Bad Blood with Tom Butler-Bowdon & Karin Richey

"Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is about the Theranos scandal - a unicorn startup worth billions that proved to be a house of cards. The title refers to a device which was at the heart of this company. It was for pin prick blood tests that would revolutionize the healthcare industry

"The scandal really only came to light because of John Carreyrou's investigation for the Wall Street Journal. He was contacted by a pathologist who didn't think what they were doing was actually possible. The more Carreyrou looked into it, the worse it got."

"This Silicon Valley thing of making things smaller and more beautiful sort of makes sense on paper, but not in medicine. There's a good reason why testing is difficult, clunky, etc. She sort of had the right intentions, but consumer ideas in medicine was never going to work."

"Holmes and Balwani created a corporate culture of fear and intimidation where anyone who sort of questioned what was going on was fired or told to shut up."

"It seems like the two of them were the masterminds and everyone else was told to 'keep your eyes down, and know that you will be replaced at any moment if you do not produce the results you are tasked to produce, if you have any questions or step out of line in any way."

"There's a lot of business lessons in this book. How to not start or run a business and all about the culture of Silicon Valley."

"Bad Blood is an exploration of the human psyche as you try to figure out what Elizabeth Holmes actually believes versus what she says and what phenomen this whole "distortion reality world" she created, where people need to buy into it and how she was able to make them do so."

"She had all the traits of Steve Jobs including making people believe that what she was wanting was possible. It's just that the product at the heart of it all was missing. It's very much about ethics and corporate governance."

"Bad Blood can serve as a cautionary tale on what can happen when you take the 10x rule to the extreme, going way too far by refusing to accept things that are literally, physically, scientifically impossible."

"Reading this book makes you have more respect for boring companies that took decades to get going and be created - where everything was done gradually and properly."