accurate lab results in his email in-box before he even left the building.
What he didn’t know was that Elizabeth was planning to use the
Walgreens launch and his accompanying article containing her
misleading claims as the public validation she needed to kick-start a
new fund-raising campaign, one that would propel Theranos to the
forefront of the Silicon Valley stage.
—
MIKE BARSANTI WAS vacationing in Lake Tahoe when he received a call
on his cell phone from Donald A. Lucas, the son of legendary venture
capitalist Donald L. Lucas. Mike and Don had gone to college together
in the early 1980s at Santa Clara University and had remained friendly
ever since. Mike was the retired chief financial officer of a Bay Area
seafood and poultry business that his family had operated for more
than six decades before selling it the previous year.
Don was calling to pitch Mike on an investment: Theranos. That
came as a surprise to Mike. He had last heard of the startup seven
years earlier when he and Don had attended a twenty-minute
presentation Elizabeth gave on Sand Hill Road showcasing her little
blood-testing machine. Mike remembered Elizabeth very well: she’d
come off as a dowdy young scientist back then, wearing Coke-bottle
glasses and no makeup, speaking nervously to an audience of men two
to three times her age. At the time, Don ran RWI Ventures, a firm he’d
founded in the mid-1990s after spending ten years learning the ropes
of the venture capital business working for his father. Mike had been
an investor in RWI. His curiosity piqued by the awkward but obviously
smart young woman, he’d asked Don why the firm wasn’t taking a flyer
on her like his father had. Don had replied that after careful
consideration he’d decided against it. Elizabeth was all over the place,
she wasn’t focused, his father couldn’t control her even though he
chaired her board, and Don didn’t like or trust her, Mike recalled his
friend telling him.
“Don, what’s changed?” Mike now asked.
Don explained excitedly that Theranos had come a long way since