When he first arrived at the company, Christian didn’t have much to
do, so he spent part of his days reading about sports. He hid it by
cutting and pasting articles from the ESPN website into empty emails
so that, from afar, it looked like he was absorbed in work-related
correspondence. Christian soon recruited four of his fraternity
brothers from Duke: Jeff Blickman, Nick Menchel, Dan Edlin, and
Sani Hadziahmetovic. They were later joined by a fifth Duke friend,
Max Fosque. They rented a house together near the Palo Alto country
club and became known inside Theranos as “the Frat Pack.” Like
Christian, none of the other Duke boys had any experience or training
relevant to blood testing or medical devices, but their friendship with
Elizabeth’s brother vaulted them above most other employees in the
company hierarchy.
By then, Greg had convinced several of his own friends to join
Theranos. Two of them were buddies from his undergraduate days at
Georgia Tech, Jordan Carr and Ted Pasco. The third was a friend he’d
made in Pasadena while working for NASA named Trey Howard. Trey
happened to have gone to college at Duke a few years before the Frat
Pack.
Jordan, Trey, and Ted were all assigned to the product management
group with Christian and his friends, but they weren’t granted the
same level of access to sensitive information. Many of the hush-hush
meetings Elizabeth and Sunny held to strategize about the Walgreens
and Safeway partnerships were off limits to them, whereas Christian
and his fraternity brothers were invited in.
The Frat Pack endeared itself to Sunny and Elizabeth by working
long days. Sunny was constantly questioning employees’ commitment
to the company—the number of hours a person put in at the office,
whether he or she was doing productive work or not, was his ultimate
gauge of that commitment. At times, he would sit in the big glass
conference room and stare out at the rows of cubicles trying to identify
who was slacking off.
The numerous late nights they spent at the office left no time for
exercise, so Christian and his friends snuck workouts in during the
day. To elude Sunny’s watchful gaze, they ducked out of the building at