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The Quiet Protagonist

Review of John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup"

Updated: Jun 3, 2019


At first one may wonder whether writing a whole book on that story was really necessary. Would it bring much added value as opposed to a long, well-documented newspaper piece, for instance? It turned out that it does and the read therefore really exceeds expectations.

Beyond the actual story of the company’s fraud and ensuing scandal, what is even more fascinating is the process behind the whole investigative work the journalist conducted, how he describes its different stages, its setbacks, the role of key actors involved (e.g. former employees) and how their own stories became entangled in the scandal. What comes across very strongly are also the values and people that constituted the driving force behind the investigation and the story that eventually came out. In that and in how breathtaking the author’s account is, the book somewhat recalls Woodward & Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men”.

The book undoubtedly is a page-turner, well-written and well-structured. Despite the large number of individuals involved, the author manages a real tour-de-force in never losing its reader, providing just the right amount of details.

The story itself is at times barely believable. The lengths to which the company and its leaders were willing to go in order to hide the fact their technology just did not work is just baffling. Even more shocking is the culture of secrecy, bullying and at times full-fledged intimidation and harassment that became inherent to the company's culture. This, just because its leaders sold an idea they could not deliver and decided to double-down in their lies rather than pause and try to actually improve their product in order to make it work. As the author points out, overselling a technology’s innovative dimension and capabilities has become business as usual in the Sillicon Valley. Except Theranos was not exactly a tech company, it claimed to revolutionize the field of blood-testing. Therefore, its lies about what its technology could and could not do had obvious, potentially tragic implications for patients.

It is difficult to review this book and talk about this curious scandal without pausing to analyze its main character. How Theranos’ CEO was able to continue raising money, getting media attention and receiving awards for so long while having very little to show for in terms of her actual, supposedly-revolutionary product is both mind-blowing and incredibly odd. The book’s author touches upon Holmes’ personality in the book’s epilogue. Yet he recognizes, to his credit, that he is not a psychologist and therefore refrained from offering any psychoanalysis about Holmes’ personality that may help explain how she was able to keep this fraud going for so long.

Based on the book, a few aspects come across as striking: how most people’s first impressions of Holmes were generally very positive. Her charisma and deep voice are aspects that keep coming up, while her intelligence is sometimes described as “one-in-a-generation”. Second, it is unquestionable that her political connections provided her with a very effective firewall. One cannot help but think that she was well aware of this and knew exactly what she was doing. The fact that Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and George Shultz were all on the board of this company that never actually proved much of what it proposed is just mind-boggling.

Ultimately, the author provides a very simple yet convincing explanation on how Holmes did it: She is an incredibly talented salesperson. This implies several attributes, such as knowing what makes people tick, having a moral compass that may sometimes sway depending on what matters for the sale at hand, and the capacity to spin setbacks and criticisms while pivoting back to turn the situation to her advantage. Yet when having the full picture of what happened with Theranos, something becomes clear: it took a very particular kind of leadership, one with clear sociopathic tendencies, to perpetrate such a fraud.

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