Uncover the Hidden Truths of a Silicon Valley Startup: 'Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies'

Girish Chandwani: Giving a great understanding of the Silicon Valley and how it operates. Good learning’s to make sure what not to do in a business venture

United Kingdom on Sep 21, 2023

Carmencas: Fácil de leer en ingles. Ni utiliza un vocabulario enrevesado o demasiado técnico. Increíble como pueden ocurrir cosas así en los tiempos actuales

Spain on Aug 15, 2023

Clem: Bad Blood is an excellent example of how to write a true story and make it sound as exciting as a thrilling page-turning novel. Few true accounts have the bite that author Carreyrou has with this narrative. If you’ve read enough true accounts of companies, organizations, or people who go bad, you know how easy it is for the author to get tied up with so many “facts” and minutia, that the finished product can significantly lose its edge. I’m reminded of a book titled “The Smartest Guys in the Room” about the Enron scandal. Although that book was a best-seller, there were times when I felt as I was reading an expanded version of the company’s 10k report. It simply wasn’t very interesting a lot of the time. Fortunately, this isn’t the case with Bad Blood.

This is the story of the failed start-up company known as Theranos and its CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes was young, brilliant, attractive, and incredibly ambitious. She dropped out of college at the young age of nineteen, not because she couldn’t handle it nor didn’t like it, but because she was too impatient. She was ready to take over the world and didn’t want to waste time waiting to get a...

United States on Feb 28, 2021

Paul Dyer: I was desperately keen to read this book after following the story emerging in real time in the news channels a few years back, and also having spent more than 3 decades in the hi-tech industry myself, which included many jaunts to Silicon Valley. The hi-tech sector is a fascinating yet brutal place to be. It is a fast-paced, exciting, and dynamic industry rife with hype and frequently driven by unrealistic expectations which result from people spinning downright lies. These people are smart, intelligent, well-polished individuals who somehow mysteriously rise to great heights within organisations and public perception. Devoid of competence themselves, they leave a trail of destruction and hardship in their wake but personally survive to even bigger and better things by having golden parachutes and being long gone from their posts by the time the brown stuff finally hits the fan. It can also be genuinely argued that without such hype and expectations, many ultimately successful developments and projects which run massively over-budget and are considerably delayed would never have been funded in the first place if those backing the venture had known exactly what costs and pain they...

United Kingdom on Jun 21, 2020

David: I missed this book when it launched, but Alex Gibney's excellent 2019 HBO doucmentry 'The Inventor: Out for blood in Silicon Valley' prompted my purchase.
Carryrou's book covers three and a half years of investigation into Theranos, its founder Elizabeth Holmes and her meteoric rise and spectacular fall in the obsessive pursuit of a dream. Its a fascinating read and Carryrou uses his research to tell the story from the beginning. The story of his investigations as a Wall Street Journal reporter follows the cronological order of events and is documented towards the end of the book.

Essentially, Elizabeth Holmes developed a start-up in Silicon Valley where she attempted to develop a device which could provide multiple blood test analyses for a range of conditions and diseases in a box not much larger that a large bread-bin. For the user only a small pinprick of blood was required to complete all these tests.
This would be a game changer. Some day, every home could have one and for a small charge could carry out blood tests and have them analysed almost immediately, providing early warning of developing conditions. What's not to like? Nothing it seemed.
What makes...

United Kingdom on Apr 03, 2019

EQ Expert: This is probably the book of 2018 with apologies to Jordan Peterson.
As a former venture capitalist for 25 years this book is fascinating reading. Most books derived from Silicon Valley are hagiographic biographies of successful founders. This tells the story of an unbelievable failure, namely the rise and fall of Theranos.
The company was founded in 2003 by 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes. It raised more than $700 million and achieved a maximum valuation of $10 billion in 2013. Theranos operated in the blood testing market claimed its technology was revolutionary and that its tests required only about 1/100 to 1/1,000 of the amount of blood that would ordinarily be needed and cost far less than existing tests.
The problem was the technology did not work but this did not Holmes and her Chief Operating Officer, Sunny Balwani, acting dishonestly to raise money from investors and signing contracts with Walgreens and Safeway. Various employees along the journey tried to act as whistle-blowers either about the technology or financial projections. Every time they were accused of not being a team player, summarily dismissed, made to sign non-disclosure agreements, and threatened...

Australia on Aug 12, 2018

Dr. Terrence McGarty: Bad Blood, by Carreyrou, is an exemplary tale of a business going bad. It is in line with two other classics, The Deal of the Century by Coll and Barbarians at the Gate by Burrough and Helyar. The former depicts the beginnings of the collapse of AT&T and the second the complex takeover of Nabisco. Both of these tales result in a massive restructuring of businesses, for better or worse. In this case, it describes probably the worst behavior seen in a startup ever and the destruction of whatever business was conceived.

This is a tale of people who seem to have been brought into a techno-cult, many smart young people who got proselytized by an even younger individual who managed to present herself as super competent but who was fundamentally was intellectually and morally flawed. This book does not depict a tragedy, except perhaps for the young employees who wasted years of their lives and frankly may be forever scarred. It is a book about the ability for a perverse individual and a co-conspirator to convince a significant number of allegedly competent people to dismiss their fundamental judgments regarding reality. There was an induced suspension of belief on the part of...

United States on May 29, 2018