Elizabeth Anne Holmes, The Dark Side of Silicon Valley Tech Startups
Elizabeth Anne Holmes, The Dark Side of Silicon Valley Tech Startups. When talking about California, United States; or to be more precise in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, who imagined the faces of legendary startup founders, such as Apple founder Steve Jobs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Elizabeth Anne Holmes, The Dark Side of Silicon Valley Tech Startups
Indeed, it is where young entrepreneurs take part in changing the world. But this time, a name appears, namely Elizabeth Holmes, who, at the very young age of 19, has founded her own company, Theranos.
With her promise to revolutionize the world of medicine with her technology, Elizabeth managed to become the youngest female billionaire in the world and her figure is admired all over the world.
But unfortunately, all of them were lies. The Theranos scandal went on to become one of the biggest fraud scandals in the United States at that time. In fact, the names of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, its founders, have become synonymous with two words: Fraud and lies.
The Princess Of Startup
Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984 in Washington, D.C. the capital of the United States. In 2002, Elizabeth entered the prestigious Stanford University in California, majoring in Chemical Engineering.
Armed with her ability to speak Mandarin, Elizabeth interned at a laboratory in Singapore, researching Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
It was there that he observed how complex the process of drawing blood and blood tests was. That's why she wanted to revolutionize the world of medicine by creating a device capable of performing various blood tests with only 1/100 to 1/1000 of the amount of blood commonly used.
So why was Elizabeth's promise so revolutionary? First we need to look at what inspired Elizabeth, namely her fear of needles.
To do a blood test (an easy example, if we have a rapid corona test, we also need a blood test, right?) Then our blood will be drawn first by injection. The more tests that will be done (to make the results more valid), the more blood will have to be aspirated.
This traumatized Elizabeth so much that she wanted to find a device that could perform a blood test for only 1/100 of the amount of blood normally needed.
For example, if we need 10 ml of blood to do a normal test, then this innovative tool requires only 0.1 ml of blood, or only a drop of blood from our index finger.
Elizabeth was so obsessed with the idea that she agreed to quit Stanford University to make her discovery. Earlier, a chemist professor who was also a lecturer at Stanford, Phyllis Gardner, had warned that her discovery was impossible.
But Elizabeth survived and founded a company called Real-Time Cures. However, due to an incident where the word Cures was incorrectly written as Curse, Elizabeth finally changed the name of her start-up company to Theranos to make it more catchy.
Elizabeth's efforts to establish this revolutionary company received financial support from Pakistani businessman Balwani, who is often called Sunny.
Elizabeth is also known to be very obsessed with Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who is certainly a very inspiring figure.
In fact, Elizabeth wants to be called the female version of Steve Jobs by imitating her fashion style, namely by wearing only a black turtleneck sweater when in public. Not only that, she also appeared with a baritone voice that made her sound authoritative.
Later, many doubted that it was Elizabeth's real voice. Many argue that Elizabeth deliberately made up her voice to sound like a man.
The success of Theranos
In 2003, Elizabeth Holmes who was 19 years old founded the company with a capital of only 6 million dollars. Elizabeth managed to attract additional capital of 700 million dollars from investors thanks to her charisma.
At that time, Elizabeth claimed that she and her team had succeeded in creating a device called Edison (inspired by the name of the famous inventor, Thomas Alfa Edison) which was able to perform a series of blood tests with only a small amount of blood sample.
Elizabeth Anne Holmes, The Dark Side of Silicon Valley Tech Startups
Undoubtedly, that will cut blood test costs from an average of $ 50 to just $ 2.9. This caused Theranos' reputation to skyrocket to its peak, in 2013 to 2014, the company was worth 10 billion dollars and Elizabeth Holmes was named the youngest female billionaire in the world according to Forbes magazine.
Not only that, in 2016, Theranos also launched its latest invention, a robot called miniLab which is able to perform blood tests.
But what it looks like and how it works is a strict secret kept at Theranos. In fact, no team of academics or doctors (from outside the company) were allowed to evaluate Theranos' findings.
This has sparked suspicion, as no one can validate Elizabeth's claims whether they are accurate or just nonsense.
However, this did not prevent Walgreens (the group that owns Walmart, the largest supermarket franchise chain in the United States) from partnering with Theranos. Why is Walmart associated with Theranos? Because Walmart which is a supermarket, of course, has a pharmacy section in it.
Now with this collaboration, not only can you buy medicine, but Walmart customers who come can have their health checked through blood tests that are done there. However, the collaboration between Theranos and Walgreens should be a red light.
The reason is, if it is true that Theranos has high-quality products with technological breakthroughs such as Edison and MiniLab, shouldn't they cooperate with well-known hospitals and medical campuses? Why with Walmart?
Some of the other parties hypnotized by Elizabeth's bombastic claims and forging a partnership with Theranos are the Cleveland Clinic and health insurance provider Capital BlueCross.
