the blood into the cartridge. He’d pricked his own finger so much while running internal tests that he no longer had any feeling in it.
With Tony’s permission, they put the Edisons in the trunk of Aaron’s Mazda and drove up to San Francisco. Their plan was to take them around to friends’ startups in the city. First, they stopped at Aaron’s apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District to do some staging. They placed the machines on the wooden coffee table in Aaron’s living room and made sure they had everything else they needed: the cartridges, the lancets to draw the blood, and the small syringes called “transfer pens” used to put the blood in the cartridge.
Aaron took photos with his digital camera to document what they were doing. The Yves Béhar cases weren’t ready yet, so the devices had a primitive look. Their temporary cases were made from gray aluminum plates bolted together. The front plate tilted upward like a cat door to let the cartridge in. A rudimentary software interface sat atop the cat door at an angle. Inside, the robotic arm made loud, grinding sounds. Sometimes, it would crash against the cartridge and the pipette tips would snap off. The overall impression was that of an eighth-grade science project.
When Aaron and Mike arrived at their friends’ offices, they were greeted with chuckles and cups of coffee. Everyone was a good sport, though, and agreed to go along with their little experiment. One of the stops was at Bebo, a social networking startup that was acquired by AOL a few weeks later for $850 million.
As the day progressed, it became apparent that one pinprick often wasn’t enough to get the job done. Transferring the blood to the cartridge wasn’t the easiest of procedures. The person had to swab his finger with alcohol, prick it with the lancet, apply the transfer pen to the blood that bubbled up from the finger to aspirate it, and then press on the transfer pen’s plunger to expel the blood into the cartridge. Few people got it right on their first try. Aaron and Mike kept having to ask their test subjects to prick themselves multiple times. It got messy. There was blood everywhere.
These difficulties confirmed what Aaron already suspected: the company was underestimating this part of the process. To assume that a fifty-five-year-old patient in his or her home was going to immediately master it was wishful thinking. And if you didn’t get this part right, it didn’t matter how well the rest of the system functioned; you weren’t going to get good results. When they got back to the office, Aaron passed on his findings to Tony and Elizabeth, but he could tell they didn’t think they were a priority.
Aaron was getting frustrated and disillusioned. He’d initially bought into Elizabeth’s vision and found work at Theranos exciting. But after nearly two years, he was getting burned out. Among other issues, he didn’t get along with Tony, who’d become his boss. To get out from under him, he had asked to transfer from engineering to sales. He’d even spent a recent Saturday driving around shopping for a suit in the hope that Elizabeth would let him tag along on her trip to Switzerland. She didn’t, but she seemed to at least be taking his transfer request under advisement.
A few days after the San Francisco excursion, Aaron was sipping a beer at home and downloading the pictures he’d taken when an idea for a joke came to him. Using Photoshop software, he took one of the pictures—it showed the twin Edison prototypes sitting side by side on dinner mats on his coffee table—and made a fake Craigslist ad. Above the photo and under a headline that read, “Theranos Edison 1.0 ‘readers’—mostly functional—$10,000 OBO,” he wrote:
Up for grabs is a rare matching set of Theranos point-of-care diagnostic “Edison” devices. Billed as the “iPod of healthcare,” the Edison is a semi-portable immunochemistry platform capable of performing multiplexed protein assays on a fingerstick sample of human or animal whole blood…
I bought these units recently when I thought I was at risk of succumbing to septic shock. Now that I’ve tested my protein C and realized that I’m safely in the 4 ug/mL range, I no longer need a pre-production blood analytic device. My loss is your gain!
$10k for the pair, $6000 apiece, OBO—would also be willing to consider trade for a comparable pre-clinical diagnostic device (i.e., Roche, Becton-Coulter [sic], Abaxis, Biosite, etc.). Comes with