her fire some thirty people, not counting the twenty or so employees who lost their jobs at the same time as Ed Ku when the microfluidic platform was abandoned.
Every time Elizabeth fired someone, Matt had to assist with terminating the employee. Sometimes, that meant more than just revoking the departing employee’s access to the corporate network and escorting him or her out of the building. In some instances, she asked him to build a dossier on the person that she could use for leverage.
There was one case in particular that Matt regretted helping her with: that of Henry Mosley, the former chief financial officer. After Elizabeth fired Mosley, Matt had stumbled across inappropriate sexual material on his work laptop as he was transferring its files to a central server for safekeeping. When Elizabeth found out about it, she used it to claim it was the cause of Mosley’s termination and to deny him stock options.
Matt had reported to Mosley until he left and thought he’d done an excellent job of helping Elizabeth raise money for Theranos. He clearly shouldn’t have browsed porn on a work-issued laptop, but Matt didn’t think it was a capital offense that merited blackmailing him. And besides, it had been found after the fact. Saying it was the reason Mosley was fired simply wasn’t true.
The way John Howard was treated also bothered him. When Matt reviewed all the evidence assembled for the Michael O’Connell lawsuit, he didn’t see anything proving that Howard had done anything wrong. He’d had contact with O’Connell but he’d declined to join his company. Yet Elizabeth insisted on connecting the dots a certain way and suing him too, even though Howard had been one of the first people to help her when she dropped out of Stanford, letting her use the basement of his house in Saratoga for experiments in the company’s early days. (Theranos later dropped the case against its three ex-employees when O’Connell agreed to sign his patent over to the company.)
Matt had long wanted to start his own IT consulting firm and he decided this was the time to walk away and do it. When he informed Elizabeth of his decision, she looked at him in utter disbelief. She couldn’t comprehend how he could possibly trade in a job at a company that was going to revolutionize health care and change the world for that. She tried to entice him to stay with a raise and a promotion, but he turned her down.
During his last couple of weeks at Theranos, what Matt had seen happen to numerous other employees started happening to him. Elizabeth wouldn’t speak to him anymore or even look at him. She offered one of his IT colleagues, Ed Ruiz, his position if Ed agreed to dig through Matt’s files and emails. But Ed was good friends with Matt and refused. In any case, there was nothing to find. Matt was squeaky-clean. Unlike Henry Mosley, he was able to keep his stock options and to exercise them. He left Theranos in February 2008 and started his own firm. Ed Ruiz joined him a few months later.
* * *
—
THERANOS’S NEW OFFICE in Palo Alto was nice, but it was actually too big for a startup that had just shrunk back down to fifty people after the Ed Ku layoffs. The main floor was a long rectangular expanse. Elizabeth insisted on clustering employees on one side of it, leaving a big empty stretch of space on the other. Once or twice, Aaron Moore tried to put it to use by coaxing several colleagues into a game of indoor soccer.
Aaron grew closer to Justin Maxwell and Mike Bauerly after Ana Arriola’s sudden departure. Ana hadn’t given any of them a heads-up that she planned on quitting. She’d just marched out one day and hadn’t come back. It unsettled Justin the most because Ana was the one who’d talked him into leaving Apple to come to Theranos, but he tried to maintain a positive attitude. He told himself that if the company was moving to prime Palo Alto office space, then it must be doing something right.
Shortly after the move, Aaron and Mike decided to conduct some informal “human factors” research with two of the Edison prototypes Tony Nugent and Dave Nelson had built. It was engineering-speak for putting them in people’s hands and seeing how they interacted with them. Aaron was curious to know how people handled pricking their fingers and the subsequent steps required to get