Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou
First posted April 2019
As a new San Franciscan at the time I wrote this, I felt it was my duty to think about my tech entrepreneur overlords.
I love books like this, and this certainly is a good version of a book like this! The review is short enough that I still like it.
Whenever I call anything a “guilty pleasure” a bell chimes somewhere and a literal prescriptivist feels the inescapable urge to announce that there is a moral imperative to revel in whatever you like, cultural mores be damned. I don’t think the term “guilty pleasure” ascribes socially enforced self-loathing for enjoying things that fall outside a rigidly curated demographic. It’s, like, shorthand, man. For stuff I feel is silly, but still liking it anyway. Keep that in mind as I talk about Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Especially if you’re looking for consistency with some of the things that usually irritate me in non-fiction books: bad subtitles (though “Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” is perhaps the least grandiose non-fiction subtitle I’ve seen); self-insertion; third thing will all get a pass. Because corporate malfeasance!
I don’t know how I dodged the Theranos story for over a decade. I had no idea who Elizabeth Holmes was until starting this book; I requested it because books in the collapsing-business storytelling non-fiction genre—Too Big to Fail and its ilk—are my guilty pleasure. There’s just no way reality is as well-paced as these books are. The narratives are far too clean. The motivations too distilled. But the broad strokes are true enough; they’re part of the public record, after all. In fiction, authors need to be subtle. In reality, people aren’t. At all. So they do all sorts of mind-bendingly stupid things that no work of fiction would be able to pull off without being ridiculed; Eliza H. dressed exactly like Steve Jobs. And lived the cliché of sleeping with her second-in-command, a man twenty years her senior, and hiding it from her board of directors. Speaking of the board, the company hired the grandson of a board member to work as a lab tech in a lab where the tech didn’t work. Also all the lying, from the deep voice affectation to saying Jagged Little Pill wasn’t an amazing album. Odd, just odd.
So, Bad Blood. Thank you for cramming whatever you can get away with in between the tentpoles of real human failure; ascribing tone to emails and intentionality to statements you couldn’t possibly have heard. I am not being sarcastic; these flourishes are what turn reporting into storytelling, and I chose the book version specifically for them!
Nothing really stands out. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I loved every second I read this book, but will retain next to nothing beyond the fact that I know who Ms. E. Holmes is now. The book’s epilogue proves to me that the world learned nothing from Theranos’ story, either:
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. But it’s crucial to bear in mind that Theranos wasn’t a tech company in the traditional sense. It was first and foremost a health-care company. Its product wasn’t software but a medical device that analyzed people’s blood.</blockquote>
Seriously, if the lesson is that what she did was bad because it was healthcare and not because it was just fucking bad, get those self-driving cars out of my society.