE CHILDHOOD NEIGHBOR

CHAPTER 6: SUNNY

CHAPTER 7: DR. J.

CHAPTER 8: THE MINILAB

CHAPTER 10: WHO IS LTC SHOEMAKER?

CHAPTER 11: LIGHTING A FUISZ

CHAPTER 12: IAN GIBBONS

CHAPTER 13: CHIAT\DAY

CHAPTER 14: GOING LIVE

CHAPTER 15: UNICORN

CHAPTER 16: THE GRANDSON

CHAPTER 17: FAME

CHAPTER 18: THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH

CHAPTER 19: THE TIP

CHAPTER 20: THE AMBUSH

CHAPTER 21: TRADE SECRETS

CHAPTER 22: LA MATTANZA

CHAPTER 23: DAMAGE CONTROL

CHAPTER 24: THE EMPRESS HAD NO CLOTHES

EPILOGUE

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ABOUT THIS BOOK SUMMARY

This book summary serves as a guide to John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. No text of the actual book is included, so if you prefer, you may purchase a copy before you proceed.

This guide includes summaries of the important happenings throughout the rise and fall of Theranos—from being a Stanford dropout’s startup to a multibillion-dollar corporation. It also introduces the key figures responsible for exposing Theranos for what it truly was: a fraud.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In 1994, John Carreyrou graduated Duke University with a Political Science degree. In 1999, he began working for the Wall Street Journal as an investigative journalist and is based in New York, Paris, and Brussels at present. In 2003, he became Deputy Bureau Chief for Southern Europe which included Portugal, Spain, and French business and politics.

In 2015, Carreyrou started writing investigative articles about Theranos—a billion-dollar company—and chronicled its eventual downfall.

PROLOGUE

Theranos was a company built with the promise of innovating the existing blood-testing technologies. Founder Elizabeth Holmes came up with the groundbreaking idea when she was only nineteen years old. It was in her Stanford dorm room that Elizabeth saw its potential to grow into a billion-dollar corporation. She gave up her pursuit of a degree in Chemical Engineering and dropped out of Stanford, using the money supposedly for her tuition as startup money instead.

Before the collapse of Theranos, it had gathered a very impressive roster comprised of leading professionals including influential investors, chemists, designers, executives, and the most prominent names in finance and politics. The chief financial officer of Theranos at the time was Henry Mosley, one of the company’s executives. What drew Henry to Theranos was its all-star cast. Theranos chairman Donald L. Lucas was the venture capitalist responsible for training Oracle’s billionaire-entrepreneur, Larry Ellison. Among the board of directors was the associate dean of the School of Engineering in Stanford, Channing Robertson. His statement regarding the addictive properties of tobacco drove the industry to a $6.5-billion settlement.

The remarkable management team was headed by renowned figures such as: John Howard, the senior vice president of Panasonic’s products who had supervised its chip-making subsidiary; chief commercial officer Diane Parks who had spent twenty-five years in biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies; and Tim Kemp, an executive who had a thirty-year experience working at IBM. Beside Elizabeth Holmes was Theranos co-founder Shaunak Roy who had a doctorate in Chemical Engineering.

Small startups rarely ever have the opportunity to gather such prominent figures together, but there was Theranos and its dream team. Their target market was enormous. Clinical trials to verify new drugs cost pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars annually. All Theranos needs is to become indispensable, then Elizabeth and her dream team would make mountains of fortune.

The demise of Theranos is owed to the fact that its founder had overstated the capabilities of the technology it offered. Elizabeth Holmes had set up financial projections so high that they were improbable. While Henry Mosley was indeed an expert in finance, he did not understand the workings of the science upon which Theranos was founded. Apparently, Elizabeth didn’t either. She was neither a scientist nor a doctor, and her two semesters of chemical engineering courses in Stanford were simply inadequate for the company to deliver the expected results.

Whenever the potential investors came to visit, Henry would bring them to meet with Shaunak Roy, who would then place a few drops of blood from his finger into a white plastic cartridge as small as a credit card. The cartridge would be placed inside a reader in the form of a rectangular box as big as a toaster. The reader was ought to extract data from the cartridge containing the blood sample. The data would be wirelessly transmitted and analyzed in a server which was supposed to send back a result immediately.

Elizabeth