Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Growing up, Elizabeth Holmes was told that she was part of a grand family legacy of great achievers, starting with ancestor Charles Fleishmann of the Fleischmann Yeast fortune. As a child, Elizabeth dreamed of being a billionaire married to a US president.

Brilliant, intensely driven, able to talk nearly anyone into giving her what she wanted, Elizabeth quit her studies at Stanford to pursue her dream of changing the world of medicine with her new blood tester. The work was hard and prone to failure, but, under the high-stress competitive pressure of Silicon Valley’s startup culture, Elizabeth decided that her idea for a fast, portable blood-test service had to work, and, therefore, that it did work. As far as she was concerned, her own beliefs trumped reality.

No one could penetrate Elizabeth’s arbitrary belief system, and few could withstand the power of her charming salesmanship. Though in fact her machines didn’t work, she would tell anyone who would listen that her blood readers functioned beautifully and were about to revolutionize healthcare. She believed that people involved in the project who disagreed with her or presented evidence of problems were saboteurs working for her competitors, and they had to be marginalized or attacked.