Rave Review: "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou

Quick Summary

Type: Nonfiction exposé, audiobook

Genre: Business, health, true crime

Back Cover: "The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.

For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley."

Read Time: 2 days

Rating: 4.75 stars

Review

I originally read this book when I was in college, after reading the original WSJ article by Carreyrou that led to Theranos's downfall. I listened to this again now that there's a satisfying conclusion (she's in prison for the next 10ish years) and it holds up. It's just an amazing story of fraud and an indictment of the Silicon Valley culture I saw a lot of back in the 2010s (and still sometimes see now).

Obviously, the fraud is what tanked Holmes - you can't do that many fraudulent things without government agencies eventually catching on. But I really thought the exploration of the culture at Theranos (which I just see as Silicon Valley culture on steroids) was the best part of the book. I knew about the fraud, but I had forgotten about a lot of the other details, specifically those about the workplace.

Good book, very easy to listen to.