 Good evening and welcome. My name is Colin Anthony, and I'm the Associate Director for Undergraduate Outreach for the Center for Ethics and Society here at Stanford University. Our Center aims to encourage and promote ethical reflection through not only research and scholarship in the classroom, but also through student engagement and community events such as this one this evening. In planning this event, I have had the unique privilege of working with many undergraduate university leaders on campus without whom this event would not have been possible. This includes our co-sponsors of tonight's event, the Student Group CS Plus Social Good. Founded in 2013, this group offers leadership opportunities that range from summer fellowships at the Haas Center for Public Service and opportunities for courses where students can build projects for nonprofit organizations. In my work with CS Plus Social Good, I have been constantly amazed and by the passion, rigor, and commitment that undergraduates have brought to the table. And so I urge undergraduates in the audience here to reach out to me if you have an idea that connects ethics and society that you would like to see envisioned in society and at this university. So please reach out to our center and reach out to CS Plus Social Good if you have any ideas that you would like to work on and become a reality. Before moving forward, I wanna share with you the format of this evening's event. First, I will turn it over to Alexander Lam, an undergraduate who's affiliated with the center, who's gonna be giving sort of a brief overview presentation of the Theranos Saga before introducing our speakers. The interview is set to conclude at 8 p.m., after which there will be a Q&A period for 30 minutes. I will allow for specific audience members if they need to leave at 8 p.m. to exit the auditorium during that time. At eight o'clock, after the interview concludes, there'll be microphones in each of the aisles, as well as a microphone in the balcony. And at that time, I will ask you to line up for question and answers. With that said, please join me in welcoming Alexander Lam, an undergraduate and affiliate with the center of ethics and society who will guide us through the story of Theranos and then introduce our speakers. Alexander? Hi, good evening, everyone. And thank you for joining us tonight. I'm very excited to be here. I'd like to begin tonight's event with a photo. One second. Four years ago, Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO and founder of Theranos sat in this very auditorium. Here, she promised to deliver technology that would revolutionize the healthcare industry in the 21st century. The idea behind her technology was simple, yet groundbreaking. With only a single prick of blood, patients could gain access to hundreds of blood test results and use them to make important medical decisions. As shown here on the cover of Forbes magazine, Elizabeth Holmes is holding what she called a nanotube of blood between her very fingers. Because of this technology's potential impact on the health of millions of people, she claimed that it was, quote, the most important thing humanity has ever built. This vision gripped the imagination of Silicon Valley and attracted influential figures to support her company, including the former US Secretary of State, George Schultz, who is the grandfather of one of our guests tonight, Tyler Schultz. She also convinced investors such as Rupert Murdoch of the Fox News Corporation and the Walton family of Walmart Tobacco Company. At its peak, Theranos was valued at over $9 billion and Elizabeth Holmes was named the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. Herald did as the next Steve Jobs, she dressed in black turtlenecks and described her technology as the iPod of healthcare. However, despite her lofty promises and celebrity status, there were deep flaws in both her technology and business practices. In her relentless pursuit of success, she manipulated lab results, deceived government inspectors and instilled a crippling fear in her employees as she struggled to hide the fact that the technology she promised was simply not a reality. In fact, in a brazen case of deception, Elizabeth Holmes guided Joe Biden through what turned out to be a fake laboratory with staged equipment in an attempt to convince the public that her technology was ready and that she could be trusted. Her ruse had worked. In 2013, despite glaring deficiencies in Theranos' faulty technology, Elizabeth Holmes scaled out products to neighborhood Walgreen stores where patients made serious medical decisions on the basis of dubious tests. Many stories emerged of people receiving diagnoses for conditions that they simply did not have, which bewildered medical professionals and frightened patients. But for the employees inside Theranos, some of them had seen enough, which brings us to the real story of tonight, the story of two courageous individuals, Erica Chung and Tyler Schultz, who in their very first jobs after college risked their personal and professional lives to stand for what is right. As we hear and learn from their experiences this evening, they will surely serve as an important reminder to us all for what happens when myth is mistaken for reality and when values are divorced from technology. And interviewing our two guests tonight with questions from many of you in the audience will be Sasank Munakutla, an undergraduate here at Stanford, and member of the student group CS Plus Social Good. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Erica, Tyler, and Sasank to the stage. Well, Erica and Tyler, on behalf of the Stanford community, I'd like to thank you for being here today. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. There certainly has been a lot of excitement around campus to hear from you. Now, Alexander earlier mentioned that Elizabeth Holmes sat here right in your chair in CEMEX Auditorium, not too long ago. How do you feel about that? Considering the seat she was sitting in today, I hope the trend stops here. Yeah, it's a bit surreal, honestly. You never would have expected, by joining Theranos, that this is what would have happened. I never expected that I'd enter into a company that ended up being a big fraud case. So, yeah, it's a bit surreal. As a student myself, and a lot of us in the audience today are students, I'd like you to think back to college. What were your experiences like, and what drew you to Theranos as your first real job after college? Do you want me to go with this one? Okay. Yeah, so a little bit of background, I studied molecular and cell biology and linguistics, and I was on the academic track, so I was trying to see about getting a PhD after college, but had kind of become a little disillusioned with academia, and fell in love with the vision of Theranos, that it was like getting research that was in a lab and making it into a commercialized product, and was super sold on the vision, totally drank the Kool-Aid initially, you know, making healthcare more accessible and affordable, was kind of right up my alley, and how cool would it be to work for a tech company in the Silicon Valley, right? The place to be for technology. So that kind of drew me to Theranos, and also Elizabeth Holmes drew me to Theranos. From the little that I'd read on the media, having a really strong female entrepreneur who was basically worked very hard to start her own company was really appealing to me, and so that's why I decided to go working with Theranos. I had two other job opportunities actually at Stanford and UCSF, but I turned them both down to work for Theranos, so. Yeah, so when I started working at Theranos, that was after my junior year of college, actually, so I was a junior at Stanford, majoring in mechanical engineering, and then I actually met Elizabeth Holmes, and I totally fell in love with her vision and changed my major to biology so I could do some more chemistry, and yeah, I was only a bio major for two quarters, but I ended up graduating biology and then going to Theranos. Could you tell us more about both of your roles at Theranos, what did your work entail? So I started out in protein engineering, so I was developing antibodies that would be used in the tests, but four days after I started doing that job full time, they actually shut down all the research labs and put us all into what was called the assay validation team, and the reason that I was told was that that team was like 20 people and then dropped down to like eight people super quickly because they were working through the night, and yeah, so then I moved into assay validation, where our goal was really to take a test and make sure that it was safe to use on the general public. Yeah, so I started off in research and development and that's where Tyler and I actually met, so I was on the assay validation team as well, and as I started working with the company, they also did the same thing where they're like actually the clinical lab needs a lot of help, so we're gonna change your job role and you're gonna work in the clinical lab, so I was in charge of taking Theranos' proprietary devices that we were validating in research and development and then integrating it into the clinical lab, and the clinical lab, just to give everyone context, is where you process patient samples, so that's regulated by the center of Medicare and Medi-Cal services, am I saying that right, and the FDA. Sure, I think it was nice to hear from you that you were often moved between different teams, other people described the culture fear at the company, entire