2022-01-09
There came a point when Holmes stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference.
Silicon Valley
FDA: Health care was the most highly regulated industry in the country and for good reason: the lives of patients were at stake.
Investors: To rescue the economy, the Federal Reserve had slashed rates to close to zero, making traditional investments like bonds unattractive and sending investors searching for higher returns elsewhere. One of the places they turned to was Silicon Valley.
Founders: Evangelizing was what successful startup founders did in Silicon Valley. You didn’t change the world by being cynical. It was OK to be optimistic and aspirational when you pitched investors, but there was a line not to cross. And this, in Mosley’s view, crossed it.
Elizabeth
The message Elizabeth took away from them is that if she wanted to truly leave her mark on the world, she would need to accomplish something that furthered the greater good, not just become rich.
Elizabeth expected her employees to give their all to Theranos, especially ones like Kent whom she entrusted with big responsibilities.
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。
The odds that Holmes could pull off this latest Houdini act while under criminal investigation were very long, but watching her confidently walk the audience through her sleek slide show helped crystallize for me how she’d gotten this far: she was an amazing saleswoman. She never once stumbled or lost her train of thought. She wielded both engineering and laboratory lingo effortlessly and she showed seemingly heartfelt emotion when she spoke of sparing babies in the NICU from blood transfusions. Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.
Watching her, John Carreyrou got the distinct impression that her display of contrition was an act. He still didn’t sense any real remorse or empathy.
Colleagues
Robertson: “She had somehow been able to take and synthesize these pieces of science and engineering and technology in ways that I had never thought of.” Robertson was also struck by how motivated and determined she was to see her idea through. “I never encountered a student like this before of the then thousands of students that I had talked to”, he said. “I encouraged her to go out and pursue her dream.”
Ed: She described a world in which drugs would be minutely tailored to individuals thanks to Theranos’s blood-monitoring technology. Ed felt himself drawn in by the young woman sitting across from him who was staring at him intently without blinking. The mission she was describing was admirable, he thought.
Ana: Elizabeth told Ana she envisioned building a disease map of each person through Theranos’s blood tests. The company would then be able to reverse engineer illnesses like cancer with mathematical models that would crunch the blood data and predict the evolution of tumors.
Tim: He was a yes-man who never leveled with Elizabeth about what was feasible and what wasn’t. Elizabeth never reprimanded Tim, even when obvious examples of his duplicity were brought to her attention. She valued his loyalty and, in her eyes, the fact that he never said no to her reflected a can-do attitude. It mattered little that many of his colleagues thought Tim was a mediocrity and a terrible manager.
Frat Pack: The Frat Pack endeared itself to Sunny and Elizabeth by working long days. Sunny was constantly questioning employees’ commitment to the company—the number of hours a person put in at the office, whether he or she was doing productive work or not, was his ultimate gauge of that commitment.
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.Shoemaker: He had come across a lot of people who seemed to think the military was exempt from civilian regulations and free to conduct medical research as it pleased. At his farewell ceremony, his Fort Detrick colleagues presented him with a “certificate of survival” for having the courage to stand up to Mattis in person and emerging from the encounter alive. They also gave him a T-shirt with the question, “What do you do after surviving a briefing with a 4 star?” written on the front. The answer could be found on the back: “Retire and sail off into the sunset.”
Ian: Ian fit the stereotype of the nerdy scientist to a T. He wore a beard and glasses and hiked his pants high above his waist. He could spend hours on end analyzing data and took copious notes documenting everything he did at work.
Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines.
After he was promoted, Paul continued to treat Ian as an equal and to consult with him about everything. But they differed in one crucial respect: Paul shied away from conflict and was more willing to compromise with the engineers building the miniLab than Ian was. Ian refused to give an inch and became furious when he felt he was being asked to lower his standards. Paul spent numerous evenings on the phone with him trying to calm him down. During these discussions, Ian told Paul to stand by his convictions and never to lose sight of his concern for the patient. “Paul, it has to be done right,” Ian would say.Indians :
On paper, all three had impressive educational credentials, but they shared two traits: they had very little industry experience, having joined the company not long after finishing their studies, and they had a habit of telling Elizabeth and Sunny what they wanted to hear, either out of fear or out of desire to advance, or both.
With time, some employees grew less afraid of him and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span. Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Sunny off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than five hundred words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Sunny simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails. Another strategy was to convene a biweekly meeting of his team and invite Sunny to attend. He might come to the first few, but he would eventually lose interest or forget to show up.
Products:
“Everyone needs to work as hard as humanly possible to deliver it.” Part of the problem was that Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product. It was as if Boeing built one plane and, without doing a single flight test, told airline passengers, “Hop aboard.”
they had a good relationship grounded in their respect for each other as scientists and would sometimes roast each other in meetings.
People didn’t bullshit or take kindly to it where he came from.
That, in turn, led to another fateful decision—the decision to cheat.
John Carreyrou
That was something she couldn’t live with. She decided to resign. Besides, at this particular moment, I was like a dog without a bone. I needed a new bone to chew on.
Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house. You needed years of formal training and decades of research to add value. There was a reason many Nobel laureates in medicine were in their sixties when their achievements were recognized.
At the Journal, we had a cardinal rule called “No surprises.” We never went to press with a story without informing the story subject of every single piece of information we had gathered in our reporting and giving them ample time and opportunity to address and rebut everything.
He explained that la mattanza was an ancient Sicilian ritual in which fishermen waded into the Mediterranean Sea up to their waist with clubs and spears and then stood still for hours on end until the fish no longer noticed their presence. Eventually, when enough fish had gathered around them, someone gave an imperceptible signal and in a split second the scene went from preternatural quiet to gory bloodbath as the fishermen struck viciously at their unsuspecting quarry. What we were doing was the journalistic version of la mattanza, Mike said. We were patiently lying in wait until we were ready to publish and then, at some time of our choosing, we would strike. As he said this, he mimicked a Sicilian fisherman violently wielding his spear, which made me laugh.
Epilogue
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.
[1]. CARREYROU J，. Bad Blood[M]. Vintage Books, 2020.