proprietary information and trade secrets, but the end result was hours of lost productivity.
The situation got so frustrating that Justin stayed up late one night and wrote a long email screed to Ana about it.
“We have lost sight of our business objective. Did this company set out to ‘put a bunch of people in a room and prevent them from doing illegal things,’ or did it set out to ‘do something amazing with the best people, as quickly as possible’?” he fumed.
Justin and Mike also got the distinct impression that Bissel and Lortz were spying on them and reporting their findings back to Elizabeth. The IT team always wanted to know what programs they were running on their computers and at times turned suspiciously friendly in what felt like transparent attempts to elicit seditious gossip. The snooping wasn’t confined to the IT guys. Elizabeth’s administrative assistants would friend employees on Facebook and tell her what they were posting there.
One of the assistants kept track of when employees arrived and when they left so that Elizabeth knew exactly how many hours everyone put in. To entice people into working longer days, she had dinner catered every evening. The food often didn’t arrive until eight or eight thirty, which meant that the earliest you got out of the office was ten.
The strange atmosphere got even stranger when the Theranos board convened once a quarter. Employees were instructed to appear busy and not to make eye contact with the board members when they walked through the office. Elizabeth ushered them into a big glass conference room and pulled down the shades. It felt like CIA agents conducting secret debriefings with an undercover operative.
* * *
—
ONE EVENING, Ana gave Justin and Aaron Moore, one of the engineers, a ride back to San Francisco. Aaron had dropped out of a Ph.D. program in microfluidics at MIT and come to work at Theranos in September 2006 after spotting a small job ad in a trade publication. He’d worked at the company nearly a year by the time Ana and Justin came on board. Aaron was smart enough to have gone to college at Stanford and grad school at MIT, but he didn’t take himself too seriously. He was originally from Portland, Oregon, and had the Portlandian hipster’s look: shaggy hair, a three-day beard, and earrings. He was also witty, all of which made him the one person at Theranos the Apple transplants could relate to.
Ana, Justin, and Aaron all lived in San Francisco and commuted by car or train to the office. During their drive home that evening, Aaron shared some gripes he had with his new colleagues as they sat in traffic in Ana’s Prius. In case they hadn’t noticed yet, people were constantly getting fired at Theranos, Aaron told them. Ana and Justin had definitely noticed. The Ed Ku layoffs had just taken place. In addition to Ed, twenty other people had lost their jobs. It happened so fast that Ed had left a bunch of work tools behind, including a nice set of X-Acto precision cutting knives that Justin had fished out of a wastebasket and claimed as his own.
Aaron mentioned that he was also troubled by the study with cancer patients in Tennessee. They’d never gotten the microfluidic system anywhere close to working properly and certainly not well enough to use on live patients, and yet Elizabeth had pushed ahead with the study. The shift to the new machine Tony built was an improvement, but Aaron felt they still didn’t have a good read on its performance. The engineering and chemistry groups weren’t communicating. Each was running tests on the parts of the system it was responsible for, but no one was conducting overall system tests.
Ana listened with rising unease. She’d assumed Theranos had perfected its blood-testing technology if it was going to be used on patients. Now Aaron was telling her it was still very much a work in progress. Ana knew the Tennessee study involved people dying of cancer. It bothered her to think they might be used as guinea pigs to test a faulty medical device.
What Ana and Aaron didn’t know and what might have allayed their concerns somewhat is that the test results Theranos generated from the cancer patients’ blood would not be used to make any changes to their treatments. They were to be used only for research purposes, to help Pfizer assess the effectiveness of Theranos’s technology. But that was never clear to most