divisions and teams were siloed away from each other with no communication between them, I'd love to hear more about that culture fear at Theranos and what that meant for both of you personally. Yeah, so there would be like barriers up that would surround where the devices were, so even if you were in the lab, you still couldn't see the devices, so I worked there for three months and didn't see a single device. It wasn't until I moved into the assay validation team that I actually saw a device for the first time, and it's kind of crazy to think that you have most of your company working towards something that they've never even seen, and that's how siloed it was, but I remember there was one funny thing that happened where a light bulb went out, so they had an electrician come in and he stands on this 12-foot ladder and puts in the light bulb where he can see over all of the barriers, so I saw that happening and I just thought, I don't know, I feel like those barriers are there, really for, I don't know. It felt weird that they didn't care about the, like someone from the outside scene, it seemed like it was a barrier to make us, like the employees realize that they weren't supposed to know things. It was also for the vendors too. I would talk to, we had these machines called T-cans, they were these robotic liquid handling arms, and they'd find it so ridiculous, because the moment you entered into Theranos, the first thing that they have you do is sign an NDA and sign like this sort of, like if you do see anything, you are not allowed to disclose what you see inside there, and this was for vendors, new employees, and by the time you were employee, you've already signed a contract that you cannot disclose anything that you've seen within those halls, but yeah, there were all these weird man-built obstructions. Sometimes they'd be escorted all throughout the building with like two security guards to make sure that they didn't see anything. I actually remember that when I first started, there was a list of words that gave me that I was not allowed to say when describing my job. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't remember exactly what was on the list, but it was like pipette research, biology. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Okay. And you couldn't put it on LinkedIn, you couldn't put it on anything, which was funny because when all this stuff blew up, we had to say we were a part of a private biotech company, so you almost always knew that someone worked at Theranos because they probably had private biotech company on their LinkedIn profile. But then they had a really intense work culture as well. Like Sunny, the president of the company would walk through the labs like three in the morning to make sure people were there working. Yeah. Yeah. Just very intense place. Yeah, and a lot of people were scared of losing their jobs. These people had families that they needed to support and feed, and so constantly feeling the pressure of needing to make Sunny and Elizabeth happy and produce whatever results that they needed to kind of further whatever initiatives that they seem to have come up with those days. There was a lot of pressure to perform and provide the results that they needed. And we had a lot of members of the team who weren't necessarily US citizens too. They were sponsored. They were scared that if they stopped working for Theranos, they would no longer have a visa, but there was a lot of pressure to get the results specifically that Sunny and Elizabeth wanted at any cost and really a sentiment that if you didn't produce, say, if you didn't get this assay validated and say that vitamin D is getting the perfectly accurate results, there was something wrong with you. There was nothing wrong with the technology, nothing wrong with the chemistry. It was like you were not performing well and you weren't getting this done. It was generally the culture. Both of you discovered troubling results of various forms despite this culture of fear and managed to think through of those results on your own. What exactly did you find and how did you go about finding those troubling results? I think we were talking about this backstage about when I started working for Theranos it must have been like two months in where I was really struggling with when did two plus two equal six? This has never been a fact ever in all of my education. But there were simple things in research and development. We were watching people basically tamper with data. They were cherry picking results. This is like fundamentals of scientific integrity. You show all the data. Even if it doesn't show the accuracy you want, the CVs you want, you keep it in there. And that provides you with the information to know I'm doing something wrong. But instead of taking those as signals of I'm doing something wrong, people would want to alter it to get better accuracy rates, to get better CVs. And so that was the first kind of like what is going on here? I've never been in a laboratory where this has happened. And then for me, because I had gone from research and development, research and development, you know things are gonna go wrong. That's kind of your job is to fix the problems of what's going on. But then going into the clinical lab and taking what I'd seen not work and just constantly being falsified and then putting it in the clinical setting where now I was having to test patients. And I was basically using the same test that I saw not working in a research setting on patients started to raise even more red flags. In addition to watching inspectors come in and Sonny and Elizabeth not showing them the actual technology we were using on patients and all these things. I'd only worked there to give her for seven months. So it was pretty quick, like probably about a month and a half in that I started seeing like something's not right here. But yeah, those were some of the instances. So for me, my first red flag was the first time that I saw what they called the open reader. So they had one reader where they didn't have a shell on it. So you could actually see what the protocol was doing inside. So when I first joined the assay validation team, they showed me and a senior scientist like my boss from the protein engineering lab, we saw it at the same time. And you can immediately tell that nothing in there is new. So the senior scientist looked at the person who was demoing the device and said, do you think this is very cool? And then the woman who's giving the demo just went, I'll let you decide for yourself if you think this is cool and walked away. And at that point I kind of realized that it was this like open secret that it wasn't real. And then I started working with the devices and going to these daily meetings where we would go over the data from the day before and you quickly fall into the habit of just deleting experiments that don't look good. Even just parts of experiments that don't look good. We would go through the meeting and go, oh, that looks weird. Let's rerun those, let's rerun. Everything was okay, what do we need to rerun? And we just rerun it. So you delete it and repeat it, fill in the data with the newly collected data. And then for me, a big red flag, probably the biggest red flag is when we were doing this for the syphilis test. And I was doing what they called precision testing. So I ran the same sample over and over to see how much variation there was. And I found that at our cutoff level, there was a 43% coefficient of variation. So the standard deviation was 43% of the expected value or the mean, which is enormous. And then we ran samples that were known to be positive for syphilis. And the first time we did that, we only got 65% correct. So we said, okay, that's not good, let's try that again. And then we got 80% correct. And then we did this other test called finger stick versus venus where we would actually collect samples from within Theranos, from our own, from ourselves and from our coworkers. We would get the finger prick, we would get the venus draw, we would test them both and compare the results to make sure that you could actually do a finger prick for this. And a ton of us tested positive for syphilis. And I remember the manager of our lab just going, guys, it's not impossible. I guess it's not impossible, but if it's plausible, then we should maybe send out like a company-wide email or something. But obviously no one took that seriously. So that was a huge red flag. Yeah, the syphilis test was definitely for me, like the big, the big kind of like wake-up call. Yeah. And after reporting these troubling results, you voiced, after recording these troubling results, both of you voiced your concerns, which led to threats of various sorts. Tyler, at your worst, it was reported you were followed by private investigators, you had lawyers showing up to your grandfather's house unannounced on what was a friendly visit. Erika, you had an individual follow you to your new workplace, who even knew your temporary home address, which even your mom wasn't aware of. How did you handle that type of pressure? How did you handle the threats when you reported your concerns? Oh, I did, a lot of running because I was so paranoid and freaked out. Yeah, it was a really tough process. I hadn't expected them to quite go to that degree. So essentially, after we had reported, I had been getting calls from Theranos and had chose, okay, I'm not gonna engage with these people because I don't owe them anything. There's no reason to engage with them. And after that, they had showed up at my