Memorable quotes
Ed didn’t think she meant it to sound as callous as it did. But she was so laser focused on achieving her goals that she seemed oblivious to the practical implications of her decisions.
Ellison might be one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of some $25 billion, but he wasn’t necessarily the ideal role model. In Oracle’s early years, he had famously exaggerated his database software’s capabilities and shipped versions of it crawling with bugs. That’s not something you could do with a medical device.
But after he filled his friend in on everything that had happened, the friend asked a question that helped him put the situation in perspective: “Given everything you now know about this company, do you really want to own more of it?”
You cannot run a company through fear and intimidation…it will only work for a period of time before it collapses.
She was so defensive and obstinate that Shoemaker quickly realized that prolonging the argument would be a waste of time. She clearly didn’t want to hear anything that contradicted her point of view.
Elizabeth’s loose relationship with the truth was another point of contention. Ian had heard her tell outright lies more than once and, after five years of working with her, he no longer trusted anything she said, especially when she made representations to employees or outsiders about the readiness of the company’s technology.
Instead of rushing to the stock market like their dot-com predecessors had in the late 1990s, the unicorns were able to raise staggering amounts of money privately and thus avoid the close scrutiny that came with going public.
As much as she courted the attention, Elizabeth’s sudden fame wasn’t entirely her doing. Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder.
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
Had she trusted the Theranos result and increased the patient’s medication dosage, the outcome could have been disastrous, Dr. Stewart said. The patient was pregnant. Increasing her dosage would have made her levels of thyroid hormone too high and put her pregnancy at risk.
THE TERM “VAPORWARE” was coined in the early 1980s to describe new computer software or hardware that was announced with great fanfare only to take years to materialize, if it did at all. It was a reflection of the computer industry’s tendency to play it fast and loose when it came to marketing. Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle were all accused of engaging in the practice at one point or another. Such overpromising became a defining feature of Silicon Valley. The harm done to consumers was minor, measured in frustration and deflated expectations.
By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery.
Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry. But it’s crucial to bear in mind that Theranos wasn’t a tech company in the traditional sense. It was first and foremost a health-care company. Its product wasn’t software but a medical device that analyzed people’s blood. As Holmes herself liked to point out in media interviews and public appearances at the height of her fame, doctors base 70 percent of their treatment decisions on lab results. They rely on lab equipment to work as advertised. Otherwise, patient health is jeopardized.
A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.
Holmes knew exactly what she was doing and she was firmly in control. When one former employee interviewed for a job at Theranos in the summer of 2011, he asked Holmes about the role of the company’s board. She took offense at the question. “The board is just a placeholder,” he recalls her saying. “I make all the decisions here.” If anything, it was Holmes who was the manipulator. One after another, she wrapped people around her finger and persuaded them to do her bidding. The first to fall under her spell was Channing Robertson, the Stanford engineering professor whose reputation helped give her credibility when she was just a teenager.