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Her rocksteady gaze and baritone voice lured you in. Then, her idea blew your mind.
One drop of blood, hundreds of results: Theranos was going to revolutionize the healthcare industry. And Elizabeth Holmes led this revolution.
Investors blindly trusted her. She rocked magazine covers, and the media called her the female Steve Jobs. Her company was worth billions. But it was all a lie.
How did one person fool the entire world? We’ll tell you all about it in this Company Forensics: Theranos.
The birth of Pandora’s box
By age 9, Elizabeth Holmes had envisioned her time machine. By high school, she was fluent in Mandarin and sold C++ compilers and had her sights on becoming a billionaire. She wanted to study medicine but was afraid of needles.
So, she enrolled in Chemical Engineering at Stanford. There, she met Channing Robertson and insisted he let her work at his lab. A lab, mind you, in which mostly Ph.D.’s worked, not first-year students.
During her first college break, she spent a stint in Singapore, working at a lab testing for SARS.
