Review of BAD BLOOD

Somehow, I just found out about Elizabeth Holmes. Whoops.

Fall of 2015 was a busy time for me. I had just started my first year of my doctoral program (time flies!) while also following the news of my field of choice – psychology – crumbling under the weight of the replication crisis going mainstream with the publication of the Open Science Collaboration report showing more than half of what I learned about psychology in undergrad was bullshit.

Forgive me for not knowing about another meltdown, this time in Silicon Valley where its hottest startup, Theronos, and its founder Elizabeth Holmes just had the whistle blown in the Wall Street Journal by investigative journalist, John Carreyrou (see six pages of stories he published on the company in three years).

Please also forgive me for somehow missing years of fallout and, recently, the culmination of her criminal charges in January. Elizabeth Holmes jokes came up a couple times in conversation recently, until I finally (embarrassingly) asked my friend “what is Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes?”

She told me to read Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup authored by the investigative journalist who broke the story of the fraudulent Silicon Valley unicorn in fall of 2015, John Carreyrou.

What an absolutely insane story! I presume many of you reading thing know about Theranos and Holmes, and probably have lost interest by now as I’m writing about seven-year-old news. But this book is nuts.

How Holmes managed to swindle some of the most prominent VCs in the Valley, in addition to top executives at huge corporations like Walgreens, is beyond comprehension. You really can start a startup with literally no product and maybe even build a unicorn based on absolute garbage. What a time to be alive.

Aside from the book demonstrating that delusional people and crappy products can garner $100s of millions in funding, it also was flat out insanity the tactics of intimidation and brute force the company used to keep their fraudulent enterprise contained. You really can keep a charade going for years with good lawyers and toxic workplace culture!

I didn’t realize at first that the author was the journalist who broke the story, but it made the book – especially the latter half once he formally became a character in the story – far more intriguing. The overall delivery of the book was fantastic, and built up well to the climax of the story breaking. The book was published in 2018, so it doesn’t cover any of the trial and formal charges that just wrapped up a few months ago. If you’re like me and somehow missed this story, or want to know more of the details about how this all managed to happen, I’d highly recommend this book.

Published: May 2018

Format: Audio

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If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:

• Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism by Jillian York (2021)

• The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara (2019)

• We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin (2018)

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