
A New Look Inside Theranos’ Dysfunctional Corporate Culture - simulate
https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-look-inside-theranos-dysfunctional-corporate-culture/
======
mhneu
It is ludicrous that Theranos' punishment for all their fraud was merely
paying a fine. We need to resume prosecuting the individuals who commit white
collar crimes. Otherwise, getting caught committing crime just gets budgeted
into the business plan.

The book _The Chickenshit Club_ does a good job highlighting this (fairly
recent) problem with US justice.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/books/review/the-
chickens...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/books/review/the-chickenshit-
club-jesse-eisinger-.html) "America’s Top Prosecutors Used to Go After Top
Executives. What Changed?"

~~~
jacobolus
“Conservative” (i.e. pro-corporate) justices have had a majority on the US
supreme court for four and half decades now. There are now decades of
precedent firmly on the side of corporate executives vs. customers, employees,
or the general public.

More generally, corporations have coopted or subverted most other institutions
in the society, including the DOJ and the legislature. (Hooray for unlimited
anonymous campaign finance.)

~~~
cepth
Ideologically, I’m inclined to agree with you. However, last year I read the
book mentioned in the parent comment, The Chickenshit Club.

One of the central arguments laid out in that book is that ultimately it is a
“gentleman’s code” in the legal world that leads to fewer prosecutions of
corporations and individuals executives. The author of that book obtained DOJ
memos and conducted interviews with several career prosecutors.

The general takeaway is that US federal prosecutors are inclined to “see the
humanity” in corporate executives, and ascribe potential criminal behavior to
negligence instead. After all, high powered lawyers and C-suite executives
went to the same handful of elite schools, and are likely to run in similar
social circles. This is complicated by the fact that the US Department of
Justice has two tracks: career civil servants, and political appointees who
are often part of a revolving door from whiteshoe criminal defense law firms
to government. The political appointees oversee and have ultimate discretion
on what cases to pursue and against whom.

The incentives for prosecutors to take cases to trial, as opposed to settling,
are also not there. Federal prosecutors cherish their “win rates”, and
extracting a settlement from a corporation counts as a win, which in turn
helps career advancement. Take a case to court, and if 1/12 of the jurors are
unpersuaded, you’ve lost.

In all fairness to George W. Bush’s presidency, his DOJ was given political
cover and the necessary resources to prosecute Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and
Arthur Andersen. Both corporation and individual executives were held
accountable with financial penalties and heavy jail sentences.

The Obama presidency on the other hand, featured former criminal defense and
corporate law firm lawyers leading the DOJ. Many had no previous experience of
working as prosecutors, and it showed painfully in several botched
prosecutions.

The problem of “chickenshit” prosecution in this country has long predated
Citizens United, and several conservative presidents have done a better job
than their liberal counterparts of holding corporations accountable, and vice
versa.

Corporate money may well add fuel to the fire, but it was by no means the
catalyst that got us to where we are today w.r.t. unpunished corporate
wrongdoing.

The book is really worth a read, and goes into far greater detail.

~~~
jacobolus
Odds of winning at trial/appeals depends heavily on the aggressiveness of the
laws on the books and on the folks judging the cases. Various quasi-fraudulent
business practices have been normalized and legalized by legislative and
judicial action over the past 2 generations, while the rights of consumers and
workers have been steadily eroded.

Available money at the top (for legal defense, lobbying, etc.) depends on the
level of income inequality, which in turn depends on income/estate tax rates,
minimum wage, allowable structures for corporate boards, allowable terms of
contracts, legality of monopolistic business practices, etc.

Political will from the top of the DOJ depends somewhat on the president’s
personality. The era of Teddy Roosevelt or FDR or Lyndon Johnson is long past;
the Democrats to hold office have been the type to favor moderation and
compromise, and the Republicans since Nixon have been firmly pro-corporate,
often bordering on fascist, embroiled in their own criminal conspiracies for
which they have largely avoided any direct consequence. But it also depends on
whether the president feels beholden to donors or can take an aggressive
message directly to the public. With unlimited anonymous campaign money, who
can afford to piss off CEOs or Saudi princes?

