A very solid documentary, and one that hits close to home for me, so I really appreciated the depth Alex Gibney provided. I have to say first that Erika Cheung is a true hero and such an admirable person. She wanted to dream the dream but remained honest to the engineering and what the data was telling her. Tyler Schultz too. They are just kids really, and the pressure they faced was enormous, and interestingly enough Schultz's elderly grandfather George (former statesman) was a part of the problem. The documentary also shows us (yet again) the importance of a free press, and the interviews with the Wall Street Journal reporter (John Carreyrou) were one of my favorite parts, along with the commentary from behavioral scientist Dan Ariely. The footage that Gibney gets from company meetings is fantastic. I also loved the parallel he shows us to Thomas Edison, giving an example of a case in which the famous inventor followed the start-up mantra "fake it 'til you make it," as well as to other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, which puts this story in context as well as helps explain it.
Elizabeth Holmes was brilliant at selling investors and motivating her employees with the promise of a breakthrough in blood testing, but she was woefully incompetent at building an engineering team or listening to R&D inputs. What she failed to understand is that while you can be boldly aspirational and even attempt to emulate the approach of your idol (in her case, Steve Jobs) down to his look, at the end of the day it has to be grounded in some semblance of reality. For Jobs, setting aside his massive personal flaws, he always had the ability to balance both of these things, and he always had a strong counterpart, starting with Steve Wozniak early on. Where was Elizabeth Holmes's Woz? It's telling that other than a brilliant scientist/PhD from Cambridge who was marginalized when he started injecting unpleasant truth into the discussion (ultimately leading him to commit suicide), there is no mention or interview with a VP of R&D, or VP of Engineering here. Instead we see the President, and ex-Apple guy who was also her boyfriend, operating in the same smoke and mirrors sales act as her, as well as one of the company's creative marketing / brand types. There was never any "there" there, as they say, with the result being a constant game of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" that snowballed.
How Holmes was able to deceive a number of powerful, older men, and then leverage that to achieve great visibility, further investment, and the Walgreens deal is pretty shocking, even by Silicon Valley standards. I've lived in the Valley for some time, and have experience with start-ups, investors, and entrepreneurs. There is often a grand vision and the joke is like that old cartoon with the calculation at the blackboard, with the step drawn at an impossible leap labeled "then a miracle occurs." There is also always going to be investor money lost in a number of startups and that's just a part of the risk - but what makes this story reprehensible is that people's health was on the line. Perhaps one thing lacking in the documentary is an interview with people who were negatively impacted, such as one woman whose bogus test results indicated she had cancer.
The young employees at Theranos understood the human factor, with Tyler Schultz pointing out (perhaps a little too glibly) that with their 65% success rate at detecting syphilis, someone could think they were STD-free and spread the disease. Holmes never seems to get this, and to the bitter end she continues lying. I thought the documentary showed remarkable restraint in not drawing a conclusion, and even showed someone say that he thought she simply dreamed it so deeply that she didn't realize she was being deceptive. I don't buy that for a second. Aside from being an awful executive, she's an awful person, and to me comes across as a master manipulator and borderline sociopath, one cloaked in the altruistic goal of revolutionizing health care. In the end she's not stretching the truth with the aim of making this thing happen, she's lying to save her own skin. It's a chilling, chilling portrait.
