he’d arrived at what seemed like extremely aggressive sales targets,
Sunny gave vague and boastful answers. Normally, companies did
research to determine the size of the audience they were marketing to
and then worked out what percentage of that audience they could
realistically hope to convert into customers. But such basic concepts
seemed lost on Sunny. Stan tried to look him up on the internet but
couldn’t find anything. He thought it was strange that someone with
his background—a tech entrepreneur who had sold a company during
the dot-com boom and made a lot of money in the process—had left no
trace on the web. He wondered if Sunny had hired someone to scrub it
for him.
It was also highly unusual for an obscure startup to hire a big ad
agency like Chiat\Day. With their overhead and staffing, the big
agencies were expensive. Chiat\Day was charging Theranos an annual
retainer of $6 million a year. Where was this company nobody had
heard of before getting the money to pay these types of fees? Elizabeth
had stated on several occasions that the army was using her
technology on the battlefield in Afghanistan and that it was saving
soldiers’ lives. Stan wondered if Theranos was funded by the
Pentagon.
That would help explain the level of secrecy. Per Sunny’s
instructions, any materials Theranos provided to Chiat\Day had to be
numbered, logged, and kept in a locked room that only the team
assigned to work on the account had access to. Any printing had to be
done on a dedicated printer inside the room. Discarded materials
couldn’t just be thrown away, they had to be shredded. Computer files
had to be stored on a separate server and could only be shared among
the team via a dedicated intranet. And under no circumstances were
they to share information about Theranos with anyone from
Chiat\Day’s L.A. office or the agency’s broader network who hadn’t
signed a confidentiality agreement.
In addition to Mike Yagi, Stan supervised two other Chiat\Day
employees who worked on the Theranos account full-time, Kate Wolff
and Mike Peditto. Kate was in charge of building the website, while
Mike was responsible for creating in-store brochures, signs, and an