~~~
cepth
It can certainly be the case that landmark Supreme Court decisions can
dramatically alter the playbooks of prosecutors. For example, SCOTUS has in
recent years tightened then widened the definition of insider trading. Gov.
McDonnell got his corruption conviction thrown out.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “odds of winning...depends heavily on the
folks judging the cases.” It’s been my experience in jury selection, both as a
potential juror and as a party to litigation, that the lawyers on both sides
are going to move to strike any jurors who are “extreme” in any
characteristic. Very rich or very poor, very young or very old, etc. It can
certainly be the case that appellate court judges have a strong pro or anti
corporate bias, but ultimately appellate courts overturn on the basis of
constitutional or procedural issues. They can’t overturn the original findings
of a jury just because they disgaree.

Re: the influence of money, both in terms of lawyers and campaign
contributions: if the federal government actually decides to throw its full
weight behind a case, there is a limit to how much a corporation can spend on
legal defense. And, even if the defense is represented by the best lawyers, a
compelling criminal case can overcome that. Keep in mind that Enron, Tyco,
Worldcom, and Andersen were represented by the white shoe-iest of criminal
defense firms. At several points, each prosecution encountered significant
difficulties, but the government prevailed in the end.

On political money, there is also a limit to its influence. As someone who
worked for the Obama campaign in 2012, I was acutely aware that we were being
outspent by hundreds of millions of dollars on the other side. A huge majority
of Obama’s 2008 Wall Street backers defected to Romney after the passage of
Dodd-Frank. However, various political scientists have found that if both
sides are adequately funded in a race, the marginal effectiveness of an
additional dollar dramatically decreases. Running an ad 500 times a week vs
your opponent being able to do it 1500 times makes no measurable impact. It’s
true that in local races, money can have a huge distortionary impact. However,
for the kinds of races that affect who gets appointed to lead the DOJ, namely
the presidential race, I think this is somewhat overblown.

All this is to say that while I suspect that we would both strongly support
significant restrictions on the influence of money in our campaign system, it
would be wrong to say that our campaign finance system and the ascendancy of
conservative judges eliminates the ability to prosecute white collar crime.
With sufficient public anger, and dedicated and courageous prosecutors, there
can be successful cases brought against wrongdoers that add some measure of
equity to the system.

~~~
jacobolus
> _With sufficient public anger, and dedicated and courageous prosecutors,
> there can be successful cases brought against wrongdoers that add some
> measure of equity to the system._

I’ll toast to that.

------
jjxw
The author of this book, John Carreyou, was apparently public enemy number 1
at Theranos. Theranos both dedicated time at an all hands to chant "f--- you
Carreyou" and developed a space invaders like game where players could shoot
pictures of his head.[0] It does put some of the more... unflattering
descriptions of Balwani in the article in context. For someone who was so
viciously attacked and ultimately vindicated on his bearish view of the
Theranos it's understandable.

[0][http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-employees-made-
space...](http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-employees-made-space-
invaders-game-where-you-shoot-journalist-that-exposed-startup-problems-2018-4)

~~~
jacquesm
That's one very sick corporate culture.

I sincerely hope that all the high level cadre at Theranos will find it hard
to get new employment. That sort of thing has absolutely no place in any
organization.

~~~
bambax
> _That sort of thing has absolutely no place in any organization._

That's kind of funny. Many (most?) organizations are exactly like that:
willing to break the law in order to get ahead. There would be no Uber and no
AirBnb otherwise; there wouldn't even be a Microsoft, either. And those are
the most visible and prominent firms.

I worked at a big consulting firm in the 90s, the corporate culture there and
then was total indifference to laws, regulations, morals or even common sense.
The only thing that mattered was billable hours.

Granted, those companies don't deal with people's health, and it's normal to
feel outraged and compassionate towards patients who were put in harm's way by
the deceiving tactics and outright lies of Theranos' officials.

But let's not forget this happens everywhere -- laws are meaningless if
they're not aggressively enforced: if people simply followed the law there
would be no need for law enforcement.

~~~
Elrac
> Granted, those companies don't deal with people's health

This sentence of yours called to mind a counter-example:

Two companies traditionally in the "business consulting" trade, Atos and
Capita, were tasked by the British Department of Work and Pensions with
investigating the "fitness for work" of millions of British welfare
recipients. Driven by expectations and probably bonuses for producing the
desired outcome, they erred overwhelmingly on the side of "fit." A few of
their "fit for work" examinees were undergoing intensive care in a hospital,
at least one died on the day following the assessment. Apparently the
assessment crew didn't even have a single licensed physician on board.

