📖 The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Learning to Learn

Synopsis

Bad Blood follows the story of Theranos, a company started by [[ Elizabeth Homes ]] that attemptes to make a blood testing device small enough to fit into peoples homes that could run hundreds of tests simultaneously off a single drop of blood. At its height Theranos was valued at over 9 billion dollars, more than both Uber and Spotify at the time. Eventually it was revealed that the company actually had no working device and was using poor practices on commercially available blood analysers to provide its results.

Thoughts

The story of Theranos never fails to astound me, how a college dropout could be so charismatic as to effectively scam investors out of billions of dollars. There is a looming question as to whether the companies downfall was due to Elizabeth or the influence from Sunny Balwani. Carreyrou argues that it was Elizabeth all along, however I do not believe this to be so. I think she was corrupted slowly by a range of external factors, Sunny, Silicon Valley, her mentors and those around her. I do find myself wondering if her inital goal would have been possible and whether Theranos could have been successful if put under proper leadership. For instance many of the engineers interviewed seem to make it seem like something like this could be possible. Elizabeth was unwavering on the size, but perhaps by starting with a more achievable goal they could have moved towards the eventual vision. For instance in the launch for Walgreens the device could have reasonably been the size of a fridge if needed, rather than the desktop size they went for.

#book/non-fiction