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A review by edgwareviabank
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Even if you've already read about Theranos, the US startup that raised millions for blood testing devices that never worked, Bad Blood is worth your time. The author, John Carreyrou, is the journalist who first broke the story. I understand a lot of it appears in articles he has been writing since 2015; presented in its entirety, it's a damning picture of Theranos's disastrous impact on employees and patients, and of the hubris of its leaders, most famously founder Elizabeth Holmes. It couldn't, and shouldn't be anything else.
I had this book in my to-read list for a while, courtesy of the part of me that falls into every internet rabbit hole about modern scams (Fyre Festival, MLMs, Caroline Calloway, you name it), and the one that works in software but is generally suspicious of anything touted as "revolutionary" or "life-altering" tech. Both found what they were looking for, and much more.
The first half of the book reads like a thriller, following several people who go through the same arc of buying into the Theranos promise and discovering its dark side when they're already in too deep. The approach is effective, because more often than not, the story covers reality that is much stranger than fiction. Think of every marker of a toxic company and multiply it by ten: questionable company culture, despotical leaders, security that borders paranoia, unethical behaviour. All the more shocking when you realise Theranos was not exposed until ten years (ten years!) into its operations.
The second half covers the period Carreyrou spent reporting on the story, bringing in sharp focus the personal cost former employees, journalists and business rivals had to pay for speaking against a Silicon Valley "unicorn" company with an exceptionally well connected founder. Elizabeth Holmes had top politicians, scientists and business leaders eating out of her hand, and that ended up being the most unexpectedly interesting part of the book to me, for two reasons.
First, it explains (at least partly) why the fraud has been allowed to go on for as long as it has. Because of the power and reputation of the people involved, yes. But why do former secretaries of state, military chiefs and presidential candidates get involved with a charismatic but clueless startup founder in the first place? Because that sort of charisma comes with privilege, and Elizabeth Holmes was born with it (whatever her father believed about his ancestors squandering a family fortune). She was the sort of person they could easily consider "one of us" and welcome within their fold. It's not a stretch to imagine that someone without her connections and safety net would fail much faster: run out of funds, be bankrupted by legal fees, fail to secure a prestigious board of directors, or even get caught by regulators much sooner.
Secondly, this all goes to show what I believe is true of the vast majority of people (and, in the case of Theranos, not just the investors - some of the employees, too). Each of us has at least one vulnerability a scam could potentially exploit; all it takes to become a victim is for someone with the intent to deceive to spot it. For many of the people who appear in the book, whether they ended up seeing the truth or not, it was the desire to be someone whose work or whose influence changed lives. For the patients Theranos has put at risk, it was the need to stay on top of their health with limited means, within the punishing and discriminatory US healthcare system.
Right when I'd just started the book, I mentioned I was reading it to someone at work. They said people like Elizabeth Holmes are delusional, but not necessarily bad: if you ask them whether they truly believe they are changing the world for the better, they'll probably say yes from the bottom of their heart. Chapter after chapter, I realised I don't agree. Delusional and bad don't exclude each other. Bad Blood makes a convincing case for both, all the while making it clear that, however absorbed by her vision Holmes may have been, she and Theranos failed to uphold the most basic moral standards and committed crimes.
I had this book in my to-read list for a while, courtesy of the part of me that falls into every internet rabbit hole about modern scams (Fyre Festival, MLMs, Caroline Calloway, you name it), and the one that works in software but is generally suspicious of anything touted as "revolutionary" or "life-altering" tech. Both found what they were looking for, and much more.
The first half of the book reads like a thriller, following several people who go through the same arc of buying into the Theranos promise and discovering its dark side when they're already in too deep. The approach is effective, because more often than not, the story covers reality that is much stranger than fiction. Think of every marker of a toxic company and multiply it by ten: questionable company culture, despotical leaders, security that borders paranoia, unethical behaviour. All the more shocking when you realise Theranos was not exposed until ten years (ten years!) into its operations.
The second half covers the period Carreyrou spent reporting on the story, bringing in sharp focus the personal cost former employees, journalists and business rivals had to pay for speaking against a Silicon Valley "unicorn" company with an exceptionally well connected founder. Elizabeth Holmes had top politicians, scientists and business leaders eating out of her hand, and that ended up being the most unexpectedly interesting part of the book to me, for two reasons.
First, it explains (at least partly) why the fraud has been allowed to go on for as long as it has. Because of the power and reputation of the people involved, yes. But why do former secretaries of state, military chiefs and presidential candidates get involved with a charismatic but clueless startup founder in the first place? Because that sort of charisma comes with privilege, and Elizabeth Holmes was born with it (whatever her father believed about his ancestors squandering a family fortune). She was the sort of person they could easily consider "one of us" and welcome within their fold. It's not a stretch to imagine that someone without her connections and safety net would fail much faster: run out of funds, be bankrupted by legal fees, fail to secure a prestigious board of directors, or even get caught by regulators much sooner.
Secondly, this all goes to show what I believe is true of the vast majority of people (and, in the case of Theranos, not just the investors - some of the employees, too). Each of us has at least one vulnerability a scam could potentially exploit; all it takes to become a victim is for someone with the intent to deceive to spot it. For many of the people who appear in the book, whether they ended up seeing the truth or not, it was the desire to be someone whose work or whose influence changed lives. For the patients Theranos has put at risk, it was the need to stay on top of their health with limited means, within the punishing and discriminatory US healthcare system.
Right when I'd just started the book, I mentioned I was reading it to someone at work. They said people like Elizabeth Holmes are delusional, but not necessarily bad: if you ask them whether they truly believe they are changing the world for the better, they'll probably say yes from the bottom of their heart. Chapter after chapter, I realised I don't agree. Delusional and bad don't exclude each other. Bad Blood makes a convincing case for both, all the while making it clear that, however absorbed by her vision Holmes may have been, she and Theranos failed to uphold the most basic moral standards and committed crimes.