and took pictures of it against a white background. Patrick then made
a photo montage showing it balancing on the tip of a finger. As he’d
anticipated, it made for an arresting visual. Mike Yagi tried out
different slogans to go with it, eventually settling on two that Elizabeth
really liked: “One tiny drop changes everything” and “The lab test,
reinvented.” They blew the photo up and turned it into a mock full-
page ad in the Wall Street Journal. In advertising lingo, this was
known as a “tip-in.” Elizabeth loved it and ordered a dozen more
versions of it. She didn’t say what she wanted them for, but Stan
Fiorito got the sense she was using them as props during meetings
with her board.
Patrick also worked with Elizabeth on a new company logo.
Elizabeth believed in the Flower of Life, a geometric pattern of
intersecting circles within a larger circle that pagans once considered
the visual expression of the life that runs through all sentient beings. It
was later adopted by the 1970s New Age movement as “sacred
geometry” that provided enlightenment to those who spent time
studying it.
The circle thus became the guiding motif of the Theranos brand. The
inside of the “o” in “Theranos” was painted green to make it stand out,
and the photos of the patient faces and of the nanotainer balancing on
a fingertip were framed by circles. Patrick also created a new font for
the website and marketing materials derived from Helvetica in which
the dots over the “i” and the “j” and the periods at the end of sentences
were round instead of square. Elizabeth seemed pleased with the
results.
—
WHILE PATRICK REMAINED entranced with Elizabeth, Stan Fiorito was
more circumspect. A gregarious ad industry veteran with reddish
blond hair and freckles, Stan thought there was something odd about
Sunny. He used a lot of software engineering jargon in their weekly
meetings that had no applicability whatsoever to their marketing
discussions. And when Stan tried to get him to walk him through how