was known as a chemiluminescent immunoassay. (In laboratory speak, the word “assay” is synonymous with “blood test.”) The technique was not new: it had been pioneered in the early 1980s by a professor at Cardiff University. But Tony had automated it inside a machine that, though bigger than the toaster-size Theranos 1.0, was still small enough to make Elizabeth’s vision of placing it in patients’ homes possible. And it only required about 50 microliters of blood. That was more than the 10 microliters Elizabeth initially insisted upon, but it still amounted to just a drop.
By September 2007, four months after he’d started building it, Tony had a functioning prototype. One that performed far more reliably than the balky system Ed Ku was still laboring on in another part of the office.
Tony asked Elizabeth what she wanted to call it.
“We tried everything else and it failed, so let’s call it the Edison,” she said.
What some employees had taken to derisively calling the “gluebot” was suddenly the new way forward. And it now had a far more respectable name, inspired by the man widely considered to be America’s greatest inventor.
The decision to abandon the microfluidic system in favor of the Edison was ironic given that Theranos had just filed a lawsuit to protect the intellectual property underpinning the former. It was also bad news for Ed Ku.
One morning a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Ed and his engineers were called into a conference room one after the other. When it was Ed’s turn, Tony, a human resources manager named Tara Lencioni, and the lawyer Michael Esquivel informed him that he was being let go. The company was heading in a new direction and it didn’t involve what he was working on, they said. Ed would have to sign a new nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement if he wanted to get his severance. Lencioni and Esquivel walked him to his workspace to retrieve a few personal belongings and then escorted him out of the building.
About an hour later, Tony glanced out the window and noticed that Ed was still standing outside, his jacket slung over his arm, looking lost. It turned out he hadn’t driven his car to the office that morning and was stranded. This was before the days of Uber, so Tony went to find Shaunak and, knowing that they were friends, asked him to drive Ed home.
Shaunak followed Ed out the door two weeks later, albeit on friendlier terms. The Edison was at its core a converted glue robot and that was a pretty big step down from the lofty vision Elizabeth had originally sold him on. He was also unsettled by the constant staff turnover and the lawsuit hysteria. After about three and a half years, it felt like time to move on. Shaunak told Elizabeth he was thinking of going back to school and they agreed to part ways. She organized an office party to see him off.
Theranos’s product might no longer be the groundbreaking, futuristic technology she’d envisioned, but Elizabeth remained as committed as ever to her company. In fact, she was so excited about the Edison that she started taking it out of the office almost immediately to show it off. Tony quipped to Dave that they should have built two before telling her about it.
Jokes aside, Tony was a bit uncomfortable with her haste. He’d had a basic safety review done to make sure it wouldn’t electrocute anyone, but that was about the extent of it. He wasn’t even sure what sort of label to put on it. The lawyers weren’t of much help when he asked them, so he looked up Food and Drug Administration regulations on his own and decided that a “for research use only” sticker was probably the most appropriate.
This was not a finished product and no one should be under the impression that it was, Tony thought.
| THREE |
Apple Envy
For a young entrepreneur building a business in the heart of Silicon Valley, it was hard to escape the shadow of Steve Jobs. By 2007, Apple’s founder had cemented his legend in the technology world and in American society at large by bringing the computer maker back from the ashes with the iMac, the iPod, and the iTunes music store. In January of that year, he unveiled his latest and biggest stroke of genius, the iPhone, before a rapturous audience at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.
To anyone who spent time with Elizabeth, it was clear that she worshipped Jobs and