Posts Tagged: "Elizabeth Holmes"

Lessons From Theranos and the Trade Secret Defense

What a strange and compelling story. Brilliant young inventor conceives revolutionary machine, raises staggering amounts from investors, is fawned over by the press for a decade, then crashes to earth on revelations of faked demonstrations and technology that doesn’t work. When I learned of the recent jury verdict, I naturally turned over in my mind how all this could have happened to such a well-meaning person as . . . John Ernst Worrel Keely. Okay, you were expecting someone else. But since you may not have heard of Keely, let me fill you in and explain the role that secrecy played in one of the country’s most elaborate and long-running scams. I assure you that the Theranos investors wish they had boned up on Keely’s operation.

The Dark Side of Secrecy: What Theranos Can Teach Us About Trade Secrets, Regulation and Innovation

The spectacular failure of blood-testing firm Theranos is the subject of a riveting book, Bad Blood by investigative reporter John Carreyrou, and an engaging documentary, “The Inventor” on HBO, focusing on Elizabeth Holmes, the once-celebrated wunderkind who dropped out of Stanford at age 19 to “change the world” with a device that would perform hundreds of diagnostic tests with a few drops of blood from a finger stick. It’s a story made for Hollywood (Jennifer Lawrence will play Holmes in the forthcoming movie), filled with lies, deception, threats and sex, set in a Silicon Valley startup. But even the Theranos story doesn’t mean that trade secret law is inherently dangerous. Consider Apple, one of the world’s most secretive companies. (Holmes famously modeled her clothing and business habits after Steve Jobs.) Apple has consistently used NDAs and secrecy management to protect products under development, to great effect when they are ultimately unveiled, all without touting non-existent technology. And it’s easy to imagine how Theranos might never have happened if investors and business partners had been less credulous and more insistent to understand the technology.

HBO Tells Only Part of ‘Inventor’ Elizabeth Holmes’ Story

Theranos was based on the promise that a charismatic 19-year-old Stanford drop-out, Elizabeth Holmes, had developed a revolutionary technology that could perform important diagnostic tests by using a drop or two of blood. Whatever the outcome of a planned three-month trial set to begin next August in San Jose federal court, there may never be a full accounting of the destructive power of a good story well-told. The attitudes that allowed Theranos and Holmes to operate undetected and for investors to be duped out of more than a half-billion dollars do not appear to have changed. “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” a documentary released by HBO earlier this year, effectively dramatizes an extraordinary narrative. Gibney’s eye-opening film is important on several levels. However, its suggestion that “faking it ‘til you make it” is what many innovative businesses and professional inventors (like Edison) typically do, is inaccurate and disrespectful.