Bad Blood Review

I read the book cover to cover in 2 days. While I found it interesting, it wasn’t a good story with a strong narrative. It was clearly a stitched-together collection of his research notes that didn’t make sense as a column. It suffered from a lack of detail around everything except the engineering, which was disappointing because it could have been a much stronger customer relationship and business management story if written from a slightly different perspective. If I were to subtitle the book, I’d call it: How to perpetrate house-of-cards style fraud: You can’t politic blood tests.

Conditional Recommendation

I wouldn’t recommend this book to someone who’s already read all of John’s WSJ columns or who has little interest in investigative journalism. There are a few tidbits that provide what was going on behind the headlines, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed reading it if I wasn’t already invested in the story. There are better books on Silicon Valley’s culture (Zero to One is surprisingly the less sociopath ideology) and on engineering/business management case studies (Soul of a New Machine is my perennial favorite).

All in all: B-

Strongest Points

The parts that stuck out the strongest to me were the parts where Elizabeth appeared to be ‘playing house’. Her management style and mistakes from the first half of the book (before the go-live), reminded me of other situations where young people are coached by older people to their own detriment. She had read all the ‘greats’ and listened to how they ran a business, so she pretended to be just like them. It turns out that the megalomaniac management style didn’t fit this business and she didn’t even notice. The points about how regulated medical devices are for new entrants misses the point that she really was only 1 product innovation away from success. If she had not just chased her own glory and lied, she could have much more easily pivoted to just being a normal medical device maker with fancy branding and SV backers. But instead, she just kept trucking, willfully ignorant of the fact that she wasn’t running a real business. The adult supervision part was brought up earlier in the book, and then again at the end with the board and voting structure. But clearly neither she nor Sunny knew what a functioning business looked like, they had never worked in one before so they made it up whole cloth.

Weakest

The part that breaks my heart is that her technical co-founder is sidelined immediately when it’s really a technical issue that sinks her company. If she really did have any innovation on her hands, she would have stayed at the height of her fame. Her personal connections and charisma haven’t diminished, so why did she bet it all on a lie? She was clearly well connected and hard working enough to become a billionaire, but thinking you’ll strike it rich on your first go-round is higher than folly. Every other success story is that of a phoenix, someone willing to accept defeat and rise again to greatness. Was it her family, her lack of close personal friendships, her imposter syndrome? I’m waiting another few years for her memoir with all the juicy details, where this book is just teasers.

Takeaways

There is no greater barrier to scientific progress and business success than poor communication. She was clearly bitten once, twice shy with IP and in an effort to protect that she effectively only trusted herself and Sunny thereafter. I’ve seen firsthand this organizational scar tissue build up from “never again” problems that weren’t close to being fatal. (All that patent fighting was entirely wasted because she never even got that far!) In large businesses it eventually slows everything to a standstill, while in small orgs it’s as deadly as described here. I have little doubt that with that amount of money, talent and time, she should have actually made a breakthrough innovation in space if the teams were more cross-functional instead of everything going through her.

Silicon Valley is for failures. The idea is to shoot big and fail fast, but it took 12 years for this to unravel. Everyone wanted to believe. The employees, the business partners, the investors, the media, the military, and probably Elizebeth herself. If she had dissected and attacked her first failure instead of working around it, they might be the world’s first commercially successful microfluidics company. Instead she shot for growth, that on one hand kept her company alive and on the other doomed it with impossible expectations. It’s so incredibly difficult to embrace failure, to know full-well that what you are attempting and investing in may turn to 0. To reduce the risk around that is good, but to forestall or deny that failure is dangerous to those who want to try something else that may work next.