BookJack talks about the book "Bad Blood" by The Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou. In 2015, Carreyrou released an investigation in which he proved that the successful startup Theranos - the company was about to introduce a revolutionary blood collection and testing system - was not all that successful. For the analyzes, Theranos used someone else's equipment, and one of the employees committed suicide, declaring before his death that the technology did not work. Carreyrou published several texts about Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes in The Wall Street Journal, effectively destroying her empire. In 2018, his book about the company was published in English - but this is not a collection of articles, but a full-fledged narrative, more like a novel, a story of great failure, not only for fans of business literature. Now the book has been published in Russian.
John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a nonfiction author. His first book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, chronicles Silicon Valley's biggest fraud.
The book by The Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreiro tells about the rise and fall of the biotech startup Theranos, and therefore has every chance of getting into bookstores on the shelves with business literature. However, in this case, at first glance, correct attribution does not help so much as disorientates: while formally remaining within the venerable genre of "company biography", in reality, "Bad Blood" Carreiro talks about business to about the same extent as about the world in general. And in this capacity, of course, she appeals not so much to the readers of business literature as to the widest circle of those who are interested in how modernity “works” in the broadest sense of the word.
The founder of Theranos, young Elizabeth Holmes, was afraid of needles for blood sampling from childhood and decided to devote her life to making the tests as painless, accessible and perfect as possible. After dropping out of Stanford University after her freshman year and enlisting the management support of her 40-year-old boyfriend, formerly successful startup startup Sunny Balwani, 20-year-old Elizabeth is immersed in the project. Finds investors, invests heavily in research and development, attracts the best specialists for cooperation, finds potential partners and clients (including the American army, one of the largest pharmacy chains, and a supermarket chain), and at the same time turns into one of the brightest American businesses stars, role model for millions of young women, "Steve Jobs in a Skirt" and the first female billionaire in Silicon Valley. The project is developing, and now prototypes of compact analyzers, capable of conducting dozens of studies with just one drop of blood, come into operation, while Elizabeth shines at charity receptions and delivers fiery speeches to employees and investors.
However, this is how the front facade of the project looks like, behind which dozens of serious violations and problems are hidden. And the main one is that, in short, Theranos has no revolutionary technology at all. A huge office, hundreds of employees, and a market valuation of $ 10 billion serve as a cover for the fact that popularized analyzers do not work (or work extremely poorly), that most of the research is secretly done on someone else's industrial equipment, that the company is reigning in terror, that one of the leading employees took his own life, and the turnover of personnel reached a truly cosmic level.
If you have not been interested in Theranos history before, you will probably be interested to know that it was the author of the book “Bad Blood,” investigative journalist John Carreiro, who was the man who brought to the surface all the dirty secrets of “the greatest startup since Apple” and became the gravedigger of the Elizabeth Holmes company. After collecting dozens of interviews with former Theranos employees (many of them took serious risks, violating corporate confidentiality agreements) and expert opinions, fighting off several deep-layered legal attacks from Elizabeth and Sunny, Carreiro prepared and published a series of materials exposing their machinations. and at once turned into dust the sky-high billions and dizzying prospects of the company.
However, reading "Bad Blood" solely as a documentary detective story about overreacting bad guys and a fearless investigative journalist in sparkling armor is at least imprudent. And the point is not only that the very figure of John Carreiro raises certain doubts: even from the extremely balanced and cautious text of the book, it is clear that at some point his confrontation with Theranos from a completely sincere concern with public safety issues develops into a personal vendetta. Much more remarkable is that for the author, the story of Elizabeth Holmes is important not only in itself, but also as a grandiose metaphor for the state in which American - and, more broadly, Western - society is today.
Carreiro's story of Theranos is not a story of grandiose fraud in its purest form: for all his dislike of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, the author believes that for a long time they were driven by a sincere desire to make the world a better place and faith in their project. The real problem, according to Carreiro, is the actually legalized business practice of "fake it till you make it" the founding of a huge number of successful start-ups and a culture of imitation that spills over into widespread triumph. By copying the behavioral models of successful startups (for example, Elizabeth Holmes, on the advice of her consultants, put on a black turtleneck and armed herself with a glass of vegetable cocktail a la Steve Jobs), their techniques and methods, the creator of Theranos actually became one of them - partners, investors, and common people believed her and even doctors. And the colossal complexity of the world of modern technology made the exposure unlikely: do not take an interest in this plot of John Carreiro and invest The Wall Street Journal in his investigation, the corporation could work without hindrance for many more years and, what the hell is not joking, in the end even bring to the market a suitable product.
The blurring of the previously unshakable border separating the forgery from the original was accompanied by other - no less disturbing and at the same time no less typical - circumstances. The fear of missing out on profits forced many partners to continue working with Theranos even after receiving completely unsatisfactory results: they were afraid that if they left the deal, the analyzers would work as they should and someone else would reap the benefits of success. Paranoia within the company led to the collapse of several brilliant careers and honestly earned reputations (as soon as one of the employees hinted at the existing problems, he was immediately declared disloyal and put out on the street with a wolf ticket with the tacit support of the entire Silicon Valley community). And the broadest media presence (the same agency that once promoted Apple worked on the image of Theranos and its founder) provided Theranos with a buoyancy margin that obviously surpasses any logic.
Nowhere directly asserting this, John Carreiro, nevertheless, quite explicitly makes the reader understand that the story of Theranos is not so much unique as the most egregious, and that it is not based on the special arrogance of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, but some kind of global system failure , affecting not only the field of startups and making it possible to repeat this situation in a wide variety of areas. And although, perhaps, there is an element of dramatization in this, Carreiro's opinion should not be completely discounted. The widespread disintegration - or, in any case, the decline - of the system of control, authority and expertise, in addition to some and, of course, good liberalization, carries with it a very high risk of the formation of new cargo cults, in which the fake and the original do not really turn out to be just very similar, but fundamentally indistinguishable.
This article was sponsored by Douglas Owen
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