So here we had two typical "bean counter" outfits acting in a way that
tragically worsened quality of life for many infirm and/or poor people.

------
rdtsc
> Like many people who met her for the first time, Beam was taken aback by her
> deep voice. It was unlike anything he’d heard before.

Someone pointed it out the other day here, and I thought well that's just
silly. Then went and listen to some videos and it is kind of freaky. It's like
she deliberately changes her voice, but it sounds worse and obviously fake.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YecjzEScXqU&t=105](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YecjzEScXqU&t=105)

Here she forgets to fake it for a while:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfaJZAdfNE&t=403](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfaJZAdfNE&t=403)

I'd think someone should have mentioned it to her. But given the culture in
the company I can see what was going on. She could have showed up with a
lampshade on her head and nobody would have said anything either. After a
while there is nothing to say to someone who does stuff like this:

> Still visibly angry, Holmes told the gathered employees that she was
> building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they
> should leave. Balwani put it more bluntly: Anyone not prepared to show
> complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the
> fuck out.”

~~~
pjc50
This is what happens when someone reads that deep voices help you make more
money: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/10052978/Deep-
voice...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/10052978/Deep-voiced-chief-
executives-are-more-successful-scientists-say.html)

And for a while, wasn't it a successful tactic?

It has a lot of intuitive validity. "Command voice" is definitely a skill that
can be taught, and is used by people from military officers to animal trainers
and teachers. Given the extent to which the HN audience is amenable to "self-
hacking", how many people here would do this if they were convinced it would
earn them an extra 5%?

~~~
zentiggr
I learned "command voice" in the control room of a sub, where certain things
HAD to be heard over twenty other voices.

It still helps with everyday conversation when my wife is on a different floor
of the house, or across the yard, etc etc.

Every once in a while it helps sort out an otherwise mishmash of a
professional discussion... when used judiciously of course.

~~~
gaius
_where certain things HAD to be heard over twenty other voices._

Often people say that higher-pitched, female voices are easier to hear over
machinery noises, that’s why car satnavs and voice warnings in cockpits tend
to be female. Which would seem to be the opposite of a low-pitched voice being
more commanding. What do you reckon?

~~~
zentiggr
Either one can be effective, it's a matter of sufficient pitch difference and
increased volume.

Almost on topic, some residents of my former high-rise barracks liked playing
their bass tracks blaring out the windows, which got my roommate and I
thinking, if they have the bass, we can take the treble... and we got our
competition bagpipe CDs out and cranked them up. We made our point. (And the
barracks mangers shut us both up... )

------
danso
Listening to the Audible version right now. Even as someone who read every
story the WSJ published on Theranos, I'm still finding the book version to be
very worthwhile. Lots of interesting detail, including on what it was like on
the engineering front to hack together the machines for what turned out to be
a pipe dream.

edit: for example, the second chapter focuses on the "Gluebot", a robot
originally designed for glue-dispensing that became the core of Theranos's
"Edison" machine. The author goes into decent detail about how this robot
differed from Elizabeth Holmes's original vision of a wildly unrealistic
microfluidic processor. And how Holmes/Theranos hired a new separate
engineering team (which came up with the Gluebot idea) to pit against
Theranos's own engineering department after the then lead engineer refused
Holmes's request to run his team on a 24/7 schedule.

~~~
Balgair
Wha? A 24 hour _engineering_ team? Who they hell did they think they were
going to hire to do engineering at 3am? Maybe they mean quality control
engineers for a 24 hour production line? Medtronic does this, but the QC guys
are really only there for when the lines mess up.

