Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“When you strike at the king, you must kill him.”

Copies of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s famous novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy who finds his destiny by going on a journey to Egypt, had been placed on every chair. Still visibly angry, Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Sunny put it more

Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry.

“We can’t not pursue this,” he said. “We can’t risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.”

The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria.

She also agreed to be barred from being an officer or director in a public company for ten years.

As the tug-of-war with Heather King over the inspection report dragged on, news surfaced that Holmes would be hosting a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign at Theranos’s headquarters in Palo Alto. She had long cultivated a relationship with the Clintons, appearing at several Clinton Foundation events and forging a friendship wit

The fear of missing out was a powerful deterrent.

And why hadn’t a single venture capital firm with expertise in health care put money into the company?