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Apple Envy

or a young entrepreneur building a business in the heart of
Silicon Valley, it was hard to escape the shadow of Steve Jobs.
By 2007, Apple’s founder had cemented his legend in the
technology world and in American society at large by bringing the
computer maker back from the ashes with the iMac, the iPod, and the
iTunes music store. In January of that year, he unveiled his latest and
biggest stroke of genius, the iPhone, before a rapturous audience at the
Macworld conference in San Francisco.

To anyone who spent time with Elizabeth, it was clear that she
worshipped Jobs and Apple. She liked to call Theranos’s blood-testing
system “the iPod of health care” and predicted that, like Apple’s
ubiquitous products, it would someday be in every household in the
country.

In the summer of 2007, she took her admiration for Apple a step
further by recruiting several of its employees to Theranos. One of them
was Ana Arriola, a product designer who’d worked on the iPhone.

Ana’s first meeting with Elizabeth was at Coupa Café, a hip coffee
and sandwich place in Palo Alto that had become her favorite haunt
outside the office. After filling her in on her background and her
travels to Asia, Elizabeth told Ana she envisioned building a disease
map of each person through Theranos’s blood tests. The company
would then be able to reverse engineer illnesses like cancer with
mathematical models that would crunch the blood data and predict
the evolution of tumors.