Home > Work > Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
1 " Elizabeth had wanted all those sweeping claims to be true, but just because you badly wanted something to be real didn't make it so. "
― John Carreyrou , Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
2 " Or so the slide deck said. "
3 " The fear of missing out was a powerful deterrent. "
4 " You didn't change the world by being cynical. "
5 " She was so laser focused on achieving her goals that she seemed oblivious to the practical implications of her decision. "
6 " When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind. "
7 " A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it. "
8 " Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry. "
9 " The way Theranos is operating is like trying to build a bus while you’re driving the bus. Someone is going to get killed. "
10 " Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief. "
11 " In one of their last email exchanges, he recommended two management self help books to her, 'The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't' and 'Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work', and included their links on Amazon.com. He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part: 'good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you "
12 " It was as if Boeing built one plane and, without doing a single flight test, told airline passengers, “Hop aboard. "
13 " By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery. "
14 " Well, there was a reason it always seemed to work, Shaunak said. The image on the computer screen showing the blood flowing through the cartridge and settling into the little wells was real. But you never knew whether you were going to get a result or not. So they’d recorded a result from one of the times it worked. It was that recorded result that was displayed at the end of each demo. "
15 " We turned to my questions about the Edison. How many blood tests did Theranos perform on the device? That too was a trade secret, they said. I felt like I was watching a live performance of the Theater of the Absurd. "
16 " One evening, as they wrapped up a meeting in her office shortly after he joined the company, she lapsed into a more natural-sounding young woman’s voice. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she told him as she got up from her chair, her pitch several octaves higher than usual. In "
17 " No, Dad, I’m not interested in getting a Ph.D., I want to make money. "
18 " FoMO—the fear of missing out. "
19 " What if the Theranos technology did turn out to be game-changing? It might spend the next decade regretting passing up on it. The fear of missing out was a powerful deterrent. "
20 " Would you rather be smart and poor or dumb and rich? The three engineers all chose smart and poor, while the Frat Pack voted unanimously for dumb and rich. Greg was struck by how clearly the line was drawn between the two groups. They were all in their mid- to late twenties with good educations, but they valued different things. "
