return.
Kent’s departure put Elizabeth in a foul mood. She now looked to Greg and others to pick up the slack. Greg also sensed a growing urgency in Elizabeth and Sunny’s behavior. They seemed to be squeezing the engineering team to meet some sort of deadline without communicating to them what that deadline was. They must have promised someone something, he thought.
As Elizabeth grew impatient with the pace of the miniLab’s development, Greg bore the brunt of her frustration. When the engineering team gathered for weekly status updates, she opened the meetings by staring at him silently without blinking until he broke the ice with a polite “Hello Elizabeth, how are you today?” He began keeping detailed notes of what was discussed and agreed to at each meeting that he could refer back to the following week to keep emotions out of it.
Several times, Elizabeth came downstairs to the engineers’ workshop and hovered over Greg while he worked. He politely acknowledged her, then resumed working in silence. It was some sort of strange power play and he was determined not to get rattled by it.
One afternoon, Elizabeth called him into her office and told him she sensed cynicism emanating from him. After a long silence in which he debated telling her she was right, Greg decided to keep his growing disenchantment to himself and told a fib: he was upset because Sunny had rejected several job applicants that he thought were well qualified and hoped the company would hire.
Elizabeth must have believed him because she relaxed noticeably. “You need to tell us about these things,” she said.
* * *
—
ON A WEEKDAY EVENING in December 2011, Theranos chartered several buses to transport its employees, which now numbered more than one hundred, to the Thomas Fogarty Winery in Woodside. It was Elizabeth’s favorite place to hold corporate events. The winery’s main building and its adjacent events facility were built on stilts into the hillside and offered panoramic views of the estate’s rolling vineyards and of the Valley beyond.
The occasion was the company’s annual Christmas party. As employees sipped drinks from an open bar inside the winery’s main building before sitting down to dinner, Elizabeth gave a speech.
“The miniLab is the most important thing humanity has ever built. If you don’t believe this is the case, you should leave now,” she declared, scanning her audience with a dead serious look on her face. “Everyone needs to work as hard as humanly possible to deliver it.”
Trey, the friend Greg had met while living in Pasadena and recruited to Theranos, tapped Greg’s foot. They glanced at each other knowingly. What Elizabeth had just said confirmed their armchair psychoanalysis of their boss: she saw herself as a world historical figure. A modern-day Marie Curie.
Six weeks later, they were back at the Fogarty Winery, this time to celebrate the Safeway alliance. Standing on the deck of the open-air events house, Elizabeth harangued employees for forty-five minutes as the fog rolled in, like General Patton addressing his troops before the Allied landings. The sweeping view before them was appropriate, she said, because Theranos was about to become Silicon Valley’s dominant company. Toward the end she boasted, “I’m not afraid of anything,” adding after a brief pause, “except needles.”
By this point, Greg had become fully disillusioned and resolved to stick around only two more months until his stock options vested on the first anniversary of his hiring. He’d recently gone to a job fair at his alma mater, Georgia Tech, and had found himself unable to talk the company up to students who stopped by the Theranos booth. Instead, he’d focused his advice on the merits of a career in Silicon Valley.
Part of the problem was that Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product. The miniLab Greg was helping build was a prototype, nothing more. It needed to be tested thoroughly and fine-tuned, which would require time. A lot of time. Most companies went through three cycles of prototyping before they went to market with a product. But Sunny was already placing orders for components to build one hundred miniLabs, based on a first, untested prototype. It was as if Boeing built one plane and, without doing a single flight test, told airline passengers, “Hop aboard.”
One of the difficulties that would need to be resolved through extensive testing was thermal. When you packed that many instruments into a small, enclosed space, you introduced unanticipated variations in temperature that could