days later, Tyler had been informed that the protein engineering group
he’d originally been assigned to was being disbanded and everyone
was being moved to the undermanned immunoassay team to help out.
It was all a bit chaotic and confusing, but Elizabeth’s stirring speech
made his budding concerns melt away. He left the meeting energized
and motivated to work really hard.
A month into the job, Tyler met a new hire named Erika Cheung.
Like Tyler, Erika was a newly minted college grad who’d majored in
biology, but that was about all they had in common. With his dirty
blond hair and famous grandfather, Tyler was a product of the
establishment, while Erika came from a middle-class mixed-race
family. Her father had emigrated to the United States from Hong Kong
and worked his way up from package handler to engineering manager
at UPS. She’d spent large stretches of her youth homeschooled.
Despite their very different backgrounds, Tyler and Erika became
fast friends. Their job on the immunoassay team was to help run
experiments to verify the accuracy of blood tests on Theranos’s Edison
devices before they were deployed in the lab for use on patients. This
verification process was known as “assay validation.” The blood
samples used for these experiments came from employees and
sometimes from employees’ friends and family members. To
encourage employees to give blood, Theranos paid them $10 per tube.
That meant you could make as much as $50 in one sitting. Tyler and
Erika competed to see who could get to $600 first—the threshold
beyond which the company had to report the payments as
compensation to the IRS. One weekend, Theranos was looking for
more volunteers, so Tyler recruited his four housemates to come give
blood with him. They used their combined loot—$250—to buy beer
and burgers and threw a party that evening at the ramshackle house
they rented a few blocks away.
—
THE FIRST THING that dampened Tyler’s enthusiasm for working at
Theranos was seeing the inside of an Edison. During his internship the