~~~
danso
Relevant excerpt from the book:

> _ED WAS WORKING late one evening when Elizabeth came by his workspace. She
> was frustrated with the pace of their progress and wanted to run the
> engineering department twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to
> accelerate development. Ed thought that was a terrible idea. His team was
> working long hours as it was..._

> _Ed pushed back against Elizabeth’s proposal. Even if he instituted shifts,
> a round-the-clock schedule would make his engineers burn out, he told her.
> “I don’t care. We can change people in and out,” she responded. “The company
> is all that matters.”_

 _Carreyrou, John. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (p.
28). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition._

~~~
Balgair
> “I don’t care. We can change people in and out,”

Yeah, that's a great person to work for right there.

------
jacquesm
That first story is the nightmare of anybody working with blood. As an analyst
you can take a guess at what a particular sample _might_ contain because of
the tests ordered but you treat each and every sample as though it contains
the worst of the worst. To have a sample container explode in a machine with
blood spattered all over would be a one-time occurrence in any responsibly run
lab, and the clean-up after an incident like that would take a long time.

~~~
walshemj
That sounds like it failed at the stage where your taking blood and not inside
some machine.

As some one who has a lot of bloods done (down to 4/5 a month now) you
occasionally have to repeat as the vein doesn't work etc and there is always
some blood leakage.

~~~
jacquesm
"When the technician pushed the tiny twin tubes into the device, there was a
loud pop and blood splattered everywhere. One of the nanotainers had just
exploded."

So definitely in the machine.

~~~
pwaivers
It was not in a machine. The 'device' is the plastic instrument they use to
collect blood, not a machine.

"At her signal, a technician pricked a volunteer’s finger, then applied a
transparent plastic implement shaped like a miniature rocket to the blood
oozing from it."

------
dr_faustus
The whole Theranos disaster and partly also whats going on at Tesla are just
good illustrations of the hubris in Silicon Valley. As soon as you leave the
domain of stuff that can be accomplished with more or less buggy software, you
collide with a bunch of real world/physical problems that are much harder to
solve and need a lot of experience and perseverance to get right. That
attitude that the guys developing blood testing devices at Siemens & co for
decades are just a bunch of idiots who never thought of reducing the size of
the devices and/or the amount of blood it takes to perform the tests is pretty
preposterous. Just like the car industry which has been at the forefront of
process automation has never thought of using robots for dashboard assembly
etc.!? Its not that they dont do it because they are stupid or lazy (which is
the assumption of SV) but because the tried for many years and it just doesn't
work well enough.

Its really interesting, that SV VC seem to have forgotten that very basic
question: why have the existing players not come up with something like that?
Very often the answer is, they have and they tried and they figured out a long
time ago, that it probably doesnt work well enough in the real world.

~~~
icebraining
What makes you assume that the SV assumption is that other companies are
stupid or lazy?

Siemens doesn't have to be a bunch of idiots to not pursue devices that test
on smaller amounts of blood; they might simply not have an incentive to do so.
If their business model is to sell devices to labs for $$$$, reducing the
amount of blood is probably not a big selling point. It only becomes so if
you're trying to bypass the lab and go more directly to the customer (as in
Theranos with Walgreens). But why would Siemens do that, when it's a less
profitable product that directly competes with the other?

For all we know, Siemens already has a smaller, cheaper device that uses only
a drop of blood, yet no reason to sell it until they get some competition.

~~~
chopin
> For all we know, Siemens already has a smaller, cheaper device that uses
> only a drop of blood, yet no reason to sell it until they get some
> competition.

Do you have a source for this? As far as I remember past discussions on HN
about Theranos, testing on small samples is notoriously difficult. As an
experimental physicist, this seems plausible to me: Say 5% error margin on
your result is required. This leaves a lot more leeway for dimensional errors
(of the sampling chamber) compared to a few µl. Not to speak of introducing
external impurities (or those induced by the sampling as mentioned by the
article). I am pretty sure Siemens has lots of incentive to err on the safe
side.

If we really like to disrupt this industry, it would be nicer to be able to
make these tests in-vivo, in my opinion.

~~~
adwn
> _Do you have a source for this?_

In case you're not a native English speaker: "for all we know" means something
like "hypothetically". icebraining's point is that Siemens' behavior is not
inconsistent with Siemens having a secret device that can reliably test on
small samples, even if they don't sell it. icebraining did _not_ mean to imply
that Siemens actually has such a device.

------
ryandrake
> As Khannah flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his
> team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Balwani might become
> wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded
> without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.

Not proud of it, but I admit that a younger, less grownup version of me once
played a similar “what can we get the non-technical senior exec to
believe/repeat” game. I guess when you encounter an obvious phony who is
likely making 10-100x what you are, you can rationalize these kinds of
immature activities to yourself :)

~~~
jacquesm
I don't even see that as a prank but as a way of establishing beyond doubt
that the guy was full of shit.

~~~
maxxxxx
Yeah. It's a test. I have done that too before. Say something obviously wrong
and see if you get called on it.

