only Republican CEOs to embrace many of the tenets of Obamacare. Like Dr. J, he was serious about his own health. He worked out on a treadmill at five every morning and lifted weights in the evenings after dinner.
At Burd’s invitation, Elizabeth came to the supermarket chain’s headquarters in Pleasanton, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, to make a presentation. As the Safeway CEO and a group of his top executives listened intrigued, she described how her phobia of needles had led her to develop breakthrough technology that made blood tests not only more convenient, but faster and cheaper. She brought along one of her black-and-white devices to demonstrate how it worked.
The presentation had a strong impact on Larree Renda, Safeway’s executive vice president. Renda’s husband was battling lung cancer. His blood had to be tested frequently so that doctors could adjust his drug regimen. Each blood draw was an exercise in torture because his veins were collapsing. Theranos’s fingerprick system would be a godsend for him, she thought.
Renda, who had started out at Safeway at age sixteen as a part-time bagger and worked her way up the corporate ladder to become one of Burd’s most trusted executives, could see that her boss was also very impressed. The Theranos proposition dovetailed perfectly with his wellness philosophy and offered a way to improve the supermarket chain’s stagnating revenues and razor-thin profit margins.
Before long, Safeway too signed a deal with Theranos. Under the agreement, it loaned the startup $30 million and pledged to undertake a massive renovation of its stores to make room for sleek new clinics where customers would have their blood tested on the Theranos devices.
Burd was over the moon about the partnership. He saw Elizabeth as a precocious genius and treated her with rare deference. Normally loath to leave his office unless it was absolutely necessary, he made an exception for her, regularly driving across the bay to Palo Alto. On one occasion, he arrived bearing a huge white orchid. On another, he brought her a model of a private jet. Her next one, he predicted, would be real. Burd was aware of Theranos’s parallel discussions with Walgreens. Elizabeth told him his company would be the exclusive purveyor of Theranos blood tests in supermarkets, while Walgreens would be granted exclusivity in drugstores. Neither company was thrilled with the arrangement, but both saw it as better than missing out on a huge new business opportunity.
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BACK IN CHICAGO, Hunter’s efforts to get Van den Hooff to take his suspicions seriously were dashed in mid-December 2010 when Van den Hooff informed his colleagues that he would be leaving at the end of the year. He’d been offered a job as the CEO of a company in New Jersey that made temperature indicators for pharmaceutical companies. It was a career opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
Walgreens appointed an internal replacement, a female executive named Trish Lipinski who had some exposure to the laboratory world. Before coming to Walgreens, she had worked at the College of American Pathologists, the medical association representing laboratory scientists. Hunter wasted no time letting her know how he felt about the Theranos project. “I’ve got to stop this because someday this is going to be a black eye on someone,” he told her.
He also voiced his skepticism directly to Dr. J, but that was of little use. Dr. J was a staunch and tireless advocate for Theranos. If anything, he thought Walgreens was moving too slowly. After learning of the model jet Steve Burd had given Elizabeth, he’d railed to Trish that Walgreens needed to show her more love. To Hunter’s amazement, he had even stopped asking Elizabeth and Sunny about the test results from the kickoff party. He was apparently willing to let Theranos get away with not producing them.
Dr. J had a powerful ally in Wade Miquelon. A sharp dresser with a taste for expensive suits and designer eyeglasses, Wade was gregarious and well liked at Walgreens. However, many of his colleagues had begun to question his judgment after a story in the Chicago Tribune revealed that he’d been arrested for driving drunk that fall for the second time in a little over a year. He shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of a car at all: his driver’s license was still suspended from the previous arrest. To make matters worse, he’d refused to take a Breathalyzer and failed field sobriety tests. The incident earned him a new nickname in the hallways