Bad Blood

Author: John Carreyrou

DISCLAIMER: These are private notes I wrote in my public library app about the book prior to creating this site and tracking and writing about all my reading here. I am pasting those notes into this site to consolidate everything. These notes are rough, unintelligent, and pasted as is (spelling mistakes and all). Enjoy.

Great book. Very well researched. The story is insane. I hope Elizabeth and Sunny and their lawyers spend years in jail and are never able to work a job again. I would accept them being labourers for a poorly managed roofing company that pays minimum wage and has them torching tar on rooftops. Or smashing boulders in the American southwest. My only complaint about the book (which isn’t really a fair complaint about the book) is that it did such a great job explaining the character of Sunny and Elizabeth that I was just in a rage half the time at how terrible these people are. It was also mind boggling the stupidity of the mega-boomers on her board who refused to look at the facts presented to them and trust Elizabeth blindly. My impression based on the facts presented in the book is that Elizabeth is a sociopathic narcissist who thinks she is a once in a lifetime genius and is so horribly non self-aware that at the end of it all she claims she is the victim of sexism in silicon valley which is why her company failed. The fact that she dressed like Steve Jobs and purposefully lowers her voice is pathetic and embarrassing. Of course she isn’t everything wrong with the world today, but she holds several of the key ingredients to things that piss me off the most. Plays a victim, liar, narcissistic, doesn’t accept responsibility, entitled, manipulates narratives like sexism to try and defend herself etc. I’m getting mad just thinking about her again. Sunny is the epitome of “small man syndrome” This guy has no technical knowledge of the subject, though he pretends he does. Loved the part where that one team makes a fake presentation for a word Sunny misheard and thinks is real and they presented it to him while he pretended to understand then they bursted out laughing when he left. Massively image obsessed and a control freak. Can’t manage his temper, fires a huge amount of people just as a power move. Pathetic. To recap the story. They developed a device that they envisioned would be in everyones home to test their blood and get results back essentially immediately. So blood tests don’t need to be performed at the doctor/in labs. The device never worked. They cheated and lied their way through it, convinced investors and potential customers like Walgreens and Safeway that it was a real product, and it never worked. Furthermore, when it was out in the field, it would give wrong results, that led to or possible led to wrong diagnosis, mis-calculation of drugs needed given the test results etc which could have cost lives.