Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is a true story about big plans and even bigger lies. The hero of the story is a company called Theranos, a health technology startup, that collected millions of dollars from investors to reinvent blood testing. The technology breakthrough wasn’t as simple as the founders expected and they ended up lying and faking their blood testing results for real patients.
Move Fast and Break Things
“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.” ― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood
While experimenting, breaking things and improving a product by monitoring real customers is a common practice for software projects, health technology is nothing like that. Process certification, lab approvals, regulatory compliance are mandatory to ensure the highest medical service quality.
“Holmes and her company had overpromised and then cut corners when they couldn’t deliver. It was one thing to do that with software or a smartphone app, but doing it with a medical product that people relied on to make important health decisions was unconscionable.” ― John Carreyrou,
Small companies are better than pharmaceutical giants. Are they?
People talk about small companies inventing new cancer treatments and how pharmaceutical giants stop progress. What if that small company “is just another Theranos”?
“Health care was the most highly regulated industry in the country and for good reason: the lives of patients were at stake.”― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood