go with it, eventually settling on two that Elizabeth really liked: “One tiny drop changes everything” and “The lab test, reinvented.” They blew the photo up and turned it into a mock full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. In advertising lingo, this was known as a “tip-in.” Elizabeth loved it and ordered a dozen more versions of it. She didn’t say what she wanted them for, but Stan Fiorito got the sense she was using them as props during meetings with her board.
Patrick also worked with Elizabeth on a new company logo. Elizabeth believed in the Flower of Life, a geometric pattern of intersecting circles within a larger circle that pagans once considered the visual expression of the life that runs through all sentient beings. It was later adopted by the 1970s New Age movement as “sacred geometry” that provided enlightenment to those who spent time studying it.
The circle thus became the guiding motif of the Theranos brand. The inside of the “o” in “Theranos” was painted green to make it stand out, and the photos of the patient faces and of the nanotainer balancing on a fingertip were framed by circles. Patrick also created a new font for the website and marketing materials derived from Helvetica in which the dots over the “i” and the “j” and the periods at the end of sentences were round instead of square. Elizabeth seemed pleased with the results.
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WHILE PATRICK REMAINED entranced with Elizabeth, Stan Fiorito was more circumspect. A gregarious ad industry veteran with reddish blond hair and freckles, Stan thought there was something odd about Sunny. He used a lot of software engineering jargon in their weekly meetings that had no applicability whatsoever to their marketing discussions. And when Stan tried to get him to walk him through how he’d arrived at what seemed like extremely aggressive sales targets, Sunny gave vague and boastful answers. Normally, companies did research to determine the size of the audience they were marketing to and then worked out what percentage of that audience they could realistically hope to convert into customers. But such basic concepts seemed lost on Sunny. Stan tried to look him up on the internet but couldn’t find anything. He thought it was strange that someone with his background—a tech entrepreneur who had sold a company during the dot-com boom and made a lot of money in the process—had left no trace on the web. He wondered if Sunny had hired someone to scrub it for him.
It was also highly unusual for an obscure startup to hire a big ad agency like Chiat\Day. With their overhead and staffing, the big agencies were expensive. Chiat\Day was charging Theranos an annual retainer of $6 million a year. Where was this company nobody had heard of before getting the money to pay these types of fees? Elizabeth had stated on several occasions that the army was using her technology on the battlefield in Afghanistan and that it was saving soldiers’ lives. Stan wondered if Theranos was funded by the Pentagon.
That would help explain the level of secrecy. Per Sunny’s instructions, any materials Theranos provided to Chiat\Day had to be numbered, logged, and kept in a locked room that only the team assigned to work on the account had access to. Any printing had to be done on a dedicated printer inside the room. Discarded materials couldn’t just be thrown away, they had to be shredded. Computer files had to be stored on a separate server and could only be shared among the team via a dedicated intranet. And under no circumstances were they to share information about Theranos with anyone from Chiat\Day’s L.A. office or the agency’s broader network who hadn’t signed a confidentiality agreement.
In addition to Mike Yagi, Stan supervised two other Chiat\Day employees who worked on the Theranos account full-time, Kate Wolff and Mike Peditto. Kate was in charge of building the website, while Mike was responsible for creating in-store brochures, signs, and an interactive iPad sales tool Theranos planned to use to pitch doctors.
As the months passed, Kate and Mike also began to develop concerns about their strange and demanding client. Both were from the East Coast and brought no-nonsense attitudes to their jobs. Kate, who was twenty-eight, grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and played ice hockey at Boston University. Her proper, small-town upbringing had given her a strong moral compass. She also knew a thing or two about medicine: her dad and her wife were both