4 Feb 2020
039- PTB discusses fears of needles, what it means to be self made and Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes was born on born on February 3, 1984 in Washington D.C. Her mother worked as a congressional staffer while her dad was employed by Enron and later worked for government agencies like the United States Agency for International Development.
She was considered to be a bright child and, at age seven, tried to invent a time machine. She filled notebooks with notes and ideas.
At age nine she told her family that she wanted to be a billionare when she grew up. She was known to be very competitive.
In high school she was a straight A student and started a business where she sold C++ compilers, a type of software that translates computer code, to schools in China. She also participated in a summer program at Stanford.
After graduating she went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. She spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute in Singapore.
In her sophomore year she went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and asked him if he wanted to start a company with her. With his help she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company's name to Theranos and filed a patent for a "Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery”. She then dropped out of college to work at her company full time.
She claimed to be developing a machine that could run a variety of tests from a small drop of blood for things like high cholesterol and cancer.
Some of the early Theranos investors were Larry Ellision, who founded Oracle, and Tim Draper, founder of VC firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Holmes was able to raise over 700$ million dollars from investors.
Holmes began to model her style and speech after her icon, Steve Jobs and was known to dress like him. She also dropped her voice to a lower tone.
She began dating the president and COO of Theranos, Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years older than her. They had met during Holmes' third year in Stanford’s summer Mandarin program, the summer before she went to college.
In 2008 the Theranos board attempted to remove Holmes to replace her with someone more experiences. After a two hour meeting Holmes convinced them to let her stay on.
As Theranos gained in fame so did Holmes. She was on the cover of Fortune and Forbes, gave a TED Talk, and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibaba's Jack Ma. Theranos also began partnering with other companies such as Capital Blue Cross and Cleveland Clinic. They made a deal with Walgreens to open testing centers in their stores.
Holmes became the world’s youngest self made female billionaire with a net worth of around $4.5 billion but no one in the outside world knew how her company worked. Anyone who visited Theranon had to sign NDAs and was escorted everywhere by security.
In 2015 Ian Gibbons, a chief scientist at Theranos, warned Holmes that the tests weren’t ready to take public and that there were issues with the technology. Others began voicing their concerns too.
In August of that year the FDA began investigating the company and found "major inaccuracies" in their testing.
Then in October John Carreyrou, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, published his investigation. He had discovered that the blood testing machine wasn’t giving accurate results and that they were running their samples through traditional blood testing machines. He spoke to ex-employees and retrieved official company documents.
Theranos threatened to sue if he published the story but did it anyway.
Holmes denied all allegations and appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money to defend herself and her company, saying that "This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.”
By 2016 the FDA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and SEC were all looking into Theranos. In January Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent Theranos a warning letter that talked about issues with staff, procedures an
