John CarreyrouCritiques

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
(Available as Print: ©5/21/2018; PUBLISHER: Knopf; ISBN: 978-1524731656; PAGES: 352; Unabridged.)
(Available as Digital: Yes)

*This version: Audio : ©5/21/2018; PUBLISHER: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group; DURATION: 11:41:54; FILE SIZE: 334544 KB; Unabridged

(Feature Film or tv: There is a documentary as well as a film version that is In the making.)

Series: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
I saw the print version of this while in my favorite bookstore, Newport Beach Public Library’s Friends Used Books, and overheard a fellow-patron who’d spotted it as well, telling the volunteers how thoroughly he enjoyed this book. Indeed, he claimed it was his all-time favorite (and this fellow was around MY age, no Spring chicken). He was asking the volunteer if she was familiar with it and with the case that was currently in the news which the book focuses on. The volunteer was aware, but wasn’t interested in hearing about the book. I got a sense of disapproval on her part, but of what (Book? Author? Biographee?) Anyway, I made a mental note to check my Los Angeles Public Library’s (LAPL) Overdrive for the audio version, and, when I did, was thrilled to find I didn’t even need to place a hold. . . .not for the first check-out. By the time I needed to renew it however, I would have, had I not been rescued by my other favorite library’s (Palos Verdes Library District) Overdrive. I suspect by this time the news had been more regularly airing snippets and the fact that a verdict on the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos trial was going to run over into the new year.
Even if you have no interest in medical devices/technology; business, startup companies, or white collar crime, this book is fascinating, not to mention exceedingly well written.

AUTHOR:
John Carreyrou: According to Wikipedia, “John Carreyrou (/ˌkæriˈruː/)[1] is a French-American journalist and writer who worked for The Wall Street Journal for 20 years between 1999 and 2019[2] and has been based in Brussels, Paris, and New York City. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is well known for having exposed the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in the Wall Street Journal. . . . A book-length treatment titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018)[34] won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.[35] A film version is in the works starring Jennifer Lawrence, written by Vanessa Taylor, and directed by Adam McKay.[36] . . .”

NARRATOR:
Will Damron: According to Tantor Media, “Will Damron is an Audie Award–nominated narrator who has recorded books in every genre, from science fiction and fantasy to romance, YA, and nonfiction. Raised in rural southern Virginia, he has appeared Off-Broadway and on stage and screen throughout the country. He lives in Los Angeles, California.”
VERY good narration here.

GENRE:
Biography; Biography; Nonfiction; Technology

LOCATIONS:
Palo Alto

TIME FRAME:
2003-2018

SUBJECTS:
Family; Start-ups; Nepotism; Business; Medical Devices; Labs; Blood tests; fraud; criminal; politicians; celebrities; marketing; Theranos (firm) history; hematologic equipment; industry; Economics; Entrepreneurship; Finance; Biomedical; technology and engineering; trade secrets; whistle blowers; Elizabeth Holmes; deceit; management; ambition; venture capital

DEDICATION:
I didn’t see one in the digital sample on Amazon.

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From the Prologue
"November 17, 2006
Tim Kemp had good news for his team.
The former IBM executive was in charge of bioinformatics at Theranos, a startup with a cutting-edge blood-testing system. The company had just completed its first big live demonstration for a pharmaceutical company. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos's twenty-two-year-old founder, had flown to Switzerland and shown off the system's capabilities to executives at Noartis, the European drug giant.
'Elizabeth called me this morning,' Kemp wrote in an email to his fifteen-person team. 'She expressed her thanks and said that, 'it went perfect!' She specifically asked me to thank you and let you all know her appreciation. She additionally mentioned that Novartis was so impressed that they have asked for a proposal and have expressed interest in a financial arrangement for a project. We did what we came to do!'
This was a pivotal moment for Theranos. The three-year-old startup had progressed from an ambitious idea Holmes had dreamed up in her Stanford dorm room to an actual product a huge multinational corporation was interested in using.
Word of the demo's success made its way upstairs to the second floor, where senior executives offices were located.
One of those executives was Henry Mosley, Theranos's chief financial officer. Mosley had jointed Theranos eight months earlier, in March, 2006. A rumpled dresser with piercing green eyes and a laid-back personality, he was a veteran of Silicon Valley's technology scene. . . ."

RATING:
5 stars. GREAT book.

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
12/27/2021 – 1/25/2022

Surprisingly readable investigative story. I was worried that there would be too many characters to keep track of, but each chapter concentrates on a certain group that then disappears from focus (often because they get fired).