~~~
majos
What is the upside of this test? If they say nothing it may be that they don't
know you're wrong or silently concluded you're wrong. If they do say something
you say...what? "Just testing you"?

~~~
maxxxxx
You say that it was a joke. It was a similar situation where a new VP was
commenting on code he didn't know anything about but just repeated falsehoods
with total conviction. So I put some stuff into a presentation that was
clearly funny to people who knew how things worked but the VP took it at face
value.

------
carapace
> ... double dilution lowered the concentration of the analytes in the blood
> samples to levels that were below the ADVIA’s FDA-sanctioned analytic
> measurement range. In other words, it meant using the machine in a way that
> neither the manufacturer nor its regulator approved of. To get the final
> patient result, one had to multiply the diluted result by the same factor
> the blood had been diluted by, not knowing whether the diluted result was
> even reliable. _Young and Gong were nonetheless proud of what they’d
> accomplished. At heart, both were engineers for whom patient care was an
> abstract concept. If their tinkering turned out to have adverse
> consequences, they weren’t the ones who would be held personally
> responsible._

Emphasis added.

~~~
jacquesm
That could have been straight from the movie 'the Cube'.

~~~
carapace
Riiiight? The road to hell is paved with "abstract concepts".

And now, for spine-tingling thrills... (shines a flashlight under his face)

 _Synthetic Biology Startups!_

(campers all scream)

------
Balgair
Tyler Schultz is the reason we know any of this. Without that brave man,
Theranos would still be faking it and very likely hurting real people with
real families. Tyler Schultz blew the whistle on this fantastic scam. When the
news and the net have you feeling really down, just remember, people like
Tyler Schultz are still here, doing the right thing.

Be brave. Be like Tyler Schultz.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-whistleblower-shook-
th...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-whistleblower-shook-the-
companyand-his-family-1479335963)

------
jmknoll
What I find really interesting here is how badly “move fast and break things
works in other industries”.

Balwani’s outlandish behavior aside, a lot of this stuff doesn’t seem all that
bad, if this weren’t a medical product. Raising money for a product you’re not
sure will work out, tinkering with what a competitor has done and seeing what
you can borrow, launching without a credible fallback and just hoping for the
best.

I think I’ve done all of these things, but for software that doesn’t put
peoples lives on the line.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I don't think it works that well in our industry either. Products from
companies that follow that process are at best frustrating to work with
because of the constant churn.

------
cryoshon
as someone with a background in the biotech industry and also as someone who
has written a lot about theranos' systemic problems, i'm inclined to say the
problems with corporate culture go way farther than this article suggests.

the technical mishaps with pipettors and nanocapsules aside, theranos has a
culture of 1. secrecy, 2. exec impunity, and 3. incompetence.

i'm sorry to say that theranos is probably not the only biotech company out
there which falsifies results. i was never under any pressure to falsify any
kind of results in my positions, but the incentives are very clear.

~~~
mhneu
Share cites of your writing?

------
duxup
Did Theranos ever have anything of value that would indicate that they could
overcome the obstacles described?

It sounds like they were up against huge obstacles and nowhere near capable of
overcoming them. Makes me wonder how anyone thought they could.

