The Secrets of a Billionaire’s Blood-Testing Startup

As far as corporate origin stories go, the blood-testing company Theranos has a pretty good one. Its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, quit Stanford in 2004, as a sophomore, to dedicate herself to the company. Over the next decade, Theranos attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Former senior government officials, including Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz, joined its board of directors. A partnership with Walgreens envisaged Theranos “wellness centers” in thousands of stores across the country. As the company’s valuation soared, Holmes took to wearing Steve Jobsian black turtlenecks, and was proclaimed “the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world” by Forbes. All of this rested on the idea that the company could revolutionize the seventy-five-billion-dollar diagnostic-lab business, by developing new kinds of tests that were quicker, cheaper, and required much less blood than their predecessors.