Mary Jayne Baker – 3/5 Stars
Read this if you:
· believe in faking it ’til you make it
· always root for a strong female CEO (even if their practices are unethical)
· wish there was a way to test your blood with just a drop from a finger prick
Synopsis:
This book follows the rise of Elizabeth Holmes, who was deemed “the female Steve Jobs” in 2014, and her startup Theranos, which promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a new way to make taking blood samples faster and easier. The problem with this technology is that it didn’t work. Despite this, Holmes spent years misleading employees of the company and investors into believing that it did, until Carreyrou, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal received a tip from from a former Theranos employee and started investigating.
My thoughts on the book:
This book can basically be summed up in one statement: Fake it ’til you make it. I found Elizabeth Holmes to be fascinating and even though her dishonesty was unethical, I thought she was brilliant both in how she built her company and in how she was able to trick investors into handing over huge amounts of money to her company.
You might think a book about a biotech company would be boring, but this work of incredible investigative journalism is so juicy, it was impossible to put down.
This book does get a bit technical in its descriptions of the technology being developed but I actually enjoyed reading about what Elizabeth’s intentions were and how well thought out the research was, even if it didn’t work.