ebullient Boies about the case and decided she should try to get him
some press about it. She offered to come brief the Fortune writer in
person. The Boies Schiller offices at Fifty-First Street and Lexington
Avenue were just four avenue blocks away.
As she walked across Midtown, it occurred to Schneider that Boies’s
victory in the Fuisz case was a good story but the far better story was
Theranos and its brilliant young founder. She had never met
Elizabeth, but she’d been hearing Boies rave about her for several
years. This was an opportunity to get David’s protégée national
attention just as her company prepared to expand across the country.
By the time she got to the Fortune offices on Avenue of the Americas,
Schneider had changed her pitch.
Parloff listened intrigued. He hadn’t seen the Wall Street Journal
article from the previous fall so he had never heard of Theranos but,
according to Schneider, that was precisely the point. It was like writing
about Apple or Google in their early days before they became Silicon
Valley icons and entered the collective consciousness.
“Roger, this is the greatest company you’ve never heard of,” she
said. “Think of it as an old-school Fortune cover.”
A few weeks later, Parloff flew out to Palo Alto to meet Elizabeth.
Over the course of several days, he interviewed her for a combined
seven hours. After getting over his initial shock at her deep voice, he
found her smart and engaging. When they broached topics other than
blood testing, she was unassuming, almost naïve. But when their
conversations shifted to Theranos, she became steely and intense. She
was also very controlling with information. She dangled a scoop:
Theranos had raised more than $400 million from investors at a
valuation of $9 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups in
Silicon Valley. And she showed Parloff the miniLab (though she didn’t
refer to it by any name). But she wouldn’t let the magazine take photos
of it and she didn’t want Parloff to use the words “device” or
“machine” to describe it. She preferred “analyzer.”
Leaving those quirks aside, what Elizabeth told Parloff she’d
achieved seemed genuinely innovative and impressive. As she and
Sunny had stated to Partner Fund, she told him the Theranos analyzer