was troubled by what he saw as a culture of dishonesty at the company.
The worst offender was Tim Kemp, the head of the software team. Tim was a yes-man who never leveled with Elizabeth about what was feasible and what wasn’t. For instance, he’d contradicted Justin and assured her they could write the Edison software’s user interface faster in Flash than in JavaScript. The very next morning, Justin had spotted a Learn Flash book on his desk.
Elizabeth never reprimanded Tim, even when obvious examples of his duplicity were brought to her attention. She valued his loyalty and, in her eyes, the fact that he never said no to her reflected a can-do attitude. It mattered little that many of his colleagues thought Tim was a mediocrity and a terrible manager.
There was one incident involving Elizabeth herself that also didn’t sit well with Justin. During an email exchange one evening, he asked her for a piece of information he needed to write a section of software. She responded that she’d look for it when she was back at work the next morning. The clear implication was that she had gone home. But minutes later, he stumbled on her in Tony Nugent’s office down the hall. Justin got angry and stormed off.
Elizabeth came by his office a little later to say she understood why he was upset, but she warned him, “Don’t ever walk off on me again.”
Justin tried to remind himself that Elizabeth was very young and still had a lot to learn about running a company. In one of their last email exchanges, he recommended two management self-help books to her, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t and Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work, and included their links on Amazon.
He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part:
good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you…Lying is a disgusting habit, and it flows through the conversations here like it’s our own currency. The cultural disease here is what we should be curing before we try to tackle obesity…I mean no ill will towards you, since you believe in what I was doing and hoped I would succeed at Theranos. I feel like I owe you this bad attempt at an exit interview since we have no HR to officially record it.
Upset, Elizabeth called him into her office, told him she disagreed with his criticism, and asked him to resign “with dignity.” Justin agreed to help smooth the transition by sending his colleagues an email with detailed instructions about where to find the various projects he’d been working on. But as he sat down to write it, he couldn’t resist including a few personal thoughts on the state of those projects, earning him one last reprimand from Elizabeth.
Aaron Moore and Mike Bauerly stayed at Theranos a few more months, but their hearts were no longer in it. One of the nice features of the new office was that it had a big terrace above the building’s entrance. Mike had furnished it with deck chairs and a hammock. Aaron and Mike would retreat there for long coffee breaks, the afternoon sun pleasantly warming their faces as they bantered.
Aaron felt someone needed to tell Elizabeth to pump the brakes and to stop pushing to commercialize a product that they were still trying to get to work. But for her to listen, the message had to come from one of the three senior managers—Tim, Gary, or Tony—and none of them were willing to tell her. Tony, who was under a lot of pressure from Elizabeth, finally had enough of hearing Aaron’s complaints and asked him to leave the company. “Go find a place where you can be a big fish in a small pond,” he told him.
Aaron agreed that it was time for him to go. To his surprise, Elizabeth tried to convince him to stay. It turned out she thought highly of him despite his prank. But his mind was made up. He resigned in June 2008. Mike Bauerly followed in December. Every member of the Apple contingent had now moved on, marking the end of a chaotic period for the company. Elizabeth had survived an aborted board coup and was back firmly in control. Remaining Theranos employees looked forward to calmer and quieter times. But their hopes would soon be dashed.
| FIVE |
The Childhood Neighbor
While Elizabeth was busy building Theranos, an