Bedford Public Library

Bad blood, secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup, John Carreyrou

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Bad blood

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John Carreyrou

secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: the technology didn't work. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When the author, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both the author and the newspaper were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the paper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. The biggest corporate fraud since Enron is a cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.--adapted from publisher's description

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Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup