Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
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Average rating4.4
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post * The McKinsey Business Book of the Year The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes--now the subject of the HBO documentary The Inventor--by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end. "The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion." --Bill Gates 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. A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.
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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.
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.
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