deadlines.
Elizabeth’s loose relationship with the truth was another point of
contention. Ian had heard her tell outright lies more than once and,
after five years of working with her, he no longer trusted anything she
said, especially when she made representations to employees or
outsiders about the readiness of the company’s technology.
Ian’s frustrations bubbled over in the fall of 2010 as Theranos’s
courtship of Walgreens intensified. He complained to his old friend
Channing Robertson. Ian thought Robertson would keep their
conversation private, but he reported everything Ian had said to
Elizabeth. Rochelle was in bed when Ian arrived at their Portola Valley
home late that Friday night. He told his wife that Robertson had
betrayed his confidence and that Elizabeth had fired him.
To their surprise, Sunny called the next day. Unbeknownst to Ian, in
the intervening hours several of his colleagues had lobbied Elizabeth
to reconsider. Sunny offered Ian his job back, albeit without the same
responsibilities. Ian had been head of the general chemistry group,
which was in charge of creating new blood tests beyond the
immunoassays they’d developed for the Edison, when Elizabeth fired
him. He was allowed to come back as a technical consultant to the
group, but its leadership was given to Paul Patel, a biochemist who
had been hired two months earlier on Ian’s recommendation.
Ian was a proud man and he took the demotion hard. The
humiliation he felt was compounded when, eighteen months later, the
company moved to the old Facebook building and he lost the private
office he’d had at the Hillview Avenue headquarters. To be sure, he
wasn’t the only one being marginalized by then: Gary Frenzel and
Tony Nugent too were being sidelined as Elizabeth and Sunny hired
and promoted newer recruits over them. It was as if the company’s old
guard—the people who had gotten Elizabeth to this point—was being
mothballed.
—
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE the move, Tony had noticed a poster for the