Recently I read a new book based on the very famous Theranos startup success story till it got exposed . I was following Theranos for a long time and marveled this intelligent woman Elizabeth Holmes (something about the name?) who was going to revolutionize health care. The book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou details the rise and fall of Theranos.
I am a fan of Agatha Christie,Erle Stanley Gardner, Robin Cook, Frederick Forsyth & I also like to read books about great innovations. I think this book is a mix of everything (but no murders here!) and also a guide to what care should be taken before funding a #StartUp .
In 2015, Forbes named Holmes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America due to a $9 billion valuation of her company 'Theranos'. Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos when she was just 19 years old. By 2013, Theranos was valued at nearly $10 billion and she partnered with Walgreens to put their blood tests in stores around the country. Fact is her story was fake and the technology never worked. In fact whatever she wanted to build never came close to working but Holmes was so good at selling her vision that she wasn’t stopped until after real patients were using the company’s “tests” to make decisions about their health. A wall street journal reporter Caarreyrou exposed her con. Now she and her former business partner are now facing potential jail time on fraud charges, and Theranos officially shut down in Aug 2018.
What Elizabeth Holmes did is nothing less than a clever magicians illusion trick! Holmes would invite prospective investors to the lab, so they could get their blood tested on a Theranos machine. The device had been programmed to show a really slow progress bar instead of an error message. When results didn’t come back right away, Holmes sent the investors home and promised to follow up with results. As soon as investor left, an employee would remove the blood sample from the device and transfer it to a commercial blood analyzer. Her investors got their blood tested by the same machines available in any pathology lab in the country, and they had no idea and none of the investors ever bothered to check. So none of the investors had ever seen any live demonstration of the Theranos machine, they just believed what Holmes told them. Clever ? No! Dumb investors!
All through you and I thought all Elizabeth Holmes claimed has been verified and re-verified by investors who had pumped in billions of dollars. I wonder was it her charm or her speech that mesmerized the investors! Nope it was her tact of targeting investors who were not expert in of he field and avoiding VC who has expertise in her field of 'specialization'/ In fact it is rumored that initially Holmes had walked out of VC meeting when she was unable to answer probing questions about the technology. Must admire this wo,am was able to fool people fro so long and had the guts to present her vision on TED MED and other conferences attended by senior experts from the industry. Shocking! S watch her video at TEDMED Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO at TEDMED 2014 /
And you must also watch this interesting video about Body Language - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf3rudZ5QT8
You can buy the book at Amazon - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
I am a fan of Agatha Christie,Erle Stanley Gardner, Robin Cook, Frederick Forsyth & I also like to read books about great innovations. I think this book is a mix of everything (but no murders here!) and also a guide to what care should be taken before funding a #StartUp .
In 2015, Forbes named Holmes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America due to a $9 billion valuation of her company 'Theranos'. Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos when she was just 19 years old. By 2013, Theranos was valued at nearly $10 billion and she partnered with Walgreens to put their blood tests in stores around the country. Fact is her story was fake and the technology never worked. In fact whatever she wanted to build never came close to working but Holmes was so good at selling her vision that she wasn’t stopped until after real patients were using the company’s “tests” to make decisions about their health. A wall street journal reporter Caarreyrou exposed her con. Now she and her former business partner are now facing potential jail time on fraud charges, and Theranos officially shut down in Aug 2018.
What Elizabeth Holmes did is nothing less than a clever magicians illusion trick! Holmes would invite prospective investors to the lab, so they could get their blood tested on a Theranos machine. The device had been programmed to show a really slow progress bar instead of an error message. When results didn’t come back right away, Holmes sent the investors home and promised to follow up with results. As soon as investor left, an employee would remove the blood sample from the device and transfer it to a commercial blood analyzer. Her investors got their blood tested by the same machines available in any pathology lab in the country, and they had no idea and none of the investors ever bothered to check. So none of the investors had ever seen any live demonstration of the Theranos machine, they just believed what Holmes told them. Clever ? No! Dumb investors!
All through you and I thought all Elizabeth Holmes claimed has been verified and re-verified by investors who had pumped in billions of dollars. I wonder was it her charm or her speech that mesmerized the investors! Nope it was her tact of targeting investors who were not expert in of he field and avoiding VC who has expertise in her field of 'specialization'/ In fact it is rumored that initially Holmes had walked out of VC meeting when she was unable to answer probing questions about the technology. Must admire this wo,am was able to fool people fro so long and had the guts to present her vision on TED MED and other conferences attended by senior experts from the industry. Shocking! S watch her video at TEDMED Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO at TEDMED 2014 /
And you must also watch this interesting video about Body Language - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf3rudZ5QT8
You can buy the book at Amazon - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
