From STATnews, Apr. 12
Theranos this week laid off
all but about two dozen of its remaining employees — the latest
indignity for the once fabulously rich blood-testing company that’s
become a parable for Silicon Valley hubris.
As with much of
the flood of bad news for Theranos, word of the layoffs came from John
Carreyrou, the investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal who was
the first to break the story of the company’s troubles in October 2015 and who later landed a string of Theranos-related scoops.
STAT obtained an advance copy of the
roughly 300-page book. Through countless details and episodes reported
for the first time, Carreyrou paints a damning portrait of the culture
of dysfunction and deception overseen by CEO Elizabeth Holmes.
Below are the eight most remarkable things we learned from reading “Bad Blood.”
The company, we should add, didn’t return STAT’s request for comment.
1. Theranos was lying as early as 2006
Much of the attention on Theranos’ misdeeds has been focused on what happened (and what failed to happen) after the company launched its blood-testing services to the public in Walgreens drugstores in September 2013.
But Carreyrou says there was deception going on far earlier.
In an episode reported for the first
time in the book, Carreyrou describes a surreal scene from 2006, in
which the company’s first chief financial officer learned that Theranos
had deceived Novartis executives in demonstrating its technology at a
pitch meeting in Switzerland. The trick: Because the blood-testing
system was inconsistent in generating results, Theranos staffers had
recorded a result from one of the times it worked to display in the
demonstration.
And when the CFO raised concern about that with Holmes? He was fired on the spot.
2. Theranos’s technology was more amateurish than previously known
Theranos has largely taken heat for
lying. But Carreyrou also found absurdity and amateurism at the heart of
the company’s technology.
In one revealing incident, Holmes and
an associate spent two hours pricking their fingers in a hotel before a
big meeting with Novartis in a futile effort to get the buggy
technology to work. In another, the head of the software team bragged
that he could write the code for the technology’s software faster using
Flash — before a “Learn Flash” book turned up on his desk....MUCH MORE
HT: Slope of Hope
via ZeroHedge
