He managed to obtain 900 million dollars from investors to launch his project and his company was valued at 9 billion dollars.
Rober Diaz / Peninsula 360 Press
SILICON VALLEY? Elizabeth Holmes is a particular woman, she dared to swindle the finicky investors of Silicon Valley. She was an intense follower of Steve Jobs, she even dressed like him using high turtlenecks, dark clothes and adopted the treatment that the former CEO of Apple had with his employees; it is even said that she had the same look that Steve used to convince his interlocutors and close deals.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford Chemical Engineering early to start her own company - sound familiar to any Silicon Valley entrepreneurial success story? She also said that she had lost an uncle to cancer and that it was the lack of early diagnosis that caused his death; with this motivation she founded the company "Theranos", a play on words between therapy and diagnosis. He took a professor from his university to work for him and launched a product that allowed a medical diagnosis with just a drop of blood.
So far so good, however the product he presented and so the scientific community argues, is impossible to do because with that single drop of blood also promised that you could do up to a hundred tests on different ailments, from a basic disease like high cholesterol to diseases as complicated as cancer. The results could be delivered to the corner drugstore where you would find a machine called Edison that would also manufacture "Theranos" with which you would get the results in three hours.
She managed to obtain 900 million dollars from investors to get her project off the ground and her company was valued at 9 billion dollars. She went from having only one employee (the professor who left with her) to 500 employees developing Edison, the idea that was not yet a reality and that had helped her to obtain the financing.
In a very short time the press began to compare her to Steve Jobs. Forbes magazine declared her the richest woman in America. But "Theranos" had not really produced anything yet. She was authoritarian within the company and when any of the employees questioned her mandates, she fired them and looked for someone else who could carry them out.
Another issue to be analyzed was her voice, for Elizabeth when she spoke in public faked a more guttural voice than the one she usually used, strange wasn't it? Well, coupled with Holmes' terrible character and essentially the fact that she was asking her team something practically impossible, everything started to fall apart.
Elizabeth sued a former college classmate for appropriating her work. In the legal back-and-forth, Ian Gibbons, the man in charge of making Edison work, was called to testify. Gibbons had two options: accept that the whole thing was a fraud or lie and wait for the whole thing to fall apart. He chose neither and committed suicide. The investigator's wife was threatened by Holmes and the matter remained there until reporter Jhon Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal, discovered the farce.
The research Carreyrou published was part of a best seller called "Bad Blood. Secret and Lies in Silicon Valley Startup", where the real rot was uncovered, as the research confirmed that many people had used Edison and that their results caused -because they were frighteningly wrong- pernicious consequences in its consumers and that all the results shown as advances of the research were lies.
During the trial where Elizabeth would be left penniless and where "Theratos" would be destroyed, she would arrive happy and greet everyone as if nothing had happened, assuring that everyone was lying.
She was disqualified from setting up or running any company -any company- for ten years. By the way, the guy we talked about in the beginning, who she claimed had given her the inspiration to create "Theratos", never existed.
Elizabeth Holmes: The Woman Who Swindled Silicon Valley
