—
ED WAS WORKING late one evening when Elizabeth came by his
workspace. She was frustrated with the pace of their progress and
wanted to run the engineering department twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week, to accelerate development. Ed thought that was a
terrible idea. His team was working long hours as it was.
He had noticed that employee turnover at the company was already
high and that it wasn’t confined to the rank and file. Top executives
didn’t seem to last long either. Henry Mosley, the chief financial
officer, had disappeared one day. There was a rumor circulating
around the office that he’d been caught embezzling funds. No one
knew if there was any truth to it because his departure, like all the
others, wasn’t announced or explained. It made for an unnerving work
environment: a colleague might be there one day and gone the next
and you had no idea why.
Ed pushed back against Elizabeth’s proposal. Even if he instituted
shifts, a round-the-clock schedule would make his engineers burn out,
he told her.
“I don’t care. We can change people in and out,” she responded.
“The company is all that matters.”
Ed didn’t think she meant it to sound as callous as it did. But she
was so laser focused on achieving her goals that she seemed oblivious
to the practical implications of her decisions. Ed had noticed a quote
on her desk cut out from a recent press article about Theranos. It was
from Channing Robertson, the Stanford professor who was on the
company’s board.
The quote read, “You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of
another Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.”
That was a high bar to set for herself, Ed thought. Then again, if
there was anyone who could clear it, it might just be this young
woman. Ed had never encountered anyone as driven and relentless.
She slept four hours a night and popped chocolate-coated coffee beans
throughout the day to inject herself with caffeine. He tried to tell her to
get more sleep and to live a healthier lifestyle, but she brushed him off.