Bad Blood: Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, with author John Carreyrou

Episode Summary

John Carreyrou literally wrote the book on Theranos – the bestseller “Bad Blood,” which built on his earlier writing at the WSJ that broke the story. With Elizabeth Holmes scheduled to be sentenced this week, I sat down with John to get the inside scoop on how he uncovered the Theranos fraud, his take on Holmes, what went wrong and why, and what her sentence is likely to be.

Sydney Finkelstein 

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

John Carreyrou

John Carreyrou is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. In his reporting for The Wall Street Journal, he was the first to break the scandal surrounding the failed biomedical startup Theranos and the disturbing lies of its wunderkind founder, Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes. A compelling speaker, Carreyrou discusses the ethical lapses, the credulous media coverage, and the lax oversight that allowed Theranos to achieve a “unicorn” valuation of $9 billion and shares with audiences the lessons that can be learned from its fall.

Bad Blood was also named the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. The HBO documentary based on the Theranos story, The Inventor, was directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney and premiered at Sundance. A graduate of Duke University, Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three children.

Insights from this episode: 

• Details about John’s book
• Theranos scandal and how John discovered it
• The intimidation, threats, and stonewalling John experienced when covering the scandal
• Details about Elizabeth Holmes's trial
• Confidential informants being stalked during the trial
• What Elizabeth Holmes did wrong and how she was able to build credibility

Quotes from the show:

• “I had done a lot of reporting about health care medicine by then and enough to know that that’s not usually how things happen (Theranos scandal). Usually, people who make advances in medical fields are trained and then do decades of research before they add value” —John Carreyrou [9:14]