inspirational quotes in little frames around the old Facebook building.
One of them was from Michael Jordan: “I’ve missed more than 9,000
shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been
trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and
over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Another was
from Theodore Roosevelt: “Far and away the best prize that life has to
offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
Patrick suggested they make them a more integral part of the
workplace by painting them in black on the building’s white walls.
Elizabeth liked the idea. She also loved a new quote he suggested. It
was from Yoda in Star Wars: “Do or do not. There is no try.” She had
it painted in huge capital letters in the building’s entrance.
To accommodate its swelling ranks, which now totaled more than
five hundred, Theranos was planning to move to a new location it had
leased from Stanford a few blocks away on Page Mill Road. It was the
site of an old printing plant that had been demolished. Patrick was put
in charge of the new building’s interior and hired the South African
architect Clive Wilkinson, who had designed the converted Chiat\Day
warehouse in L.A., for the job.
The central motif of the design was once again the sacred geometry
of the circle. Desks were arranged in large circular patterns rippling
out from circular glass conference rooms in the center. The carpeting
followed the same circular patterns. In the building’s lobby,
interlocking rings of brass were embedded in the floor’s terrazzo tiles
to form the Flower of Life symbol. Elizabeth’s new corner office was
designed to look like the Oval Office. Patrick ordered a custom-made
desk that was as deep as the president’s at its center but had rounded
edges. In front of it, he arranged two sofas and two armchairs around a
table, replicating the White House layout. At Elizabeth’s insistence, the
office’s big windows were made of bulletproof glass.
Patrick wasn’t just Elizabeth’s style and décor consultant. He also
spearheaded a big marketing push Theranos was making in Arizona,
where its wellness centers had expanded to forty Walgreens stores. He
hired Errol Morris, an Academy Award–winning documentary
filmmaker who moonlighted as a producer and director of