workplace. So I was working late, my coworkers had come up to me and they said, Erika, there's been someone who's been sitting outside all day. We don't feel comfortable for you to just go alone into your car. We're gonna walk you to your car. And they walked me to my car, this man comes up to me and he hands me this letter and I look at the letter and I see it and it was for an address for a temporary home I was staying. I was in between houses. And so I was staying with my coworker Julia and I was completely freaked out because no one had known this address. No one knew I was living in this place. I was technically only staying in this place one day through Friday and then every weekend I'd go to LA or NC My Family and move stuff and completely panicked. And actually, it was a bit weird because Tyler and I were going through similar experiences but actually had to silo from one another. And I had made up this, because I thought I was being followed. Tyler I think was also being paranoid about it was followed. I had this lamp that I said I'd give him. So I just like randomly had this lamp in my house hand showed up at his house and pretended that the reason I was there was to give him this lamp. And then we went into this like backward area to talk to each other to just check in and like what is going on? What is going on? Like I am absolutely terrified right now. I don't feel comfortable talking to anyone. Like at this point, you know, I think I was 23, right? I have no money to my name thinking that I'm gonna have to hire a lawyer and not knowing how much that's gonna cost me. And I'm being followed, right? People are taking the extreme of following me places. Yeah, actually, I think Erica, we had like an extra room and Erica was supposed to stay in that extra room for a little while and she said she could bring me a lamp because I had no light in my room, literally no light. And then I just started ignoring her. She would text me, she would message me on Facebook and I just stopped talking to her hoping she would like get the hint or something. Which I did. But then I was actually in my driveway and I saw her driving down into our driveway and I remember thinking, oh no. Cause we weren't, I wasn't supposed to be talking to anyone from Theranos anymore. But then I obviously really wanted to talk to Erica so I didn't send her away. But then I remember we went inside and was like, actually let's go back outside and we went into this like random place. I was living out in Los Altos Hills so we went like down into the bushes. Because we knew someone was following us and like, I don't know, I was, I don't know. We were just concerned. I had a burner phone for like over a year because I was scared my phone was being tapped and maybe that was me being very, very paranoid but that's again, back to that statement of culture of fear, just the amount of secrecy, signing the NDAs, the retaliation of coming after employees. This is how paranoid a lot of us were. We like, I, yeah, I had a fake phone for over a year and if I wanted to discuss anything, like I never said the word Theranos. It was like, you know, the like forbidden word for a long time, especially in near any of my phone communication cause I was so nervous about the potential consequences of what that could have. I had a burner phone too. Yeah. With all these threats, intimidation, tactics, how did you still find the courage? Was there ever a thought of just remaining silent and just moving on, perhaps like some of the other employees at the company? Well, I think at that point it was too late. You know, by the time we were getting kind of bullied around it was, the decision had been made. I at least had no idea what I was getting into when I got into it. I mean, I had no idea what was coming. But once I was in it, there was no question in my mind that I was about being right. I knew I was right. There was, I was not gonna give in. There was no way I was so stubborn. There was no way I was gonna say I was wrong when I knew I was right. No chance. Yeah. I had a different experience than Tyler when we were talking about this. Like I really felt, there's this term that I just learned called gaslighting and it's where you make someone believe that they are the crazy one. And you'll use these different manipulation tactics to make someone believe that. And really at Theranos, I thought I was missing something that I didn't have enough information. The fact that I was with people who were PhDs from MIT that we had huge teams of people working on this project. We were almost like 200, 300 employees. Me being 22 and fresh graduate out of college, like I just was missing something. And for me it wasn't until, I knew there was a lot of messed up things going on and frankly I'm just not one of those people who can kind of keep quiet. Like I'm just gonna tell you like, yeah, this is wrong. Like I don't know what they're doing, but you know this was my experience and I'm for better or worse very transparent about information in general. But it wasn't until that type of retaliation that I knew, okay, they're hiding something. The fact that they're going to these types of lengths to come after me, again being a 22 year old who's a fresh grad, there's something going on here. Like they're lying to patients. And honestly because they had come after me and I had to seek the help of a lawyer, I was able to have a conversation with them about how do I report this to a regulatory agency? What does it mean to be a whistleblower? What are the next steps to make sure that they stop processing patient samples? Because at this point I know and I'm certain that they're trying to cover something up. And so in a weird way it kind of backfired on me that they retaliated, but then it empowered me with the information I needed to know to say, I know how I can tell Clea everything they need to know to where they can do this inspection and actually find out are they testing patients the way that's appropriate and come to find out it wasn't and Clea shut them down, which was ultimately what I wanted in the end. I wanted not to have them lie to patients anymore. On the note of intense retaliation, my next question is for you specifically Tyler. The Wall Street Journal reported that you'd incurred over $400,000 in legal fees and that your parents almost had to sell their house to defend you. Your grandfather was also on the board of Theranos. How did you handle this type of pressure, especially knowing that family was involved? I mean it definitely was not easy. So at that time, I mean my lawyers told me that the only people I can talk to are my wife, my lawyers, and my priest. And I'm not religious and I'm not married. So the only person I can talk to are my lawyers and that is an extremely expensive therapy session. I wasn't talking to anybody and it was really weird for me to be disconnected from my parents. My parents obviously knew crazy things were happening but they didn't know what the details were. But the only source of information that they were getting was actually from my grandfather, which is ultimately he was kind of like a microphone for Elizabeth. So Elizabeth could talk to my parents but I couldn't talk to my parents. It was kind of how it seemed. So they were kind of under the impression that I was the crazy one. They were told that 80% of what the Wall Street Journal came only from me, that I was being unreasonable in our negotiations to try to settle things. So we had a tough conversation where they said, the next opportunity you have to sign something, just sign it and end this. This is not your fight anymore. You've done enough. And they said we will support you no matter what and we will sell our house to keep paying for your legal fees but please just end it. But I didn't do that. I let it keep going, racked up a huge bill but my parents were awesome the entire time. Luckily it ended, luckily they stopped bothering me before it came to the point where they had to sell their house. But yeah, it was a huge bill at the end of the day but it's funny because for me it ended up being, I kind of saw money as like a runway and I had really no emotional attachment to it. I saw it as like, okay, I can put up a fight for this long so I need to figure out, be obviously be smart but this is how long I can put up a fight. I didn't have like an emotional attachment to oh no, I'm losing hundreds of thousands of dollars as this goes on. And I think that just goes back to how stubborn I was and how convicted I was in knowing that I was right. Sure, I would like to reflect now more on the board of Theranos. The board of Theranos included secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, generals, a lot of other big names and influential people. Would you say that these individuals, would you hold them guilty or culpable in any way or would you feel they were totally unaware, just placeholders really? I mean, it's one of those things when you come in as an investor, I guess this is a good warning sign to investors, hey, do your due diligence, right? If you don't know anything about medical diagnostics, maybe you should bring someone in to kind of research what the product is and the people behind it and what's kind of going on here. I think in the case of Theranos and what we saw by the SEC filings and everything, they were feeding their investors a lot of false information. So how would the board of directors members know what the extent of which was going on if Sunny and Elizabeth were lying to their board members about what was happening? I think they strategically