Biography great leaders

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies
in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou

Trust me, after you’re halfway in, you won’t put this book down for dinner. Published in mid-2018, Bad Blood is a compulsively readable account of Theranos Inc., a Silicon Valley unicorn that truly was a fairy tale. Its charismatic young founder persuaded an A-list of wealthy people to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on a pipe dream: her spurious claim that a small, portable machine could accurately, speedily diagnose hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood.

At one point Theranos was worth $9 billion, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford University dropout with no medical or scientific training, was briefly worth more than $4.6 billion. She was hailed as the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all rolled into one; in a nod to her hero Jobs, she even wore the same brand of black turtleneck sweaters that Jobs wore, and she got around Palo Alto in a black Audi sedan lacking license plates, only hers came with a chauffeur. Still in her 20s, she had a private Gulfstream jet at her disposal, she never went anywhere without a security detail, and her face was on the cover of national magazines.

Today, in her mid-30s, she is disgraced, broke, and, along with the company's pr

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