Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos, claimed to have cracked the code.
She said she had developed the technology that would allow the medical industry to test for a variety of things with just one drop of the blood.
The problem?
Her technology wasn't real.
She had collected a variety of investors, but her product was a sham.
John Carreyrou looked into Holmes and her company and wrote about it all.
Here is a description of Carreyrou's book, BAD BLOOD: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup from Amazon, where you can purchase a copy.
"In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley."