one at Theranos had bothered to think it through, as far as Kate could
tell.
—
THE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS before the website went live turned into a
mad scramble. Mike Yagi, who for months had been laboring to write
and rewrite copy to Elizabeth’s satisfaction and was under a lot of
stress, had an anxiety attack and went home to rest. He left the office
so abruptly and in such a state that his colleagues didn’t know whether
he’d ever be coming back.
Then, on the evening before the launch, Theranos sent word that it
wanted to have an emergency conference call. Kate, Mike, Patrick,
Lorraine Ketch, and a copywriter named Kristina Altepeter who was
filling in for Yagi gathered in the warehouse’s board room (so named
because its table was made from surfboards) and listened as Elizabeth
announced that Theranos’s legal team had ordered last-minute
wording changes. Kate and Mike were annoyed. They’d been
requesting a legal review for months. Why was it only happening now?
The call dragged on for more than three hours until 10:30 p.m. They
went over the site line by line, as Elizabeth slowly dictated every
alteration that needed to be made. Patrick nodded off at one point. But
Kate and Mike stayed alert enough to notice that the language was
being systematically dialed back. “Welcome to a revolution in lab
testing” was changed to “Welcome to Theranos.” “Faster results.
Faster answers” became “Fast results. Fast answers.” “A tiny drop is all
it takes” was now “A few drops is all it takes.”
A blurb of text next to the photo of a blond-haired, blue-eyed
toddler under the headline “Goodbye, big bad needle” had previously
referred only to finger-stick draws. Now it read, “Instead of a huge
needle, we can use a tiny finger stick or collect a micro-sample from a
venous draw.” It wasn’t lost on Kate and Mike that this was
tantamount to the disclaimer they had previously suggested.
In a part of the site titled “Our Lab,” a banner running across the
page beneath an enlarged photo of a nanotainer had stated, “At