Bad Blood

Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Epub, 352 pages

English language

Published Jan. 5, 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf.

OCLC Number:
1090936522

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3 stars (2 reviews)

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. source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549478/bad-blood-by-john-carreyrou/

5 editions

A gripping tale of the apparent fairy tale-like rise of a person who is eventually shown to be a fraud.

4 stars

A fascinating book that starts slow, introducing the reader to the host of people involved with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos as they attempt to get their blood testing machines out into the market, but rapidly becomes a gripping tale as the behind-the-scenes shenanigans eventually cause people to have second thoughts and push for investigations into the company, eventually exposing its technology to be a fraud, but not before causing pain and anguish to people who might have been misled by the false results returned by the Theranos machines.

The story starts with Elizabeth Holmes's childhood ambition to 'change the world' that morphs into a desire to be a billionaire. While working in Singapore, getting blood samples during the SARS epidemic, Holmes would get the 'there must be a better way' urge to show that a whole host of blood tests could be done with small quantities of blood.

After various …

avatar for Tomat0@bookwyrm.social

rated it

2 stars