Patrick.
A strikingly handsome man with blond hair, blue eyes, and the
sculpted physique of someone who worked out religiously, Patrick was
taken with Elizabeth from the moment he met her. His attraction
wasn’t of a romantic nature; he was gay. Rather, he was drawn in by
her charisma and her singular drive to put a dent in the universe. He’d
worked at Chiat\Day for fifteen years, creating ads for big corporate
clients like Visa and IKEA. The work was interesting, but it didn’t
inspire him the way Elizabeth had when she’d first come to the
agency’s converted warehouse in Playa del Rey and described the
Theranos mission of giving people access to pain-free, low-cost health
care. In advertising, it wasn’t often you got to work on something that
really had the potential to make the world better. Patrick hadn’t been
surprised or put off by Theranos’s insistence on absolute secrecy.
Apple had been the same way. He understood technology companies’
need to protect their valuable intellectual property. In any case, the
company would soon be coming out of “stealth mode,” as Elizabeth
called it, and that’s where he came in: his job was to make its
commercial launch as impactful as possible.
Redesigning the Theranos website was a big part of that. Schoeller’s
photos were going to be featured on it. Not just those of Elizabeth. The
photographer had spent most of the two-day shoot at a studio in
Culver City taking pictures of models posing as patients. They were of
different ages, genders, and ethnicities: children under five, children
between five and ten, young men and women, middle-aged folks, and
seniors. Some were white, some black, others Hispanic or Asian. The
message was that Theranos’s blood-testing technology would help
everyone.
Elizabeth and Patrick spent hours choosing which patient photos to
use from the shoot. Elizabeth wanted the faces displayed on the
website to communicate empathy. She talked movingly about the
sadness people felt when they found out that a loved one was sick and
that it was too late to do anything about it. Theranos’s painless blood
tests would change that by catching diseases early, before they became
a death sentence, she said.