decided to choose board members that didn't have a medical background, that didn't have a biotechnology background, so they were able to not have people that would investigate very deeply in kind of the technology and what was going on. Whether they should be held accountable or not, it's hard to say, right? Because you don't know what those conversations were. I highly doubt all of these people would have invested in this company and continued their commitment to the company, which many of them didn't, as more information was getting exposed if they had known what was actually going on. Yeah, it's hard to know. I mean, I think the board was negligent at best. So I think there is some responsibility there and I think anytime you give someone a check for over $100 million, you are giving that person an incredible amount of power and you should do more due diligence. I think there is a complete lack of due diligence that is just astounding. Yeah, and we were talking about this, like it was kind of like an echo chamber where it's like you get that one guy that you have a lot of respect for who then gets like one other guy who they have a lot of respect for and then you have, you know, Elizabeth basically convincing both of them that they're great and then they're telling each other how great Elizabeth is, but it's all fed from the information of this one person and then it just kind of gets, it echoes around. And then even if you do bring in one more person, it's like, okay, you expect this one person to tell secretaries of state defense that they're all wrong. No, yeah, it's not gonna happen. Especially if you, I mean, yeah, if they're like your friend or whatever. Yeah. Like Henry Kissinger brought in this surgeon from New York who he says is the smartest man in the world. So obviously they're good friends. Of course he's just gonna, like, I don't know, apparently he like did due diligence or whatever and said it was all good, but I don't know, how honest is he really gonna be with all these people? I'd like to explore the theme of accountability a bit more, especially with the employees. Now many employees at Theranos stayed silent, despite knowing that the claims made in the media were obviously false and knowing that patients were at risk. On their perspective, they were arguably silenced by intense pressure from Theranos, including the threat of heavy litigation, intimidation tactics, as you've already mentioned. Would you hold your fellow employees who stayed silent, culpable or guilty in any way? This is super hard, right? I definitely do not. Yeah, I don't either, but. I mean, it was a really tough situation. Like if I could go back and give myself my advice, I would probably tell myself not to do anything. Like that would be my advice. Like you're gonna pay a huge, huge price for this. Someone will figure it out anyway, I don't do it. Knowing myself, I would have ignored that advice and done it anyway. Yeah. But I don't think any less of my coworkers who didn't do what I did. Yeah, it's really complicated, right? Because these people, again, they have families, they have, okay, there are several different things. So Theranos was a big organization. So if you're a software developer just doing the interface for how the machines work, you're not really gonna know what's going on with the patient processing. So there are a lot of employees that were just very ignorant to what was actually going on. One, because of the way that the structure of the company was worked, there were physical barriers blocking people. There was card key access where some people couldn't get in and others could. So it makes it really hard for a lot of even the internal employees going, like within the company to know what's going on. And then the people working in a clinical setting, like an example is we had clinical lab scientists that typically would work in hospitals. They do all the patient processing. For us in the clinical lab, a clinical lab scientist could not see what was going on with the edutons and the Theranos proprietary devices until they could be trusted. So we had CLSs that were on board, but they were stuck in a separate room and not to see the actual machines that we were using to test the patients. So there were definitely a lot of processes like this that like the own staff and employees were guarded from seeing what's going on. You know, even in my case, I didn't end up reporting to the Center of Medicaid and MediCal Services until I talked to a lawyer. Like never in my life would I have anticipated that I was gonna have to report a company to a regulatory agency. There is nothing in life that prepares you for that experience at all. There's just like no school class, nothing. No one anticipates having to do this. And so even that first step of engagement is really hard to figure out. Like for me, how do you find the number for the Center of MediCal and MediCal Services with the specific domain of lab diagnostics, right? Like just even finding that phone number is actually quite hard. So it's one of those things that, no one is really prepared for these types of instances of what to do. And it really took I think the specific experiences that I had at least, I can speak for myself to know what to do and that empowered me to sort of make the decision to come forward. I'd now like to move on to a broader reflection, I guess, of Silicon Valley on the whole. Now many people associate Silicon Valley of course with limitless innovation, pioneering novel technology, but there has been pushback against its reckless culture. Vaporware, the public marketing of technology that is yet to be fully realized is perhaps the worst result of this. So do you think there's a broader problem with Silicon Valley culture of which Theranos and Facebook are just symptoms of? So after Theranos actually started my own company and I was part of the Stanford Stardex incubator and overall I would say almost every single person in there is just a really passionate person and they're not, I mean I don't think anyone in that incubator at least is selling vaporware. So in my experience, I would say no I don't think it's a huge problem. I generally think that most entrepreneurs are just really passionate, smart people. I think the problem here isn't necessarily saying, okay I want to build this product, I need capital to do that and this is my idea and this is like the minimal viable product that I have and here are my plans, can you give me the capital to sort of build this? Right, and that's very normal, that process is very normal. I think the greater problem here is lying and sort of being delusional and this happens across the board. In the case, not disclosing to someone, not disclosing to your investors that I am launching a product that's not ready on patients, like that's a problem, right? Like that's a severe problem. I think it's hard to say, like we were talking about the software model. So in software you have this instance where you iterate constantly, like what makes a good technology product is the fact that you can kind of throw something out there, see how people respond based on what the better response rate is, you curtail to the next thing. And I think at Theranos they were trying to take the same software model but with medical diagnostics and you can't do that, right? You can't decide, okay I'm gonna launch this product, sacrifice six patients, see if some responded well then I can move in this other direction to sort of iterate and improve on these medical diagnostics. It's a different industry, it's a different field and it's not something that you can just test on a few users here and then kind of change what the product looks like. It's a very different, it's just a very different industry. You just can't do that in healthcare. Do you think that there should be any alternative cultures that should try to be fostered or do you believe that it's fine to segregate, keep software as it is or would you want to hope for any alternative culture and hope that that would maybe inspire the other industries to have to be less reckless perhaps? Just be honest, just be honest, just be transparent. Be transparent and honest with your customers and with your investors and just say like, look this is where we're at and these are, be passionate still about what the possibilities of some things are but be realistic in what can actually be reality versus. Yeah, I gotta be clear about what is vision, what's the vision and what is reality. Exactly. Yeah, entrepreneurs are definitely responsible for selling the vision so I guess sometimes it's easy to get too caught up in selling your vision and you start pretending like it's real but I think, I don't think it happens. I don't know, in my experience I haven't seen that happen too often. I see it a lot. I see it all the time, especially yeah, I see it all the time. And Hong Kong ICOs have been very big and just watching people now raise money in a very unregulated way, I've seen people say, oh yeah, I have this great electronic medical record system, it's gonna leverage AI to be able to do predictive diagnostics and you ask them the simple question, hey, can I see your product? Can I see a product demo? And it's a Google form, like that's all it is and you're like. But they still showed you the Google form. They still showed me, yeah, yeah. It's like, look, you can input your name. I'm like, oh man, great, great, great. Elizabeth would have said proprietary. Proprietary, yeah, exactly, that was the scope. Proprietary, sorry, I cannot disclose this. Yeah, I think now coming from