Elizabeth also acknowledged that Theranos has collaborated with the world's leading biopharmaceutical laboratory, namely Pfizer (which has now succeeded in producing a Coronavirus vaccine).
In fact, however, Pfizer is completely unaware of this cooperative relationship. In 2015, thanks to this sensation, Theranos was awarded the Bioscience Company of the Year.
A Lies Revealed
There is a saying, No matter how sophisticated a carcass is hidden, its smell will also smell. Maybe this is what happened to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. Various parties began to doubt Elizabeth's claim which they thought was too good to be true.
In 2015, a Stanford professor named John Ioannidis wrote in the leading medical journal, "Journal of the American Medical Association" that to date no scientific journal has validated the superiority of Elizabeth's two tools.
This suspicion was then kissed by a journalist from "The Wall Street Journal", named John Carreyrou, who later wrote an article about Theranos. Luckily the journalist got an insider's "leak" saying that the technology Elizabeth was proud of was a lie.
Tyler reveals a secret that surprises many. It's true, Theranos created a sophisticated tool called Edison. But as it turned out, scientists at Theranos themselves were under stress because the device wasn't working properly, and even failed to carry out valid blood tests.
But what did Theranos do when they found out that their equipment had failed? Of course hiding that fact.
In fact, all the blood tests carried out by Theranos didn't actually use their invention like MiniLab and Edison's, but instead used conventional tools that were commonly used.
Of course they do this so they can continue to get a steady flow of funds from donors and stock investors. After all, who wants to invest in a company whose product is failing?
Elizabeth immediately rejected the accusation, even trying to remove a section of the Wikipedia article about Theranos that discredited the company.
But the facts tell another. In 2016, just a year after the article was published, a state health company, filed a report that one of Theranos 'laboratories in Newark, California failed to provide proper test results, failing to put patients' lives at risk.
Hearing the shocking news, Walgreens and Capital BlueCross immediately stopped their collaboration with Theranos.
Elizabeth Anne Holmes, The Dark Side of Silicon Valley Tech Startups
Fortunately, the disgrace was immediately exposed, because at that time Theranos applied for permission to test for the Zika virus, a disease that is quite dangerous because if it infects pregnant women it can cause birth defects.
Imagine if Theranos managed to get that license and carried out a test that turned out to be wrong. Maybe people's lives were at stake.
As a result of the disclosure of the scandal, Theranos suffered enormous losses because she was forced to close down his laboratory, even losing 40% of its employees. In the following year, Theranos' condition got worse until now she was forced to cut 41% of his workers.
Now not only losing money, Theranos has also received lawsuits from various parties who feel cheated, such as Walgreens. In 2018, Theranos finally went bankrupt and the company was closed.
In the same year, both Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani were charged with fraud. Unmitigated, if convicted, they can be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
However, one thing we need to ask, did Theranos incur victims because of their "negligence"? The answer is already. However, you won't be expecting it.
The Tragic Story of a Scientist
His name is Ian Gibbons, a professor of biochemistry from the University of Cambridge who has 30 years of experience working in laboratories.
He was ordained a senior staff expert to work at Theranos. His job is to develop Theranos' tools to compete with commercial analysis tools made by other companies.
But in fact, this work frustrates Ian, because every Theranos discovery always fails, even giving different results from the actual test results.
He gradually grew embarrassed and began to question the validity of Theranos' claims. This protest he conveyed to his boss, Elizabeth. However, Elizabeth did not want to accept any criticism and instead fired Ian.
However, due to pressure from other staff who felt comfortable with Ian's presence at the company as their mentor, he was reinstated.
As a figure who is quite influential in Theranos, Ian's name is pinned as one of the inventors of this sophisticated tool made by Theranos. So herein lies the problem. When the fraud case committed by Theranos began to emerge and the trial process began, Ian's name is now referred to as a witness.
He also received summons from the court to testify. But who would have thought, the day after receiving the call, Ian's body was found lying in his bedroom, lifeless.
The night before, Ian had taken amphetamine pills with large amounts of alcohol, causing him to overdose.
His fellow scientists said that with his background as a biochemist, Ian must have known that the combination of drugs and alcohol was so dangerous that it was concluded that Ian deliberately ended his own life out of shame.
Of course, if Theranos' lies were exposed, his reputation as a leading biochemist would suffer. Surprisingly, when Ian's wife called Theranos' office to inform him of her husband's death, the office was very cold.
Instead of condolences, they asked Ian's wife to immediately return the company-owned laptop, because there is still a lot of evidence.
The results obtained
Elizabeth Holmes, who revealed her figure as a con artist, has now become a viral publication. Initially she was considered the female version of Steve Jobs, but, it turns out that all of his achievements were the result of sheer fraud.
Many parties are competing to publish about the excitement of this Theranos scandal. John Carreyrou, the first journalist to expose Theranos' lies, published a book in 2018 entitled “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup”. In fact, this book has been filmed under the title "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley".
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