Does Theranos Mark the Peak of the Silicon Valley Bubble?
John Carreyrou talks to Nautilus about the lessons of a $1 billion fraud.
Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. The term is instructive. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but also that there’s something unreal about them.
There’s no recent Valley startup that satisfies both dimensions better than Theranos. Founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, who went on to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, it raised nearly a billion dollars from investors and was valued at $10 billion at its peak. It claimed to have developed technology that dramatically increased the affordability, convenience, and speed of blood testing. It partnered with Safeway and Walgreens, which together spent hundreds of millions of dollars building in-store clinics that were to offer Theranos tests. Tens of thousands of Americans had their blood tested by its proprietary technology.
The problem was that Theranos’ technology was never close to ready. In a series of devastating articles published…
