Bad Blood

One of the first things you notice about Elizabeth Holmes are her eyes. Undeniably large and round, unblinking and startlingly blue. A quick Google search generates a list of results soundly supporting everyone’s fixation with them; articles dissecting how such an unwavering gaze was just one of the more subtle ways in which she managed to dupe everyone. How ironic then, that the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America should lose it all in the blink of an eye.

In the soft, balmy fall of 2002 Holmes began her sophomore year at Stanford University. Her peers remember a smart, socially awkward and fairly unremarkable student, forgettable even. But to Professor of Medicine, Phyllis Gardner, Holmes was memorable, namely for not taking no for an answer. The 19-year-old approached Gardner after class one afternoon and outlined her idea for a patch that would test for a particular microbe and which could deliver antibiotics to its wearer. Although Gardner didn’t want to discourage this blue-sky-thinking, she was quick to emphasize the impossibility of the idea. “Antibiotics are not potent. That’s why you have big IV bags.”
Not to be deterred, Holmes returned once more with her patch pitch and was politely redirected to some of the department’s other professors, who might better accommodate such misapplied tenacity.

Only a few years later, Gardner would be bogarted by one of her students at the end of class and told about Holmes’ new business venture, Theranos. The ‘in utero’ start-up claimed to do away with the hypodermic needle and, by using tiny quantities of blood, be able to screen and diagnose over 200 conditions.

It was the start-up everyone wanted to believe in; Obamacare was still yawning it’s way into the average US citizens’ household and Theranos promised much-needed accessibility and affordability whilst Holmes, in the same concrete and shrubbery-flanked vistas as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, fulfilled the long-awaited desire for a female innovator, so perfectly on track for world domination. Arguably, it’s this particular facet of Theranos’ story which is so compelling, so shocking and so…novel. It was a rare and very public example of a female leader catastrophically felled by her own ego.

In fairness, it was an ego that year-on-year was being fattened up on a metaphorical diet of peaches, T-bone steaks and Californian sunshine. It positively flourished as investors, including Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison and Tim Draper proffered huge sums of money for nothing more than a vision. Walgreens, the second-largest pharmaceutical chain in the US, rolled out Theranos blood testing booths in around 40 of its stores, on nothing more than a vision.
Why was the story that was being told and the individual telling it, more important than the unviable product itself?

It became apparent to Theranos employees early on that Holme’s vision for the ‘betterment of humanity’ couldn’t become a reality in the immediate future. The proposed ‘one size fits all’ method of testing was simply incompatible with the majority of medical conditions being tested.

For example, the pressure of extracting blood with a finger prick test often results in the sample containing burst red blood cells and consequently distorting the levels of potassium in the blood. In some of Theranos’ samples, the levels of potassium were so high that the patient would have to be dead in order for the reading to be accurate.
Adam Vollmer, a mechanical engineer who worked on the blood-drawing device, reported that light was seeping into the device and corrupting the blood telemetry data of real studies being carried out, ‘it seemed like we were a very long way away from having a working product.’

Such glitches and setbacks are anticipated in the initial phases of any start-up but it also quickly became clear to employees that these weren’t to be discussed openly. Secrecy was the company’s modus operandi, leaving morale rotten to its core and protecting Holmes in her Machiavellian manoeuvres. Manoeuvres that many maintain weren’t to accommodate a cold-blooded scam but more the result of one lie that snowballed in order to protect her meticulously studied persona and the company that was built around it.

Ana Arriola, another former employee, was willingly poached from her position as a product designer at Apple, leaving 15,000 shares of Apple behind her for a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’. She recalls Holmes’ obsession with her previous employer and Steve Jobs, specifically his attire.
‘I explained to her that he was inspired by Sony's heritage of having Issey Miyake come in and create a lot of the line manager apparel’. It wasn’t long before Arriola realised she had gone from apples to oranges when Holmes began roaming the office’s halls in black turtlenecks, with many also attesting to her adopting a new low, businesss-like baritone around this time.

It was this well-placed research and approach from Holmes that evidently paid dividends.
Ken Auletta, a journalist who spoke to many people for a New Yorker profile on the Theranos founder, remembers people’s reactions: ‘they were talking about her as if she was Beethoven’.
Henry Kissinger, one of the board of directors told Auletta that Holmes had an ‘ethereal quality’, even going so far as to compare her to a member of a monastic order. It was this public perception, coupled with a self-importance teetering on sociopathy, that witnessed her hailed by Forbes as the youngest and wealthiest female billionaire by 2014, with a net worth of 4.5 billion. By 2016, Forbes had revised this to zero after a veritable buffet of fraud allegations.

In 2019, Kylie Jenner would be the first person to claim Forbes’ ‘youngest self-made’ title after Holmes. Despite the controversy surrounding Forbes’ questionable designation of Jenner as ‘self-made’, her empire was nevertheless built on a $26 lipstick that offered it’s users the perfect ‘Kylie lip’. Jenner had already admitted to having lip fillers in May 2015 and the product wasn’t launched until November of that same year. The ‘Kylie lip’ being sold was an illusion, available in shades (you wonder how ironically) named ‘Shady’, ‘Ironic’ and ‘Extraordinary’. But consumers were more than happy to pay for this carefully manufactured illusion that Jenner was fronting, even paying up to ten times as much for re-listings of the product on eBay.

Both are stories about the power of believing the hype and about products being carried to the stratosphere purely based on the individuals fronting them. Am I suggesting that the respective journeys of a cosmetics empire and biotech start-up have some light parallels? Maybe.
Am I suggesting that both achieved their success on ideals that didn’t exist? Definitely.

Review of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, written by John Carreyrou.

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