fourteen-page complaint in California Superior Court on August 27,
- It requested that the court issue a temporary restraining order
against the three former employees, appoint a special master “to
ensure that they do not use or disclose Plaintiff’s trade secrets,” and
award Theranos five different types of monetary damages.
In the ensuing weeks and months, the atmosphere at the office
became oppressive. Document retention emails landed in employees’
in-boxes with regularity and Theranos went into lockdown. The head
of IT, a computer technician named Matt Bissel, deployed security
features that made everyone feel under surveillance. You couldn’t put
a USB drive into an office computer without Bissel knowing about it.
One employee got caught doing just that and was fired.
—
AMID THE DRAMA, the competition between engineering teams
intensified. The new group competing with Ed’s was headed by Tony
Nugent. Tony was a gruff, no-nonsense Irishman who’d spent eleven
years at Logitech, the maker of computer accessories, followed by a
stint at a company called Cholestech that made a simpler version of
what Theranos was trying to build. Its handheld product, the
Cholestech LDX, could perform three cholesterol tests and a glucose
test on small samples of blood drawn from a finger.
Tony had initially been brought to Theranos as a consultant by Gary
Hewett, Cholestech’s founder. He’d had to step into Hewett’s shoes
when Hewett was fired after just five months as Theranos’s vice
president of research and development.
Hewett’s conviction when he’d arrived at Theranos was that
microfluidics didn’t work in blood diagnostics because the volumes
were too small to allow for accurate measurements. But he hadn’t had
time to come up with much of an alternative. That job now fell to
Tony.
Tony decided that part of the Theranos value proposition should be
to automate all the steps that bench chemists followed when they
tested blood in a laboratory. In order to automate, Tony needed a