This is an incredible expose about Elizabeth Holmes, 20 years old, college drop out before sophomore year, charismatic and with a desire for "a purposeful life". She patented her idea to develop an in-home mini lab where individuals can administer their own blood test with a single drop of blood and transfer the info to their doctor for treatment recommendations, if necessary.
In the span of 10 years Theranos, the start-up which Holmes created, went from a little blood testing machine to, well, a little non-functioning blood testing machine. Through quick thinking, being evasive and using outside testing facilities for accurate results was she was able to receive the backing of the US Army and former Secretaries of State, George Schultz and Henry Kissinger.
How does this flimsy start-up come to an end? A phone call to a Wall Street Journal journalist named John Carryrou from a suspicious employee.

Highly informative and interesting. Could barely put it down. Simply fantastic.

The thing about this being a page-turner was no joke: i read it in three days.

This one totally led up to the hype. This level selling people on complete BS totally happens and it takes you back all the times you've been in a meeting and thought "yeah right" this is that out of control. Written like a true investigative report it gives the facts objectively but not so dry it's boring. Very well written, the ordering made sense and wasn't confusing or hard to follow even when listening as an audiobook, a hard feat for this type of book.

Everything about this book is insane. The story is compelling, really well written, and a great example of why we need a free press.

Like the movie "Spotlight," this book presents a potent argument for buttressing journalism schools in the United States and ensuring that we as a society and a republic have among us a cadre of well-trained, independent, professional journalists. Kudos to John Carreyrou for both his gifts as a stylist and an investigative reporter. It would not be too much to call him an American hero.

I always wondered why is was so difficult to expose illegal business activity. Now I understand why. The pressure on the truth teller is intense.½

Good book and a great story. It got a little monotonous and repetitive at times but I’m glad I read it.

Coming to this book a bit after-the-fact (the two main protagonists were prosecuted a year ago), I was already biased against Elizabeth Holmes. I had really only been paying passing attention to the situation, thinking it just another 'tech" talking a good game, getting a lot of press and walking away with tons of money, enough to hire lawyers to sort out the mess.
Well, I got to page 25 and absolutely hated her and it became clearer and clearer as the book went on that this was a situation that went well beyond the typical Silicon Valley flash in the pan that came crashing down, this whole situation was outright fraud. Whether or not she is a diagnosed Sociopath, Ms Holmes managed to convince a number of very intelligent people that she was going to change the world for the better, all while having absolutely no concept on how to get her idea to work.
As an aside, the shear amount of employee turnover would give any business person and investor pause (it is comforting to see the number of people who left the company on moral grounds).
Towards the end of this horror show, I just couldn't help picturing in my mind Elizabeth Holmes jumping up and down in her cell complaining to all who would listen about how unfair this whole situation is. That the medical establishment and a muckraking journalist were just out to get her. It really is unfortunate that she'll be out of prison in a couple of years, I am convinced that she will not, ever, learn a lesson from this.

The nerve of some people!

This is kickass writing. I listened to the audiobook and it read like a nail biting thriller. A simple story of how perceptions can cause so much illusions. More importantly, why founder-value fit is much more important than product-market fit.

One of the best investigative pieces I've ever read - and also, by the nature of the case, horrifying.
This book deals with Theranos, the famous Silicon Valley unicorn (a term coined for a tech startup which is valued at more than $1 billion) and its neurotic founder, Elizabeth Holmes and her equally neurotic boyfriend, Sunny Balwani.
Many people have heard that Theranos has had shady dealings (myself included), but how shady they were is revealed by this book - a treatise on Theranos spanning from its foundation till its demise (of which the author was the main catalyst). The amount of laws and regulations that the startup flouted is staggering in itself. But what is more staggering is that the premise on which Theranos was founded (that hundreds of blood tests could be performed on a tincture of blood nipped from your index finger) and which gave Holmes a personal valuation in excess of $5.5 billion, was all a hoax. How this hoax came about, who all were wittingly (and unwittingly) involved in the hoax, and how the hoax could have led about to hundreds of deaths, forms the basis of the investigative novel.
On reading this book, one can easily understand how Carreyrou has won the Pulitzer Prize twice - his treatment is precise and cutting, and very easy to decipher and absorb - even medical laymen like me will have a ton to draw from the book, as is the book's intention.
TL;DR - roller-coaster work spanning the rise and fall of a Silicon Valley startup that got too ambitious for its own good, and in sight of its goal, flouted everything there was to flout. A dense but fulfilling read.

I read this book very slowly, this was mainly because Theranos had a habit of constantly firing people and I kept forgetting who each name referred to. The book flipped between timelines a little bit and there were a few times that I had trouble following. Other than that, this is an interesting book about a woman who wanted to be the next Jobs or Gates and ended up defrauding many influential Americans. I feel bad for anyone that received a false blood test on one of her devices.

As a side note: there is a trial set to happen in October 2020. I look forward to seeing what happens.

