“Bad Blood: secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup” by John Carreyrou
How can a 19 year old Stanford dropout, with only 2 semesters worth of chemical engineering credits, is able to start a company in Silicon Valley focusing on cutting-edge new science in medicine?
How can she then surrounds herself with all-stars management team (such as General James Mattis and former Wells Fargo’s CEO Richard Kovacevich), employ the most capable experts (Stanford, MIT, Caltech and Cambridge PhDs are not uncommon among the 800 employees), backed by a number of diverse investors (with Rupert Murdoch, Carlos Slim Helu, Betsy DeVos, among many of them) and highly regarded board members (like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz), not to mention the numerous media exposures and her attendances at formal White House events.
How can she pull all of this off, even at one time regarded as the female Steve Jobs that will revolutionise the healthcare industry, only ended up becoming a fraud?
This is an incredibly bizarre true story of Elizabeth Holmes, and the rapid rise and spectacular fall of her start-up bio-tech company Theranos.
The author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, interviewed more than 150 people (including more than 60 former theranos employees) to set the facts straight, turned it into THAT 2015 investigative reporting at the Wall Street Journal, before re-telling the story in this book in a gripping manner that reads like a thriller movie.
It is filled with hope and brilliance, lies and deceits, lots of lawsuits, harassments, and even suicide. It’s no wonder that the book has received so many awards including winning the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award in 2018. It is simply hard to put down the book once you start reading it.
EDWIN SETIADI 