an investment perspective is like just be honest, just be transparent. Like people want these things to succeed, especially the vision like Theranos, right? Making diagnostics cheaper to produce, more affordable. You wouldn't even need insurance to be able to get these tests done. Like who wouldn't wanna support a project like that? If you're honest with me and tell me, like look, this is our vision, this is what we wanna do, this is where we're at. We anticipate, we need to hit these milestones by this point, this is our plan, this is our strategy. I'm more than willing to give you cash. Many investors are more than willing to give you cash in order to have that come into fruition. But don't lie about it. Don't falsify data. Don't falsify how much revenue you're making. All these things, it's like really just being honest. It's such a simple thing. It's almost hard to say that that's an alternative culture. On those values of honesty and transparency, what do you think should be the role of educational institutions such as here at Stanford in preparing young graduates to navigate ethical challenges in their careers? You got anyone with this one? I don't know, I think it'd be really, really tough. I don't think I could have taken a class that prepared me for this. I think it's probably most important to just be introspective about your own experiences. After this happened to me, I've had tons of people come tell me that say, oh, I've experienced something very similar, obviously not in the same magnitude, but very similar situation. So many people have said that, and I think probably everyone in this room has an experience that's somewhat similar and they can relate, at least to some degree. So I think even better than a class is just to be aware when these types of situations happen and checking with yourself and see what did you do, what maybe should you have not done, or what could you have done better, and yeah, I don't know. I think it'd be hard to have a class that prepares you. But I think it would be good to know that whistleblower laws exist, because I didn't know that at all. Yeah. Yeah, if you go down the right channels, you actually have a lot of protections as a whistleblower. So it's good to know those channels. Yeah, after this all happened, I've been getting a lot of feedback from people that say the same thing, whether you work for the NHS, or whether you're in academia, or you're working for a biotech company. A lot of people are like, hey, I'm seeing kind of shady stuff going on in my workplace, and I wanna do something about it, but I don't know what to do about it. And I feel bad because people feel that, because I was in that position, I will know what to do, but I have no idea how you would report something to the NHS or anything. Even in academia, I don't know how to go through that process. I think we're at an interesting time where we were talking about this with Theranos, and in my case, I had a lot of doubts whether what was going on was, again, I had a lot of doubts about my own knowledge about the regulatory landscape, but what I was able to do was go on the internet, stay up at three in the morning, and like, no, this is not the law. They keep telling me that this is a law, but it's not. So I think for a lot of people knowing that there's a lot of resources that you can access. If you have a question, you can go on the internet. You can potentially talk to free lawyers. You can go and talk to people about certain concerns that you have, and they'll probably be able to tell you what the next steps are. And if you're, another big thing is if you're getting retaliation from people, learning how to have the mental forces here to be resilient is really, really important. And to kind of stick to integrity, saying to yourself, like for me, it was like I made the commitment by going into healthcare to make sure that I protected the patients that I served. And holding on to that simple line and that simple fact really carried forward all of my actions. Like this is the commitment that you made by going into this industry that you needed to protect patients. Yeah, it's hard to formulate a class or anything, but depending on what side you're coming from, like know you have access to resources now. We live in a beautiful time where you can type anything into a search engine to figure out the right person to talk to or the right resources to go to. If you are getting retaliation from your employees, just like take a moment, breathe, try and stay resilient through the process. And I think those are the two biggest things that I learned. How you can put that in a class, I don't know. But yeah, honestly having discussions like this is probably very valuable too. Because many, especially with technology in general, whether it's big data in AI, synthetic biology and genetic engineering, we're gonna have a lot of these discussions kind of coming up where we don't know how to handle new technologies anymore. It's something that we haven't experienced. And we don't know the consequences necessarily of what they'll have when they get implemented into societies. What advice would you have for students or new graduates when looking at potential job offers, internship offers to gauge for integrity and ethical environments? Both of you mentioned you had multiple job offers. Do you think there are certain questions you would have asked retrospectively or any red flags you wish you had noticed perhaps in an interview setting? And retrospect, I would never work for another stealth company again. There's just no way I could, there's no way I would step back into a stealth company. I mean, that might be swinging too far. I'm sure there are plenty of stealth companies that are fine, but at least just me personally, I wanna be able to go do a job and then be able to tell my friends and family what I'm doing. Yeah, having to sign an NDA before you go into a job interview is probably like, okay, this is just a job interview. I haven't started working for you. What's going on here? I think just like with anything, just ask questions. Do your due diligence. Like what I've realized with working is like you're gonna spend at least 40 hours a week doing this thing, more likely more because you drive and you get there. Like asking people a lot of questions on, what are your values? If people have left the company talking to previous employees, what was their experience? I think alone at Theranos, if we had just talked to previous employees, that would have like set the record straight. Yeah, would have really set the record straight quite fast. We would have realized like just the horrible, horrible experiences that so many people had that preceded us. Actually a good question would be like how many people have quit in the last four months? Yep, that's one and two. If it's like 20% of your company. And probably if they say the other issue too with us, like anytime you would ask Elizabeth a question, it would always be, I'm sorry I can't disclose that, that's confidential information. So that's probably another thing where you're like, okay, like is this warranted secrecy or not? But it's yeah, just do your due diligence, ask a lot of questions, talk to former employees. That would have probably been the most illuminating is just to talk to former employees. On the other turn as a startup founder, this my next question is sourced from a member of the audience. How should young startup founders work to establish integrity and an ethical environment, especially in fields like healthcare? Just be honest. Yeah, I think it's gonna take a long time. Yeah. So start building a track record as early as you can. I read a good article actually with the Stanford Business School, they were talking about how in business you tend to create metrics for your shareholders. So you're constantly focused on things like ROI. And maybe it's much better if we start thinking about who are our actual stakeholders. So in the case of healthcare, like what are the things that would make this product or service successful for my patients? And really examining the business in a more holistic way, where we're, you know, maybe we need to design the way that we examine a company, not solely by the revenue it's generating and the profits it's making, but also about what are its consequences for society? What are its consequences for, you know, the hospitals that serve, the patients that serves, the potentially even the insurance providers that it has. And to, you know, not solely focus on the bottom line. And my final question, I would like to hear more about where your careers are now and how this whole experience of being a whistleblower has impacted your careers. Has it, do people view it favorably? Is there anyone you've interacted with who views your tag as a whistleblower cautiously? I'd love to hear about the reflections on your life after this experience. For me, it's only been positive. Yeah. And it's kind of weird, because I think in most whistleblower situations, the whistleblower has a really hard time kind of getting their life back on track. But for me, it was like the exact opposite. Like after the Wall Street Journal article, like said who I was, I was getting job offers from venture capital, from big biotech companies, from small startups, from research institutions. Like really the whole gamut, I was getting emails from people saying, hey, love what you did, come work for us. And I think that's actually really rare in these types of situations. And I honestly don't know what is different about my situation than other