Bad Blood tells the story of Theranos, one of the biggest Silicon Valley scams of all time

📚 Finished listening to Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.

This is a deep dive into the life and times of the infamous med-tech company Theranos. Or one of the biggest provable scams of the many that seem to originate from the world of Silicon Valley.

Theranos was Elizabeth Holmes' company that promised some incredible medical devices that could truly change the trajectory of a certain type of healthcare. She was offering tiny finger-pick blood tests that could run hundreds of lab tests quickly and cheaply. Much smaller, cheaper and quick than anything that came before. Eventually the company was valued as high as $9 billion.

Her vision seems to be that they’d eventually become an essential device in everyone’s home, allowing people to painlessly pick up on early signs of any number of problematic diseases and hence get early treatment .

It would, undoubtedly, save lives.

Only one problem. They couldn’t make it work. The devices were much more limited than claimed and extraordinarily unreliable. A real shame. But not something Holmes et al would ever accept. What started out as what felt to me as a genuine desire to build and sell this revolutionary technology turned into nothing more than a huge scam as Theranos constantly lied about its capabilities, secretly using big machines from its competitors to run the tests, in the end manipulating investors, misrepresenting science, conning investors out of huge sums of money and very likely putting the patients that used their test at tremendous risk.

Whistleblowers were rarely seen, and the handful that did talk to author talked about being threatened, sidelined or otherwise suppressed. This probably had something to do with Holmes and her COO, Sunny Balwani running an extremely secretive operation within which they ruled by fear. Constant NDAs everywhere, constant threats and actual litigation abounded to its own employees and other curious parties.

Including journalists. This book is written by John Carreyrou, a journalist who, despite the legal threats, published a pivotal series of exposures in the Wall Street Journal after he did manage to get the inside track via a number of often confidential sources. The rest is history - regulatory investigations ensued, Theranos was closed down, and criminal cases were commenced against Holmes and Balwani.

The book finishes before the court action commenced, but we now know that Holmes was found guilty of 4 counts of criminal fraud and sentenced to 135 months in prison. Balwani got 12 years and 11 months. And they were ordered to pay $452 million to the victims of their fraud between them.

The book in parts reads like a thriller. The audacity of what went down is almost unbelievable, and yet, at this point it’s clear to everyone that this was a real life conspiracy theory that turns out to be appallingly true.