technology at all. Did its vaunted “black box,” as people at Chiat\Day referred to the Theranos device, even exist?
They shared their mounting doubts with Stan, whose own interactions with Sunny were becoming increasingly unpleasant. Every quarter, Stan was having to chase Sunny around for money. Sunny kept asking him to justify the bills the agency submitted. Stan spent hours going over them with him point by point. Sunny would put him on speaker and pace around his office. When Stan asked him to move closer to the phone so he could make out what he was saying, Sunny’s temper would flare.
Not everyone at Chiat\Day was souring on Theranos, however. The L.A. office’s two higher-ups, Carisa and Patrick, remained smitten with Elizabeth. Patrick idolized Lee Clow and the marketing magic he had conjured up for Apple. It was clear he thought Theranos had the potential to become his own big legacy moment. Kate voiced her concerns to him on several occasions, but he dismissed them as Kate just being Kate. She had a tendency to be overly dramatic, Patrick thought. His view was that she and Mike should stop questioning everything and just complete the work they were being asked to do. In Patrick’s experience, all tech startups were chaotic and secretive. He saw nothing unusual or worrisome in that.
| FOURTEEN |
Going Live
Alan Beam was sitting in his office reviewing lab reports when Elizabeth poked her head in and asked him to follow her. She wanted to show him something. They stepped outside the lab into an area of open office space where other employees had gathered. At her signal, a technician pricked a volunteer’s finger, then applied a transparent plastic implement shaped like a miniature rocket to the blood oozing from it. This was the Theranos sample collection device. Its tip collected the blood and transferred it to two little engines at the rocket’s base. The engines weren’t really engines: they were nanotainers. To complete the transfer, you pushed the nanotainers into the belly of the plastic rocket like a plunger. The movement created a vacuum that sucked the blood into them.
Or at least that was the idea. But in this instance, things didn’t go quite as planned. When the technician pushed the tiny twin tubes into the device, there was a loud pop and blood splattered everywhere. One of the nanotainers had just exploded.
Elizabeth looked unfazed. “OK, let’s try that again,” she said calmly.
Alan wasn’t sure what to make of the scene. He’d only been working at Theranos for a few weeks and was still trying to get his bearings. He knew the nanotainer was part of the company’s proprietary blood-testing system, but he’d never seen one in action before. He hoped this was just a small mishap that didn’t portend bigger problems.
The lanky pathologist’s circuitous route to Silicon Valley had started in South Africa, where he grew up. After majoring in English at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (“Wits” to South Africans), he’d moved to the United States to take premed classes at Columbia University in New York City. The choice was guided by his conservative Jewish parents, who considered only a few professions acceptable for their son: law, business, and medicine.
Alan had stayed in New York for medical school, enrolling at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but he quickly realized that some aspects of being a doctor didn’t suit his temperament. Put off by the crazy hours and the sights and smells of the hospital ward, he gravitated toward the more sedate specialty of laboratory science, which led to postdoctoral studies in virology and a residency in clinical pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
In the summer of 2012, Alan was running the lab of a children’s hospital in Pittsburgh when he noticed a job posting on LinkedIn that dovetailed perfectly with his budding fascination with Silicon Valley: laboratory director at a Palo Alto biotech firm. He had just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. The book, which he’d found hugely inspiring, had cemented his desire to move out to the San Francisco Bay Area.
After he applied for the job, Alan was asked to fly out for an interview scheduled for 6:00 p.m. on a Friday. The timing seemed odd but he was happy to oblige. He met with Sunny first and then with Elizabeth. There was something about Sunny that he found vaguely creepy, but that impression was more than offset by Elizabeth, who