A Pulitzer Prize winning reporter at The Wall Street Journal charts the rise and fall of Theranos, one of Silicon Valley's hottest health-care startups that, after attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from the likes of Joe Biden and Betsy DeVos, turned out to be a fraud
In Theranos’s brief, Icarus-like existence as a Silicon Valley darling ... [t]he company was the subject of adoring media profiles; it attracted a who’s who of retired politicos to its board ... This is the story the prizewinning Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells virtually to perfection ... Carreyrou’s presentation has a few minor flaws. He introduces scores of characters and, after a while, it becomes hard to keep track of them. In describing these many players he sometimes relies on stereotypes ... Such blemishes in no way detract from the power of Bad Blood. In the second part of the book the author compellingly relates how he got involved, following a tip from a suspicious reader. His recounting of his efforts to track down sources...reads like a West Coast version of All the President’s Men. The author is admirably frank about his craft ... The question of how it [Theranos] got so far — more than 800 employees and a paper valuation of $9 billion — will fascinate business school classes for years.
Bad Blood is indeed a great and at times almost unbelievable story of scandalous fraud, surveillance, and legal intimidation at the highest levels of American corporate power.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is John Carreyrou’s gripping story of how Holmes’s great idea led to Silicon Valley stardom and then into an ethical quagmire ... Carreyrou tells this intricate story in clear prose and with a momentum worthy of a crime novel. The only flaw, an unavoidable one, is that keeping track of the many characters is not easy—Carreyrou interviewed over 150 people. But he makes sure you know who the moral heroes are of this sad tale.
