Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
2018 • 339 pages
Ratings202
Average rating4.4
15
Ratings202
Average rating4.4
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.
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 tests 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 $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.
For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
Reviews with the most likes.
Perfect book to snap a reading slump. It kept getting more and more implausible that people kept believing in this charlatan. Important people! I went into this almost completely cold. I only had vague notions that Theranos did something with blood draws. This was well explained without being pedantic, didn't overly repeat itself, and walked a great line between helping an uninformed reader like myself understand the science and litigation piece without getting too in the weeds.
If you like non-fiction at all I recommend this.
The journalistic work that went into this book is A++, but did I like this book? Nope. I read a lot of this book with gritted teeth because it was breaking my brain that there were so many warning signs and yet Elizabeth Holmes had so many enablers, and was able to raise so much money even as her employees were operating in such a toxic environment.
A less coherent review?
Aaaaarrrghhhhhuwgsudusfai
A real page turner, describing the ethics of entrepreneurship and how one lie can lead to another. A cautionary tale in someways of an obviously talented individual marred by an obsession with an ungrounded vision.
