Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Rating: 8.6/10

Going into this book, I had a rough outline of the Theranos story. Billion-dollar Silicon Valley startup Theranos and its charismatic founder Elizabeth Holmes were embroiled in controversy over whether their groundbreaking blood testing technology actually worked. I knew Theranos had been publicly embarassed by John Carreyrou after his brutal expose in the Wall Street Journal. What really hit home after reading this book was the extent of Theranos's deceit. For more than a decade, Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend/COO Sunny Balwani were deceiving regulators, investors, and eventually patients themselves.
I really enjoyed the amount of detail Carreyrou has documented here, like specific employees's conversations with Holmes. It was a bit hard to keep track of all the names of employees or confidential sources and the like, but that's been the case for the last few nonfiction books I've read. I listened to this book in audiobook form and really enjoyed the medium. Normally, I would've spent maybe a week or two reading this but in audio form, I was able to devour it in two or three days. Overall, I loved the book and was incredibly engrossed in the drama of a unicorn company collapsing into controversy and ultimately, irrelevancy.