I read this book very slowly, this was mainly because Theranos had a habit of constantly firing people and I kept forgetting who each name referred to. The book flipped between timelines a little bit and there were a few times that I had trouble following. Other than that, this is an interesting book about a woman who wanted to be the next Jobs or Gates and ended up defrauding many influential Americans. I feel bad for anyone that received a false blood test on one of her devices.

As a side note: there is a trial set to happen in October 2020. I look forward to seeing what happens.

The Theranos story is so fascinating. Carreyrou paces the book evenly, slowly building his case. I borrowed this from a clinical chemist who plays (per him) a bit role in the story, appearing in a couple sentences within the book. When I returned his copy, the two of us sat in his office just marveling at how things progressed so far. Within my own little clinical chemistry domain, CLIA looms like a Greek god -- all-powerful and all-knowing. Should we accidentally make a typo in our data, CLIA will send bolts of lightning to destroy us. The idea that a lab somehow became CLIA-certified with such significant variance in their data even before the straight-out fraud is almost unbelievable.

In addition, this seems like any doctor in their right mind would know what to make of Theranos. My best friend who works with silicon valley startups asked me about it several years ago, when I was still in residency, and I told her that the problem with capillary draws was hemolysis (blood cells splitting) and that you could never get some accurate results do that - and that's baked in to the blood draw, before you even get to the machinery. Any doctor worth their salt knows this.

So this is an almost fantastical story about how someone by force of personality alone paraded out technology that everyone knew was impossible, and somehow, without ever really inventing anything became a billionaire running laboratory testing in clinical labs on patients. It's pretty serious and scary stuff.

While reading it, I couldn't help but be amazed by the number of smart, well-educated people who were at least temporarily a party to this, often bullied by fancy lawyers and nondisclosure agreements. I think there's a lot here about how much the assumptions of civil society are really what keep us in check more so than institutions like CLIA or CAP. Once someone starts operating in bad faith, it's pretty scary how far they can get. On the other hand, Theranos was pretty much brought down by Carreyrou assisted by a pair of early-twenty-somethings who felt they had to speak out. So I think there's also a lot here about the importance of protecting whistle-blowers and the media.

Man, this chick was something else. She hoodwinked a whole slew of folks. Did those people really believe in her garbage, or were they more interested in making a quick buck?

This was such a fascinating read that, even though I knew the story, I was captivated by how it unfolded. Elizabeth Holmes is a curious woman; she believed so passionately in what she was trying to accomplish she started focusing on only the end goal and ignoring the means by which it was to be reached.

I love this quote from James "Mad Dog" Matthis: "She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I've ever heard articulated." (p. 207)

Even if you know the story, this book will still prove to be a fascinating read.

Holee shit.

Meticulously researched, superb storytelling, and shocking facts. Especially the shocking facts part.

Page turner for a nonfiction book, can’t believe she was able to dupe so many MEN into believing her bullshit. Goes to show that most politicians have power and no intelligence. Fooled by a dumb blonde in a black turtleneck; couldn’t even pick her own ‘style’.

A tremendous piece of investigative journalism that really highlights the lengths to which a sociopath will go to achieve their goals. This book may be the best one I read this year. Unlikely villians and heroes go head to head, a woman running a company like a mob boss, blatent lying, gullible famous people, family feuds. I love fiction, but if this book was a novel, no one would find it believable.

Update: Read it again for a book club. Still a terrific read . . .highly recommend.

I have of course already listened to podcasts and stuff about this story, so I knew the general scope, but there were two things that were big twists: the first one was seeing a pic of Sunny and realizing he was not in fact som hot-looking Rob-Lowe-in-Parks-and-Rec forty year old that Elizabeth was hooking up with but actually very much looked his age, and the second one was when the story suddenly switched to first person because I did not realize who had written it.

The first half is kinda dragging because the story has to be built up, but the second half is great and from that point on it was hard to put the book down. A good read!

Henry Kissinger writes a birthday limerick, a megalomaniac plays at 4-dimensional patent application, and they're not even the principal criminals detailed in Carreyrou's investigation into Theranos' amazing scam.

Obviously the major takeaway from this book is the vaporware applied to medicine is a chilling novelty of Silicon Valley's questionable moral culture, but I wonder if the most stunning revelation of Carreyrou's research is how Palo Alto seems to nurture world-class psychopathy as a business virtue. Nearly every major player selected in this story is an elite, privileged douchebag. No doubt Elizabeth Holmes is a marquee villain, but so much of this story is about the rank and file weakness of character in pursuit of glory that animates Silicon Valley.

The shocking story behind Sillicon Valley's first female billionaire and her downfall.
Although non-fiction, this book reads like a fictional thriller and I found myself unable to put it down.

What started off as an honest and noteworthy endeavour ended up being one of the biggest scandals since Enron. You have to read it to believe it.