whistleblowers. Yeah. I had a similar, it was overall, it was very, very positive. I think the thing you never know, and Tyler, I think you actually said this to me, you never, no one who has a problem with it or who thinks it's a bad thing will tell you. So you really don't know what the consequences of it are going to be until you're in a room with a VC and then they get confronted by, they say, oh, you were the whistleblower of Theranos, okay, get out of my room potentially. I don't know, because you really can't predict when that would happen. But I feel like the people that had a problem with it are not gonna tell you. The people of course who admire what you did, they'll be very communicative about that process. It's been really interesting now. So since I left Theranos, I now work for a tech accelerator in Hong Kong. So we invest in early stage startup companies. And now going outside of working for a startup, building the product, knowing the grind and the hustle of like, how do I get this thing to work? How do I get people to actually want what I'm making? And now sitting on, how do I evaluate a company? And is this a good investment or not? It's made me much more skeptical with those investment decisions. Like it's just the simple thing of just asking people for a product demo. You would think it would be the like, first thing you would wanna see, but so many investors fail to do that, to actually just sit and dig into the products. Yeah, this has definitely kind of made me, I think, a much better investor and doing much more, much better due diligence on the companies now that we support. I'm hoping that this won't hurt my career in the future, but honestly, you don't know kind of when something will come back to bite you until it does. I have one kind of funny anecdote. So I was asked to call into a business school class at Yale, so I did that, but the professor didn't announce to the class that I was on the line yet. And he asked, does anyone think that Tyler Schultz did the wrong thing? One person raised their hand and he called on her and he said, he's on the phone right now, do you wanna tell him why? And she went, no. I'm like, come on, trust me, I can take it. But I think she didn't speak up. But there are people out there. Yeah. It's been incredibly inspiring to hear from both of you and I'd like to thank you on behalf of the Stanford community for being so candid and sharing your insights. I think students can certainly look up to you as role models on how to stay true to your core values, even under intense adversity. It's been my deep pleasure to moderate this discussion for the next segment. I'd like to invite Colin, who will moderate a Q and A from the audience now. So why don't we start with the gentleman with the Yale shirt on right here? Is this on? Yeah, cool. Well, first, you guys made enormous sacrifices and showed incredible bravery. So thank you for that, first of all. And secondly, so I read Bad Blood and one of the things that I've been trying to wrap my head around that I still don't quite understand is just the psychology of it. And I mean, obviously you guys aren't inside Elizabeth's and Sonny's head. But can you help me understand what the deal is with Sonny Balwani? Because it's like, he sort of lurks in this Bad Blood story and it's never really clear as he like the puppet master behind the scenes or like, you know, Carrie Root came and gave a talk here and he sort of said he's this, you know, oblivious guy. What are like, and I don't know, that didn't quite make sense to me. I'm just trying to figure it out and wrap my head around it. It's this weird, dark, fascinating story that doesn't quite make sense. And so we'd love to sort of hear your guys' thoughts on that. So I would say that Sonny Balwani has the personality of gravel. It's like this grumbly, I don't know, grumbly guy, just like very rough around the edges. I didn't interact with him all that much. But probably the most pleasant conversation I ever had with him was he was telling me about how he knows a lot of cops and they tell him when they're not patrolling 280 so he can go drive his cars really fast. But like I really didn't interact with him all that much but he would like walk through the labs at three in the morning and, you know, not really say anything. Just walk through and walk back out. But he was definitely running the show inside there in us, for sure. Yeah, there were so many instances with him. It was funny someone asked me the question. So like, what did you think about him? And it was clear I was trying to be very diplomatic about it. He was like, was he an asshole or was he not an asshole? I was like, total asshole. I was like, hands down. But yeah, he definitely was running the show with a lot of the things that were going on and even we did this internal proficiency testing. So proficiency testing is where you're essentially trying to check if the results you are given in third party labs are you getting within the same accuracy range? And we had decided to essentially test it on our old machines like the Siemens Advia, all the other machines and the Theranos proprietary methods. Cause what they used to do it on was just the old machines and we were finding that the results weren't lining up. And he sent back, first of all, he wasn't even on this email. So he just got all of our emails and we had no idea. He was like monitoring all of us and piped in about how this was the most terrible thing that we had ever done. Like how dare we use the Theranos proprietary, like the Edison's to double check whether, you know, the results were actually accurate. It was all in broken English. Like you couldn't understand what he was saying. It was just an absolute mess. It was like he just was constantly surveillance-ing all the employees, was making a lot of calls and decisions without having the expertise within those domains, particularly within healthcare and a clinical laboratory. People had those like dots that they put over the cameras on their computers cause they thought Sonny was watching them. And same with phone calls. Like everyone knew that their phone calls were being tapped and so people would like pass, like I remember our lab director was so paranoid about it, he would like pass me notes because he was like convinced that they were monitoring all his phone calls. And a big reason why I quit, I had a few interactions with Sonny throughout the course was because I got pulled into his office and basically knew I was like, this person's a crook. Like I don't know what they're doing, but they're lying. They're, there's just something wrong here. I don't know what's going on. But after the conversation that I had in his office one-on-one, I quit, I called my dad crying on the phone like, what do I do? And I'm like, I can't work for this company anymore. I do not feel good about this. Like I'm sorry. I know, like I got student loans to pay but I'm out of here. Like I can't do this. And yeah, he was not a good figure in the whole storyline at all. Thanks again for your honesty and for your sacrifice. Yeah. The gentleman in the balcony. First of all, I'd like to thank you so much for the wonderful conversation. My question revolves around your guys' experience with regulatory agencies and with lawyers. I was wondering if either of you were heading up MediCal or the FDA or in Erica's case, the Chinese counterpart of those. What would be a regulation you'd want to put in place to try to make sure that companies like Theranos couldn't rise to $10 billion before having whistleblowers stop them? Ooh, that's tough. I feel like the systems that are in place now just need to work better. Like for instance, I sent an email about the proficiency testing to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services back in early 2014. And they referred me to like, basically they refer me to the correct department. I contacted them, they said, okay, what's the name? They said, this is cheating. Please let us know the name of the company, what tests were run, what dates they were run so we can reach out to them and help them improve their methods. And I gave them all that information and then that email just got lost in the shuffle and nothing happened. Same thing, when CMS came to inspect Theranos, they weren't shown that Theranos devices, they should know that a startup diagnostic company is going to have some not-off-the-shelf diagnostic product. