analyzers could do the entire range of laboratory tests. In Elizabeth’s
mind, that was going to be the miniLab’s selling point.
Greg spent a lot of time studying commercial instruments made by
diagnostics equipment makers to reverse engineer them and make
them smaller. He ordered a spectrophotometer from a company called
Ocean Optics and broke it apart to understand how it worked. It
turned into an interesting project, but it made him question their
approach.
Instead of building new instruments from scratch to fit the arbitrary
dimensions Elizabeth had laid out, Greg felt they would do better to
take the off-the-shelf components they were laboring to miniaturize
and integrate them together to test how the overall system worked.
Once they had a working prototype, they could then worry about
shrinking it. Emphasizing the system’s size first and how it worked
later was putting the cart before the horse. But Elizabeth wouldn’t
budge.
Greg was in the midst of a breakup with the girl he’d dated in L.A.,
so he came to the office on Saturdays to get his mind off it. He could
see that Elizabeth really appreciated that. She saw it as a sign of loyalty
and dedication. She told Greg she wanted to see Kent come in on
weekends too; it bothered her that his friend didn’t. Keeping a work-
life balance seemed a foreign concept to her. She was at work all the
time.
Like most people, Greg had been taken aback by Elizabeth’s deep
voice when he’d first met her. He soon began to suspect it was affected.
One evening, as they wrapped up a meeting in her office shortly after
he joined the company, she lapsed into a more natural-sounding
young woman’s voice. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she told him as she
got up from her chair, her pitch several octaves higher than usual. In
her excitement, she seemed to have momentarily forgotten to turn on
the baritone. When Greg thought about it, there was a certain logic to
her act: Silicon Valley was overwhelmingly a man’s world. The VCs
were all male and he couldn’t think of any prominent female startup
founder. At some point, she must have decided the deep voice was
necessary to get people’s attention and be taken seriously.