Bad Blood author John Carreyrou recently sat down with Dov Seidman for a #HOWMatters Conversation to discuss what has been called the greatest fraud since Enron. Carreyrou is the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos. Indeed, had it not been for John’s dogged reporting for the Wall Street Journal and the courage of a few brave Theranos insiders who told their stories, Theranos might have hurt hundreds of thousands of people—maybe millions.
Right off the bat in his conversation with Dov, John made the point that Theranos should not be considered an outlier. In many ways, he argues, Theranos can be viewed as the product of the Silicon Valley culture, where “fake it until you make it” is the time-honored mantra of startups. Holmes, however, took faking it to a new extreme. When it became clear that what she was faking could never be made real, she simply kept on faking it. This, to Dov, is a difference of kind, not just degree. When you have knowledge that somebody might get falsely diagnosed, might either ingest something or accept a treatment they don’t need, or not get a required surgery, that really crosses a line.