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard for regulators too because when they're going in, regulators aren't there to crack down on people. That's not really what they want to do. They want to work as a system of check and balances but they don't anticipate that a company is just going to go to such extreme lengths to deceive them. In terms of new policy that you can create, I don't even know. Like it's really hard to say. I think the policy is- The laboratory developed tests loophole should be closed. Oh yeah, so there's a loophole where, so people thought that this was regulated under the FDA but it's not. It's regulated under the Center of Medicaid and Medical Services and the way that LDTs work is that you can actually run an LDT for I think six months before you have to report it to CLEA. The thing about Theranos, why they were a special case is because no one anticipated that people would say for like HB A1C, right? This test has been around forever. That someone would mess it up so bad, right? Because I just don't think regulators thought that with a test that's existed for like 50 years now that you would really like shake it up so much to have that much variability and to have that many problems. But it's really tough to say what the right policy would be. It's really about funding. Like making sure that these organizations have enough resources to be able to conduct a proper inspection. Thank you. The guest with the scarf. Yeah, I'm assuming that you've both read Bad Blood and I'm just interested if there's anything about the story or the book that you were surprised by. And then if you can speak more to how you think Elizabeth Holmes won all of these people over because it is an impressive skill to get that many CEOs and investors behind you. And there are still people who stand behind her. So from your perspective, what it is about her personality and how she did that that got so many people behind her? I mean, she was extremely charismatic. Like I would go into her office and she would tell me about the vision of the company and helping third world countries. And I would be so motivated to do my job and then I would go back and I was working with a fairness device and I go, whoa, what just happened? This is what we were talking about that whole time? How did she just do that to me? Like I was working with this device every day but in like a five minute conversation with her, she was able to change my mind and for me to feel motivated again. So I can see how if you weren't actually working with the device every day, how easy it would be for her to convince you that this was real and all of these things were happening. Yeah. I think the biggest surprise about Bad Blood was how many people had such an intense crazy experience with her. There were so many people, so many iterations of employees that had worked with her and just been like, oh my gosh, this is an absolute disaster. And just the whole context of that, how long that had gone on. I had entered the company about 10 years after it had been in existence. That was the biggest surprise to me. Like, whoa, this has been going on for this long. And the fact that, like you said, she had convinced so many people. Part of the reason it was able to go on for so long is because the turnover of people was so great where she could constantly onboard new people. But it was a beautiful vision, right? I think everyone is dismayed with our healthcare system. The fact that it is way too expensive, that the fact that people can't get a simple blood test without breaking the bank is just atrocious, right? Like this is just ridiculous. So I think really that vision is very easy to sell. And it pulls on the heartstrings of so many people. You know, people who have family members that are sick, who have been sick themselves, who've financially devastated themselves because of the healthcare costs. And then also her as a person. It was really remarkable, right? We love these kinds of stories where you get this person who dropped out of Stanford. She had a great idea. She worked insanely hard. It really builds up that American meritocracy. You can just set your mind to any goal and if you put in the effort and the energy, you can make it happen. Yeah. I think that's probably why she was able to bring so many people on board. So you mentioned that it was a pretty easy transition to going back to your careers after the whole incident was over because you were both whistleblowers. People supported you. But how do you think that the people like the head scientist who did know something was wrong for years and years and didn't speak out about it, to your knowledge, how were they able to pick up their careers again and have people trust them? They've been fine. Seraj got a job and just boggles my mind. This guy who is just basically in on all of it. His hands were everywhere. And he just quit and he might have got a job at BD. Yeah. I think. Fun. For me, it was weird. When I immediately quit the company, it was like a bad breakup though because I really, I had, I was so committed to this project. Like anyone who knew me working out of that job, like I really wanted it to work. And I could have seen myself working for that company pretty much for the rest of my life. Like I really was onboarded to the mission and when I left, I became incredibly disillusioned. Just like, yeah, I completely sort of lost hope in faith in these things. But I think for most people, there's a big disassociation between, what Elizabeth did in the employees within the organization. I think many of the employees within the organization, they're probably upset just like I was, where it was like, you feel very, you feel lied to, you were lied to. And that was, it wasn't a good experience. But many of them I think can kind of learn to grow and move on from that because they're like, that's, she was kind of responsible and the ring master for a lot of what happened. But even Elizabeth's brother got a job fairly easily. Really? Yeah. And he knew, I mean, I'm sure he knew what was going on. Yeah. So, I don't know, people don't seem to care. Yeah. And a lot of these end up that way, right? Like even the guy, the Wolf of Wall Street now is like the successful life coach. You're just like, what? I'm just like, yeah. Thank you. My question was on, in terms of Elizabeth Holmes' personality and the way she makes statements that she makes, I think we see many other like famous figures in Silicon Valley, I mean, Elon Musk and how many others making these wild over promises. And I'm wondering if you see also those parallels in terms of successful entrepreneurs and other fields that who seem to be acting just like you, so to speak. I think the difference between Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes is like, Elon Musk did deliver on quite a bit of things, you know? Like, you can't go on the road anymore without seeing a Tesla kind of running about. But I think it's interesting how the Silicon Valley has been the situation, like the hero storyline has really prevailed. Where now instead of admiring a pop star, you now have, you can admire a technology innovator. And we kind of hold these people on a certain pedestal thinking that they're almost like gods when really they're just human like us, and they're gonna make mistakes. But I think the striking thing about Elizabeth was the fact that it just, we held her to such esteem, but she wasn't producing any results for such a long time, right? Like she just did not deliver any of the things that she had said, and she had been dishonest about so many things to so many different people. Her employees, her investors, and her patients. How long has SpaceX been a company? I'm not sure. Hey, they launched and landed their rocket though. They've made reusable rockets. I know, that's... That was the goal, right? Wasn't that the goal? I think so, right? 2002, so that's like the same time that Theranos was founded. Yeah, and we couldn't get a machine that worked. I know, they couldn't run a freaking glucose test. The balcony. Hi, first of all, I wanna commend you for your honesty and your courage in doing what you did, and coming here to talk to us is a real treat. One of the things I wonder about, I don't know how flat the company was in terms of management, but why do you think, it's easy to understand how recent graduates may not have had the experience to turn on the lights quicker in terms of figuring out what was going on, but experienced people should have, and the question I have is why your middle management people weren't the ones who actually became the whistleblowers. So many of them had families. That's the only thing that comes in my mind is just like a lot of them had families and had this sense of like, they didn't wanna lose something. They were scared, most of them were scared of losing their jobs. A lot of them were scared of maybe even losing face with being with a company that would have failed. The structure of the management wasn't super flat. It was also very fragmented. Like your chemistry team didn't necessarily talk all the time with your immunoassay or your infectious disease team. But I think it's just, I mean, for us, it was weird how many people who were recent graduates did say something, and maybe it was a case because we had a lot less to lose in certain ways. I think it definitely helps, yeah, having less to lose. But the other thing that confuses me is that there were a lot of people that I respected who stayed at Fairness for a long time, like past when all these stories came out. That's confusing to me. Good evening, thank you. Since we're in the biz school, I figured we should have at least one sort of finance question, and that is the sort of nine and a half billion dollar evaluation was based on some amount of total equity raise, which I recall was in the eight or 900 million dollar range, something like that. So the question is, is where did all the money go, right? So I know they had to cough up 40 million back to Walgreens, but they took in 140, and I know they paid tens of millions or maybe over 100 million dollars to boys and other legal firms. Were the salaries incredibly high? Did people, were people attracted more by stock options? Were, you know, did Sting and Bono play at company parties? Where did it go? That's a really good question. Definitely the lawyers took a lot of it. