Reply With QuoteThanks for the heads up. I read Bad Blood when it came out - a fascinating read and had followed the story online before that for various reasons. I'll look up the podcast directly!
I'm listening to a fantastic podcast called The Dropout. It's about medical company Theranos and its (then) 19-year old founder, Elizabeth Holmes. And the massive multi-million dollar fraud she perpetrated. I find it intriguing that someone can be so driven, lauded and superficially successful, yet also know that everything that success is built upon is a lie.
In short, Holmes drops out of Stanford after a year, having pitched an unworkable 'blood testing/medicine application patch' idea to a professor there who bought into her idealism hook, line and sinker. Luckily her dad's friend ran an influential medical venture-capital firm, so she was able to get significant start-up funds from him. Helped by his and her Stanford professor's reputations, and in no small part Holmes' charm in selling her vision, further investments were made--although many other VC firms with medical expertise passed at this early stage. The design soon changed to become a small device that could perform multiple tests using a drop of blood from a pinprick, but the machines never worked. This was kept hidden from investors, and even Walgreens, the largest pharmacy chain in the US that paid Theranos to open 'clinics' in its stores. Theranos did provide blood testing services, but it was using regular testing machines that required phials of blood drawn using needles in the usual way, not the pinprick of blood that was promised. More money flowed in, and at one point the company was valued at $9 billion, with Holmes becoming famous--including appearing on the cover of lots of magazines. Eventually, a series of reports in the Wall Street Journal lifted the lid on the deceit, leading to official investigations. Last year Theranos was wound up, with its investors (mostly very wealthy people) losing millions--up to one billion dollars was invested over the years!. Holmes is facing up to 20 years in jail if she's convicted in the ongoing court case.
Holmes is interesting too. She had a fascination with Steve Jobs, and hired a lot of ex-Apple people in the early days of Theranos. All of them left fairly quickly. She wore black turtlenecks like Jobs did and would lease a different car every few weeks so she could drive around without licence plates, just like Jobs did. She also spoke in a noticeably deep voice, which turned out to be affected. All very weird.
Amazingly, she thinks she can still find redemption. How anyone can trust someone who's lied like that (and refuses to admit to wrong doing) is beyond me.
It's a fascinating story, and the WSJ journalist who broke the story wrote a good book about it called Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup that I'd recommend for even more details about this story.
Thanks for the heads up. I read Bad Blood when it came out - a fascinating read and had followed the story online before that for various reasons. I'll look up the podcast directly!
There's also a documentary on HBO starting next month, I've read.
Thanks for that, I’ll give it a listen today. Will make a change to my usual podcasts of unsolved murders and is Bigfoot real
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve been relying a lot more on podcasts as I travel a lot with work and Radio 4 in the morning is mostly three solid hours of the B word...
One I’ve found very interesting is called How I Built This which is biographies of successful entrepreneurs who started companies we all know like Five Guys, Kickstarter and Tempur.
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Just listened to the first five episodes of this and I genuinely don’t know what to think, it’s insane.
The amount of investment she received based on a great idea and a bunch of lies is staggering.
How she kept the lie going in the face of everything is just amazing, I think her investors were as greedy as she was so it’s hard to find any sympathy except for the workers. I’ve never heard of her but will look forward to the documentary
Cheers for the recommendation
Originally Posted by mickylall
I just finished watching the Netflix doc about the Fyre Festival. Same thing as you describe here - seems to me to be lots of greedy investors all so keen to be part of the next big thing that they forget basic due diligence.
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There's a 2 1/2 hour documentary on Sky tonight at 9pm about this mentalist, if I hadn't listened to the podcast I'm sure I'd be finding it very hard to believe - looking forward to it as it's sure to be totally bonkers. Cheers Sean
What's fascinating is how these fraudsters seem convinced they'll get away with it—and that they do for so long.
I know there's a 'fake it 'til you make it' culture in parts of silicon valley, but defrauding people of millions and millions of dollars based on something that doesn't work is another kettle of fish altogether.
These people deserve to have the book thrown at them, especially as their roles in the medical industry meant their fraudulent actions affected people's health and well being. Something they seem to be in denial about.
Been ages since I listened to a podcast. Thanks for the heads up.
Now that that my interest has been reignited, where is the best place to find them and can you still arrange automatic downloading of updates and new regular casts.
Must get into these again, as I'm currently not interested in radio content.
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I listened to this recently as well and it's fantastic. I completely missed the news story when it came out so had to Google whether it was real or not!!
Documentary was OK but it missed out a lot of the batshittery. Looking at her I've no idea how anyone believed her, she looked insane in a non blinking psychopath sort of way
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