In the same vein, Bad Blood is a satisfying read for anyone who wants a book full of salacious startupenfreude. In the past two years, we’ve watched public opinion flip on Uber and Facebook, and the nerdy opulence of startups has become a frequent punchline, be it through the lampoon of HBO’s Silicon Valley or memes of thicc Mark Zuckerberg. Still, these are small issues in a book that speaks volumes to tech at large. (Carreyrou might have two Pulitzers, but this isn’t exactly Spotlight.)
Since we’ve spent the last 200 pages in the story, hearing him piece it together after the fact is a bit humdrum. Still, the book stumbles a bit in its third act, when Carreyrou introduces himself and how he broke the story. The technology might be new and shiny, but the scam was as old as time.Ĭarreyrou’s reporting in Bad Blood is exhaustive, including interviews with more than 150 people-more than 60 of those being ex-Theranos employees with enough tea to fill an Olympic pool. So began a convoluted scheme of bait-and-switches (baits-and-switch?) with potential investors and clients to convince suckers that Theranos could deliver on the goods: broken machines and fake results. Theranos created devices that simply did not work. could be summed up by a motivational saying inscribed on a paperweight she kept on her desk: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” Holmes’s assistants would Facebook-friend employees just to report on what they were posting. She pitted engineering teams against each other, assuming competition would foster better productivity over collaboration. The company’s CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, was a classic narcissist-an intelligent and ambitious entrepreneur who surrounded herself with mediocre yes men. Turns out Theranos would involve a lot more than one prick. Theranos-not to be confused with Thanatos, the god of death, or Thanos, the purple Marvel villain-raised money on a too-good-to-be-true promise of a pitch deck: a revolutionary household box that could administer a number of medical tests-all with a single prick. You might recall Carreyrou’s reporting last year in The Wall Street Journal, when he exposed the lie behind Theranos (rhymes with “Bailamos”), the multi-billion-dollar-valued tech startup that sought to simplify blood testing. Titled after the eleventh best song on 1989, John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood is a scrupulously reported book about Silicon Valley hubris.
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