Holmes and Balwani were romantically involved. I knew from reading
the New Yorker and Fortune articles and from browsing the Theranos
website that Balwani was the company’s president and chief operating
officer. If what Alan was saying was true, this added a new twist:
Silicon Valley’s first female billionaire tech founder was sleeping with
her number-two executive, who was nearly twenty years her senior.
It was sloppy corporate governance, but then again this was a
private company. There were no rules against that sort of thing in
Silicon Valley’s private startup world. What I found more interesting
was the fact that Holmes seemed to be hiding the relationship from
her board. Why else would the New Yorker article have portrayed her
as single, with Henry Kissinger telling the magazine that he and his
wife had tried to fix her up on dates? If Holmes wasn’t forthright with
her board about her relationship with Balwani, then what else might
she be keeping from it?
Alan said he had raised his concerns about proficiency testing and
the reliability of Theranos’s test results with Holmes and Balwani a
number of times in person and by email. But Balwani would always
either rebuff him or put him off, making sure to copy a Theranos
lawyer on their email exchanges and to write, “Consider this attorney-
client confidential.”
As the laboratory director whose name had been on the Theranos
lab’s CLIA license, Alan was worried that he would be held personally
responsible if there was ever a government investigation. To protect
himself, he told me he’d forwarded dozens of his email exchanges with
Balwani to his personal email account. But Theranos had found that
out and threatened to sue him for breaching his confidentiality
agreement.
What worried him even more than any personal liability he might
face was the potential harm patients were being exposed to. He
described the two nightmare scenarios false blood-test results could
lead to. A false positive might cause a patient to have an unnecessary
medical procedure. But a false negative was worse: a patient with a
serious condition that went undiagnosed could die.
I hung up the phone feeling the familiar rush I got whenever I made