Drawing blood
World’s youngest self-made billionaire and the storm that has gathered over her company. Meet Elizabeth Holmes
The world’s youngest self-made billionaire and the storm that has gathered over her company. Meet Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes is strangely similar to Steve Jobs. She, too, wears those convenient black turtlenecks, cutting short those extra 10 minutes spent deciding what to wear and she, like the Father of the iPhone, has an intense, ambitious streak —to change the way we are.
Which is why Holmes is now the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, valued at a net worth of $4.6 billion, and the most controversial. Her medical diagnostics company, Theranos, aimed to disrupt a $75 billion industry, filled with ageing equipment and “painful procedures”. The plan was simple — device a technology which can carry out over 30 tests using just a few drops of blood from the fingertips. Everything from cholesterol to cancer could be tested from these droplets and the best part, these tests would be cheaper than what’s out there.
The rise: Theranos was kept a complete secret (aka stealth mode) for at least 10 years. During that time, Holmes never dated, took no vacations and worked seven days a week. In various interviews, Holmes has admitted she “doesn’t hang out anymore”. In fact, she’s a vegan because avoiding meat lets her function longer without sleep. She also, doesn’t own a TV set and according to reports, she drinks “a mix of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery”.
The urge to work towards change started early. When she was 9, Holmes wrote a letter to her father saying, “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.”
Theranos itself was born out of a childhood fear of needles and painful medical procedures. Soon after entering Stanford to study chemical engineering, she won the President’s Scholar which meant she was entitled to receive a $3,000 stipend for a research project of her choosing. And within a year, she filed a patent for a wearable device which monitors a patient’s blood. That wasn’t enough though. The very persistent Holmes decided to drop out of Stanford (at age 19) to start Theranos in the basement of a house — in 2003.
No looking back: The search for money was quick. In just four years, Holmes managed get her company a total funding of over $70 million and by 2012, Theranos was an absolute giant... functioning out of massive facilities in the hearts of some of the biggest cities in the United States. As of July 2015, Theranos is the owner of over 26 patents and is valued at nearly $10 billion.
Trouble: Theranos, however, is not without its share of crisis. Experts worldwide have pointed out that the health giant has remained tight-lipped about its technology. A recent Wall Street Journal expose pushed a knife into it by claiming Theranos was just using existing technologies to diagnose blood samples and poured doubt on the company’s ability to get 100 per cent results. America’s FDA, too, after the findings, has asked the firm to halt all tests except one... until the air clears.
The world is now asking... Is Holmes’ Theranos all hype? The company has vehemently denied the allegations maintaining the tests remain accurate. “Every test that we offer in our lab can be run on our proprietary devices,” Holmes said in a statement. “This is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.”
The boss has also blamed disgruntled former employees maintaining that they’re just... well... stupid. The company also released a statement slamming the WSJ story. “The story about Theranos is factually and scientifically erroneous and grounded in baseless assertions by inexperienced and disgruntled former employees and industry incumbents. The sources relied on in the article today were never in a position to understand Theranos’ technology and know nothing about the processes currently employed by the company. We are disappointed that, in an effort to make its story more dramatic, this reporter relied only on the views of four ‘anonymous’ disgruntled former employees, competitors and their allies.”
Observers and early investors are standing by Holmes though, simply because she’s nothing like they have ever seen in a long time. They are even calling her a “visionary”, saying the future of healthcare could be safe in her hands. But for now, Theranos will have to fight. To win back confidence, and like its invention —pain free.