Hopkins Medicine to any product or service.”
Hunter told Van den Hooff the letter was meaningless. Judging
from the Belgian’s expression, he sensed that he was starting to make
headway. Van den Hooff’s confidence seemed shaken. Hunter knew
that Dan Doyle, the executive responsible for the innovation team’s
finances, shared some of his skepticism. If he could convert Van den
Hooff to their point of view, they might get Dr. J and Wade Miquelon
to see the light and avert a potential disaster.
—
WALGREENS WASN’T the only big retail partner Theranos was courting.
During this same period, Theranos employees began noticing visits to
the Hillview Avenue office from an older gentleman with an earnest air
who wore rimless glasses and a suit and tie. It was Steve Burd, the
CEO of Safeway.
Burd had been at the helm of Safeway, one of the country’s biggest
supermarket chains, for seventeen years. Along the way, his
disciplined focus on the X’s and O’s of the grocery business, which had
earned him plaudits from Wall Street during his first decade as CEO,
had given way to an intense interest in health care.
He’d gotten hooked on the subject after realizing that Safeway’s
rising medical costs threatened to someday bankrupt the company if
he didn’t do something to tame them. He’d pioneered innovative
wellness and preventive health programs for his employees and
become an advocate for universal health coverage, making him one of
the only Republican CEOs to embrace many of the tenets of
Obamacare. Like Dr. J, he was serious about his own health. He
worked out on a treadmill at five every morning and lifted weights in
the evenings after dinner.
At Burd’s invitation, Elizabeth came to the supermarket chain’s
headquarters in Pleasanton, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, to
make a presentation. As the Safeway CEO and a group of his top
executives listened intrigued, she described how her phobia of needles
had led her to develop breakthrough technology that made blood tests