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if Elizabeth and Sonny took a lot of it as well throughout the years. But when they find her based on the SEC violation, they gave her some hand slap, apparently what was it, $500,000 or something, based on what her net worth was. So I don't see that she was able to look with ADSS. I don't think she had a very high salary. Like someone told me her salary was like $250,000 a year, but she took out a $25 million loan from the company. So she had money in her bank account, but that still doesn't account for where all that money went. The salaries weren't insanely high. Yeah, I mean, we did have a lot of employees. Biotech in general is pretty costly, right? You have a bunch of machinery you have to buy. Even the like stock items that you have, like reagents, when you're developing these antibodies, like a small little tube of antibody can cost you like $6,000 US dollars. So the salaries, they bought a nice, pretty little office building. Yeah, Page Mill Road's not cheap. Yeah, that's not cheap. Yeah, that building was a lot. Last question, did you ever see her blink? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Hi, so you talked about how your grandfather was on the board of Theranos. And I can't imagine if you ever went to him and told him, you know, like, I don't believe what's going on here, or it's kind of a scam, he would have an easy time believing you. So I'm wondering, were there people around you guys that simply had a tough time believing you, and did they ever say sorry? Lots of people had a hard time believing. Yeah, I mean, we saw it from kind of like the back end. Like when the first paper came out, it was like when the Wall Street Journal first broke the story, you know, at this point, neither of us were on the record, and we saw it, and we saw the response of like, oh, of course, you know, they're trying to target her. It's because she's successful. They're targeting her because she's a woman. Like, you know, this is like classic tactics by the media to build another sensationalist story so they can make more money. So we definitely saw a lot of pushback on what was happening. I had even, you know, personal friends of mine who are entrepreneurs here that said, oh, yeah, it's because she's a woman. That's why that they're attacking her because they're trying to, you know, just take down various women in tech. So we kind of saw like the sentiment really shift and slammed down like kudos to John because he really stacked up those stories in a really intelligent way to make sure like the first one, I was pretty underwhelmed. I was like, oh man, like this is kind of technical. A lot of people aren't gonna understand what this means, but then just all the lies, he was able to unravel and show people like the depth of deception that was occurring. But it took a long time for like the consensus of people to realize like, okay, this isn't an attack on her. It's really like she has just lied this much. And there are just so many problems that have been occurring in this company. Took a long while to change people's sentiment in that direction. Balcony. So I'm actually really interested in this psychology of being in an environment where you've identified that things aren't right, but everyone around you seems to accept that it's totally normal. And it seems to me that both of you are able to be like, nope, I'm gonna trust my gut on this. But I'm curious if you have advice for people who maybe aren't able to trust themselves as well or feel like they're the ones taking crazy pills because everyone else is just business as usual. And how do you basically fall your gut and do what's right when it feels like you're the one who's wrong? I had the feeling that I was wrong for quite some time. Like I really left there. I didn't know if I was wrong. I was like, no, there's something wrong going on here. But maybe there is something I'm not seeing because you were just surrounded by so many talented people. I just couldn't, I really felt that there was something that I wasn't seeing. I think honestly, if I had stayed within the company, I would have probably more likely not done something because I would have been so, it's so hard to say. I have no idea. But you're so easily swayed by, again, that culture, like the fear that's sort of implemented in there. And then everyone else kind of being very just nonchalant about what was going on, just kind of going through the motions and the grind of the everyday, even though knowing that there's a lot of problems. But I don't know. I don't know if I have a very good answer to this. I don't know. I never thought that I was wrong. Like I never had a doubt. And the part of it was that we're, all the senior scientists around me were seeing the same things and I would go to them and they would say like, yep, that's what you're seeing. But it's mostly like, it's kind of weird. Like the culture is mostly brushed off. Tons of people made jokes about it. But not that many people really did anything about it. But I really never doubted that I was right. And I don't know how to tell someone who's doubting themselves to just, yeah, no, you're right. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how you would take that switch. I guess just accumulating enough evidence, right? And asking other people like, hey, is this right? For me, it was really talking to lawyers and regulators. And then it was like, oh, okay, yeah. These intuitions that you had about what was going on can be easily confirmed by kind of experts in that field. John, in here. So part of what I think makes this story so fascinating is how badly it went wrong. And one of the things that makes me curious about it is, do you think Elizabeth went in knowing she was gonna lie and cheat her way if necessary? And if not, kind of, where do you think it went wrong? I don't think she went in this to just lie and deceive. I really think that she initially went in with good intentions. And I don't know where it went wrong. And it's so tragic to me that it went wrong and that so much money was wasted, and that now it's put this sort of scorn around diagnostic projects where they're not getting funded as easily. And a lot of people have a lot of skepticism around point of care diagnostics and everything. But I have no idea. I think it just, again, she just overpromised so much and just didn't know how to deliver and had so much capital that she was able to just kind of bide her time for a long time. But I really don't know. I think she just really wanted to be Steve Jobs. So she created a world where she was Steve Jobs. But it does seem kind of short-sighted. I think she wasn't, I think she just wasn't able to let go to admit, okay, this isn't working. I just think she was just not capable of doing that. And there's that very popular psychology that runs through this world that if you just believe something hard enough that it'll come into fruition. We've seen Oprah and all these successful people kind of take this mentality that if I just really wish it into being and I just visualize myself being at my end goal, somehow that's just, it's just gonna work out. And I don't know, I feel like her and maybe the people she surrounded herself with kind of just like fed into that delusion for so long that they couldn't break out of it and just face reality of what was sitting right there in front of them. Yeah, it's kind of funny because investors want to invest in someone who says failure is not an option. But it's really, I feel like investors should tell their CEOs, failure is an option. And it's okay. I think investors have to be okay with failures. I think CEOs have to be okay with failures. And she was definitely of the mindset failure is not an option, which is detrimental. I think we have time for one more question. Well, I guess I should conclude that this failure of this question should be an option. There's a lot of pressure. Thank you for coming in. I had a question about something you said earlier about this kind of hero worship, which is definitely present in Elizabeth Holmes, people hailing her as the next Steve Jobs and all of that. First of all, hero worshiping Steve Jobs and then hero worshiping her based on this vision of her as Steve Jobs. With this and Elon Musk and all these other people in Silicon Valley, who we look up to and often fall, fall from grace later on, like Steve Jobs was made out to be a bad manager later on in a biography. Elon Musk has kind of gone off the rails a little bit. How closely do you think we should tie these people to their company? And should we predicate our belief on how good they are as a person on how successful their company is? Because you said earlier that Theranos failed, but SpaceX and Tesla are successful. But there have been multiple pieces saying that the working conditions there are very bad anyway, even despite their success. So I just wondered if you could talk about that a little bit more. It's hard to kind of pull them away from their company because people like that just spend all their time on their companies. So I don't know how you separate. Like Elizabeth was Theranos. The two cannot be separated. Steve Jobs is Apple or was Apple. But it's not the case. The majority of companies that's not actually the case. Because in the US, actually what you see is a lot of founders actually get replaced and they'll have an actual managing CEO run their company in most cases. And it's weird, there've just been these few people that have managed to really link themselves to their companies and become the identity of that organization. People like Elon Musk, people like Steve Jobs. But I think it's the minority more than it is the majority of people that kind of are these really strong idols and leaders of their companies. And I don't know, maybe they use Twitter more or maybe I don't know why that happens, but yeah. Please join me in thanking Tyler, Erica and Sasan.