figure. A modern-day Marie Curie.
Six weeks later, they were back at the Fogarty Winery, this time to
celebrate the Safeway alliance. Standing on the deck of the open-air
events house, Elizabeth harangued employees for forty-five minutes as
the fog rolled in, like General Patton addressing his troops before the
Allied landings. The sweeping view before them was appropriate, she
said, because Theranos was about to become Silicon Valley’s dominant
company. Toward the end she boasted, “I’m not afraid of anything,”
adding after a brief pause, “except needles.”
By this point, Greg had become fully disillusioned and resolved to
stick around only two more months until his stock options vested on
the first anniversary of his hiring. He’d recently gone to a job fair at his
alma mater, Georgia Tech, and had found himself unable to talk the
company up to students who stopped by the Theranos booth. Instead,
he’d focused his advice on the merits of a career in Silicon Valley.
Part of the problem was that Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable, or
unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product.
The miniLab Greg was helping build was a prototype, nothing more. It
needed to be tested thoroughly and fine-tuned, which would require
time. A lot of time. Most companies went through three cycles of
prototyping before they went to market with a product. But Sunny was
already placing orders for components to build one hundred miniLabs,
based on a first, untested prototype. It was as if Boeing built one plane
and, without doing a single flight test, told airline passengers, “Hop
aboard.”
One of the difficulties that would need to be resolved through
extensive testing was thermal. When you packed that many
instruments into a small, enclosed space, you introduced
unanticipated variations in temperature that could interfere with the
chemistry and throw off the performance of the overall system. Sunny
seemed to think that if you just put all the parts in a box and turned it
on, it would work. If only it were that easy.
At one point, he pulled Greg and an older engineer named Tom
Brumett into the big glass conference room and questioned their
passion. Greg prided himself on never losing his cool, but this time he