named “Project T-Rex.” It referred to none other than the company’s
partnership with Theranos, which by now—February 2012—was two
years in the making.
Burd had high hopes for the venture. He’d ordered the remodeling
of more than half of Safeway’s seventeen hundred stores to make room
for upscale clinics with deluxe carpeting, custom wood cabinetry,
granite countertops, and flat-screen TVs. Per Theranos’s instructions,
they were to be called wellness centers and had to look “better than a
spa.” Although Safeway was shouldering the entire cost of the $350
million renovation on its own, Burd expected it to more than pay for
itself once the new clinics started offering the startup’s novel blood
tests.
A few weeks after the earnings call, Burd and his executive team
took a group of analysts on a tour of a Safeway store a few miles from
his home in the scenic San Ramon Valley east of Oakland. The analysts
were shown the store’s new wellness center, but Burd remained
evasive about what sort of service it was going to offer. Even the store’s
manager was in the dark. Theranos had insisted on absolute secrecy
until the launch.
There had been quite a few delays since the companies had first
agreed to do business together. At one point, Elizabeth told Burd that
the earthquake that struck eastern Japan in March 2011 was
interfering with Theranos’s ability to produce the cartridges for its
devices. Some Safeway executives found the excuse far-fetched, but
Burd accepted it at face value. He was starry-eyed about the young
Stanford dropout and her revolutionary technology, which fit so
perfectly with his passion for preventive health care.
Elizabeth had a direct line to Burd and answered only to him. A war
room had been set up in the Pleasanton headquarters where a small
group of Safeway executives privy to Project T-Rex met once a week to
discuss its progress. Burd attended all the meetings, either in person
or via conference call if he was traveling. When questions or issues
came up that had to be taken back to Theranos, he would pipe up with
what became a refrain: “I’ll talk to Elizabeth about it.” Larree Renda,
the executive who had started out at Safeway as a teenage bagger in