Also did the other industry players pretty much know... they had to be full of
it?

~~~
danso
The book makes the case that Elizabeth Holmes was a capable practitioner of
the "reality-distortion field" and was able to use her charisma, and
Theranos's purported humanitarian mission, to persuade enough of the right
people. For example, former Safeway CEO Steve Burd, who committed the company
to $350M in renovations to accommodate Theranos "Wellness Centers". Burd
remained confident that Holmes was legit (and had been vetted by others), even
after Theranos missed every deadline. He even brushed off how Theranos's test
erroneously diagnosed a Safeway senior executive with prostate cancer.

> _When questions or issues came up that had to be taken back to Theranos, he
> would pipe up with what became a refrain: “I’ll talk to Elizabeth about it.”
> Larree Renda, the executive who had started out at Safeway as a teenage
> bagger in 1974 and climbed the corporate ranks to become one of Burd’s top
> deputies, and other executives involved in the project were surprised by how
> much latitude he gave the young woman. He usually held his deputies and the
> company’s business partners to firm deadlines, but he allowed Elizabeth to
> miss one after the other. Some of Burd’s colleagues knew he had two sons.
> They began to wonder if he saw in Elizabeth the daughter he’d never had.
> Whatever it was, he was in her thrall._

~~~
MusaTheRedGuard
> The book makes the case that Elizabeth Holmes was a capable practitioner of
> the "reality-distortion field"

She also survived a coup attempt by her board, simply by convincing them to
give her another chance. Then she fired the executives that moved against her.

------
Quanttek
> At heart, both were engineers for whom patient care was an abstract concept.
> If their tinkering turned out to have adverse consequences, they weren’t the
> ones who would be held personally responsible.

That seems to be at the heart of the issue for me. It is not only the
structuring of (financial) on a macro (economy) and micro (Theranos) level
that puts profits over the health of patients. It is also the lack of both any
liability for the people "just following orders" and the lack of any legal and
moral education as part of the engineer training at uni

------
gabriellemic
A key universal insight here is surely that "it's extremely dangerous to
consider anyone who raises concerns or objections as cynics or nay-sayers", in
any company culture.

------
azeotropic
When do we get an article about the dysfunctional culture of the press? They
helped Holmes hype Theranos without asking any hard, or even mildly difficult,
questions. Why is that?

~~~
eicnix
The book describes how the board vouched for the initial integrity of Theranos
and Holmes. Because of the high calibers of the board members they were taken
as character witnesses.

The boarded included:

* former Secretary of State George Shultz

* William Perry (former Secretary of Defense)

* Henry Kissinger (former Secretary of State)

* Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator)

* Bill Frist (former U.S. Senator and heart-transplant surgeon)

* Gary Roughead (Admiral, USN, retired)

* James Mattis (General, USMC)

* Richard Kovacevich (former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO)

* Riley Bechtel (chairman of the board and former CEO at Bechtel Group)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
So only one with a medical background.

~~~
JorgeGT
But several experts in the bloodshed field.

------
maxerickson
Apparently Theranos wasn't above advertising their broken tech as a tool for
Ebola response:

[https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/998998156661706753](https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/998998156661706753)

------
techsin101
I'm happy for all VCs that lost money. Ivy college x drop out got them good.

~~~
gaius
The VCs didn’t lose any money, they lost money entrusted to them to manage.

~~~
jacquesm
Some of them lost their own money, some of them lost their LPs money, but
given the fact that they failed the DD I would not be surprised if those LPs
have a claim on the managing partners.

------
dubhrosa
The site is unusable on my mobile device, (chrome on OnePlus 5t, unclosable
popup appears immediately) Aside, I really think displaying a picture of the
"villain" so obviously doctored to make them look cartoon-villainish weakens
any factual reporting that follows (which I'm sure it does, the case against
Theranos being so clear cut by now)

~~~
danso
Well, it is excerpted from a book titled _" Bad Blood"_, which arguably is a
signal of where the author stands on the matter.

~~~
dubhrosa
Whatever the source I don't think there can be any question how Theranos will
be judged at this point, which makes resorting to cheap devices all the more
unnecessary and redundant.

------
colmvp
Wow that is a creepy looking feature image lol

~~~
FartyMcFarter
Well that will teach me to read stuff just before sleeping...

------
dbuder
The term unicorn and the search for unicorns has never been so appropriate.

------
oinoi30998
It took me about 2 minutes on Google to find the source's real name. Given the
detail about his CV in the article, I find it hard to believe that the author
took his source's privacy very seriously.

~~~
danso
For which potential bad actors has "Alan Beam's" privacy been seriously
compromised? He was already known (according to the book) to Theranos and its
lawyers as being a whistleblower. It may have been enough privacy for him to
make sure Googling his actual name would not bring up Theranos in search
results.

