Apple. She liked to call Theranos’s blood-testing system “the iPod of health care” and predicted that, like Apple’s ubiquitous products, it would someday be in every household in the country.
In the summer of 2007, she took her admiration for Apple a step further by recruiting several of its employees to Theranos. One of them was Ana Arriola, a product designer who’d worked on the iPhone.
Ana’s first meeting with Elizabeth was at Coupa Café, a hip coffee and sandwich place in Palo Alto that had become her favorite haunt outside the office. After filling her in on her background and her travels to Asia, Elizabeth told Ana she envisioned building a disease map of each person through Theranos’s blood tests. The company would then be able to reverse engineer illnesses like cancer with mathematical models that would crunch the blood data and predict the evolution of tumors.
It sounded impressive and world changing to a medical neophyte like Ana, and Elizabeth seemed brilliant. But given that Ana would be leaving behind fifteen thousand Apple shares if she joined Theranos, she wanted to get her wife Corrine’s opinion. She arranged to meet Elizabeth again in Palo Alto, this time with Corrine present. Any hesitations she had were put to rest when Elizabeth made a big impression on Corrine too.
Ana joined Theranos as its chief design architect. This mostly meant she was responsible for the overall look and feel of the Edison. Elizabeth wanted a software touchscreen similar to the iPhone’s and a sleek outer case for the machine. The case, she decreed, should have two colors separated by a diagonal cut, like the original iMac. But unlike that first iMac, it couldn’t be translucent. It had to hide the robotic arm and the rest of the Edison’s innards.
She’d contracted out the case’s design to Yves Béhar, the Swiss-born industrial designer whose reputation in the Valley was second only to Apple’s Jony Ive. Béhar came up with an elegant black-and-white design that proved difficult to build. Tony Nugent and Dave Nelson spent countless hours molding sheet metal in an attempt to get it right.
The case wouldn’t conceal the loud noises the robotic arm made, but Ana was satisfied that it would at least make the device presentable when Elizabeth took it out on demos.
Ana felt that Elizabeth could use a makeover herself. The way she dressed was decidedly unfashionable. She wore wide gray pantsuits and Christmas sweaters that made her look like a frumpy accountant. People in her entourage like Channing Robertson and Don Lucas were beginning to compare her to Steve Jobs. If so, she should dress the part, she told her. Elizabeth took the suggestion to heart. From that point on, she came to work in a black turtleneck and black slacks most days.
Ana was soon joined at Theranos by Justin Maxwell and Mike Bauerly, two other recruits hired to work on the design of the Edison’s software and other parts of the system that patients would interact with, like the packaging for the cartridges. Ana and Justin had worked together at Apple and knew Mike through his girlfriend, who had been a colleague of theirs there. It wasn’t long before the Apple transplants began noticing that Elizabeth and Theranos had their quirks. Ana would arrive early every morning for a daily seven-thirty meeting with Elizabeth to update her on design issues. When she pulled her car into the parking lot, Ana would find her jamming to loud hip-hop music in her black Infiniti SUV, the blond streaks in her hair bouncing wildly.
One day, as Justin walked into her office to update her on a project, Elizabeth motioned him over excitedly, saying she wanted to show him something. She pointed to a nine-inch-long metal paperweight on her desk. Etched on it was the phrase, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” She’d positioned it so the words were facing her and clearly found it inspiring.
Having an idealistic boss wasn’t a bad thing, but there were other aspects of working at Theranos that were less pleasant. One of them was having to do daily battle with Matt Bissel, the head of IT, and his sidekick, Nathan Lortz. Bissel and Lortz had the company’s computer network set up in such a way that information was split into silos, hampering communication between employees and departments. You couldn’t even exchange instant messages with a coworker. The chat ports were blocked. It was all in the name of protecting