Bad Blood
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is a nonfiction book by journalist John Carreyrou, released May 21, 2018. It covers the rise and fall of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup headed by Elizabeth Holmes. The book received critical acclaim, winning the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
Stats for nerds
119recommend
254mentions
207people
2018–2026years
52% recommend48% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I read the book (Bad Blood) and watched the mini-series (The Dropout) -- both absolutely great! and yet I still don't completely understand how Sunny & Holmes were able to fool experts inside their own company for so long.
Fooling the public is easy. But how do you fool the people working on the machines and trying to get actual results out of them? Sure, dividing the work into micro-tasks help, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion/excitement/respect for authority, etc. But still?!?
- You can just read Bad Blood, too, and skip the movie / hyperbole/ whatever
- Try the book: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
- I don't know of any worthy documentary, but I have read the book "Bad Blood" [0], which I thought was thorough, well written and, to me, an excellent read.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood:_Secrets_and_Lies_in...
- maybe take a look at "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou
- I love these kind of books, some recommendations:
Tech-specific (more like Careless People):
- Empire of AI: tells the story of how the massive AI labs started and became as big as they are with a focus on OpenAI, provides new insight into the coup that outed Altman a couple years ago
- Number Go Up: digs into the crypto culture and scams with novel insight into Tether
- Bad Blood: a classic about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes and how far a technologically impossible startup can go
- Super Pumped: about Uber and the dirty tactics they employed to stay ahead, also touches on the toxic culture that was propagated there
- Money Men: about the criminal enterprise around Wirecard, hard to keep up with at times due to the focus on the FT investigation rather than the fraud but interesting anyway
Finance-focused:
- Barbarians at the Gate: a classic about the attempted takeover of RJR Nabisco (oreos and tobacco) by management and early PE firms, told from first hand accounts
- Too Big Too Fail: similar in form to Barbarians but instead focused on the 08 collapse and the attempts by the government to save all the irresponsible banks, told in too much of a sympathetic way for me but interesting to see how things happened behind the scenes
- All the Devils Are Here: on the other hand a very unsympathetic look into the 08 crisis, by the same authors as Smartest Guys in the Room
Other:
- The Smartest Guys in the Room: my favourite of them all, tells the story of Enron and their rise and incredible fall, basically a foundational text on how to do a financial crime (and not get away with it)
- Chip War: very relevant look into the production of computer chips, highlights the reliance on only a few companies and the incredible costs involved
- Empire of Pain: also a favourite, goes into the Sackler family and how they built Perdue Pharma and then proceeded to cause the devastating opioid epidemic
- The Power Broker: a classic about Robert Moses who basically built half of New York at the expense of marginalised residents, it's very long so I'd recommend reading/listening along with the 99% invisible breakdown
I've not read Character Limit so have added that to my "To Read" pile!
