AVIE WAS ONE of Steve Jobs’s oldest and closest friends. They’d worked
together at NeXT, the software company Jobs created after being
ousted from Apple in the mid-1980s. When Jobs returned to Apple in
1997 he’d brought Avie over with him and made him the head of
software engineering. A grueling decade later, Avie had called it quits.
He’d made more money than he knew what to do with and wanted to
enjoy more time with his wife and two kids. A few months into his
retirement, a headhunter recruiting new directors for Theranos had
approached him.
Like Ana, Avie’s first meeting with Elizabeth had been at Coupa
Café. She’d come across as a bright young lady who was passionate
about what she was doing, exactly the qualities you looked for in an
entrepreneur. Her eyes had lit up when he volunteered some pieces of
management wisdom he’d learned at Apple. His long association with
Jobs seemed an object of fascination to her. After their encounter, Avie
had agreed to join the Theranos board and bought $1.5 million of
company stock in its late 2006 offering.
The first couple of board meetings Avie attended had been relatively
uneventful, but, by the third one, he’d begun to notice a pattern.
Elizabeth would present increasingly rosy revenue projections based
on the deals she said Theranos was negotiating with pharmaceutical
companies, but the revenues wouldn’t materialize. It didn’t help that
Henry Mosley, the chief financial officer, had been fired soon after
Avie became a director. At the last board meeting he’d attended, Avie
had asked more pointed questions about the pharmaceutical deals and
been told they were held up in legal review. When he’d asked to see the
contracts, Elizabeth had said she didn’t have any copies readily
available.
There were also repeated delays with the product’s rollout and the
explanation for what needed to be fixed kept changing. Avie didn’t
pretend to understand the science of blood testing; his expertise was
software. But if the Theranos system was in the final stages of fine-
tuning as he’d been told, how could a completely different technical
issue be the new holdup every quarter? That didn’t sound to him like a
product that was on the cusp of commercialization.