a colleague of theirs there. It wasn’t long before the Apple transplants
began noticing that Elizabeth and Theranos had their quirks. Ana
would arrive early every morning for a daily seven-thirty meeting with
Elizabeth to update her on design issues. When she pulled her car into
the parking lot, Ana would find her jamming to loud hip-hop music in
her black Infiniti SUV, the blond streaks in her hair bouncing wildly.
One day, as Justin walked into her office to update her on a project,
Elizabeth motioned him over excitedly, saying she wanted to show him
something. She pointed to a nine-inch-long metal paperweight on her
desk. Etched on it was the phrase, “What would you attempt to do if
you knew you could not fail?” She’d positioned it so the words were
facing her and clearly found it inspiring.
Having an idealistic boss wasn’t a bad thing, but there were other
aspects of working at Theranos that were less pleasant. One of them
was having to do daily battle with Matt Bissel, the head of IT, and his
sidekick, Nathan Lortz. Bissel and Lortz had the company’s computer
network set up in such a way that information was split into silos,
hampering communication between employees and departments. You
couldn’t even exchange instant messages with a coworker. The chat
ports were blocked. It was all in the name of protecting proprietary
information and trade secrets, but the end result was hours of lost
productivity.
The situation got so frustrating that Justin stayed up late one night
and wrote a long email screed to Ana about it.
“We have lost sight of our business objective. Did this company set
out to ‘put a bunch of people in a room and prevent them from doing
illegal things,’ or did it set out to ‘do something amazing with the best
people, as quickly as possible’?” he fumed.
Justin and Mike also got the distinct impression that Bissel and
Lortz were spying on them and reporting their findings back to
Elizabeth. The IT team always wanted to know what programs they
were running on their computers and at times turned suspiciously
friendly in what felt like transparent attempts to elicit seditious gossip.
The snooping wasn’t confined to the IT guys. Elizabeth’s
administrative assistants would friend employees on Facebook and tell