The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

I had read John Carreyrou's fine Wall Street Journal articles, as well as his thrilling book, Bad Blood, before seeing this documentary tonight. The first half of the documentary seems almost worshipful of Elizabeth Holmes, building up her mystique and putting her unique ability to attract doting followers to her message on display. Quite a lot of time is spent gazing into those big blue, unblinking eyes. By the time we get around to the cracks in the facade, we are more than an hour into the film. It is inevitable that a lot of important background was left out: the climate of constant firings that went on for years, the fact that Sunny and Elizabeth met when he was 38 (and married) and she was 19, that Elizabeth's dad had been a VP at Enron, etc. Mostly I would have appreciated a little more specific information on why the Edison machine failed. The examples given in the film don't seem that unsolvable, but I know from the book that there were some basic issues that simply couldn't be dreamed away owing to the tiny sample sizes from the finger pricks. Tyler Shultz comes off as a happy-go-lucky guy, but in fact he is one of the heroes of this story. It is not mentioned in this film, but not just his grandfather former Secretary of State and Theranos board member George Schultz, but also his parents flipped out when he told them he was quitting the company. His bravery in standing up for his values is truly admirable in one so young, especially considering the immense pressure he came under. To his parents' credit, they came around and ended up mortgaging their home to pay his legal bills. Ultimately, though, the story gets Elizabeth right: she is a zealot who is deaf to any naysayers, even to this day. The cautionary tale for the rest of us, is are we George Shultz or Tyler Shultz? Are we willing to see the truth and make a difficult decision, or are we too invested to be willing to give up on something we had believed in?

Currently airing on HBO, this film by master documentarian Alex Gibney (The Armstrong Lie/Taxi to the Dark Side) explores the pervasive 'fake it till you make it' ethos which much of the dotcom enterprises have undertaken in order to gain funding for their big idea even though sometimes, as in this doc's case, there is no product delivered at the end of the day. Elizabeth Holmes wanted to create a revolutionary device which by using a person's blood (from a finger prick) could examine & determine any maladies or characteristics for medical use at a fraction of what the big labs charge today. Not having any successfully manufactured tangible device to use, the results of the initial tests performed on patients were skewed & problematic even though Walgreen's had bought into their new tech setting up wellness centers in Arizona before rolling them out nationwide. Aligning herself w/big money & hopeful investors, Holmes, along w/her partner & significant other, continued to ratchet up the success of their non-existent product to the public much to the chagrin of employees who knew the truth all along & eventually whistleblowed the entire scheme to the press. A worthy case of believing in the product rather than the producer is made when we see avarice & arrogance go hand in hand to a potentially devastating result.

I was struck by some of the similarities between this and an ostensibly very different documentary I recently watched, about the disastrous Fyre (music) Festival. In both cases, a young person managed to get older and supposedly wiser people to give them ridiculous amounts of money based purely on their chutzpah, while providing nothing in the way of oversight or verification in return. In both cases, everyone involved should have known better from the beginning.

I don't know the history of the production of this documentary, but there's a lot of very flattering footage of Holmes, so my guess is that at the heart of this, someone was working on a hagiography about her and then re-tasked the footage when things went South. This means you'll get your fill of her strange unblinking stare and weirdly affected voice.

I found very amusing that hordes of older men were quick to fawn over her (sometimes to an embarrassing degree) and support her financially, while the only person who didn't buy it was her female professor at Stanford. Is it possible these men maybe weren't thinking with their brains? I wonder (actually I don't).

Everyone compared her to Steve Jobs, and she consciously cultivated the image, but the thing everyone forgets is the Apple didn't involve any new or even challenging technology. No one doubted you could build a home computer. Jobs' genius was realizing people would *buy* one. In contrast, Holmes was claiming to have developed a revolutionary new technology that had eluded some of the biggest medical tech companies in the world, and everyone simply took her word for it with no evidence whatsoever. Imagine if instead of a computer, Jobs had claimed to have built a spaceship in his garage, and then rounded up investors without showing it to anyone. That's more like what Theranos was like.

The movie does a very good job of laying out the facts and the time line, but a central question remains unanswered; namely, when exactly did things go from "optimism" to "fraud"? Was it a scam from the beginning, or did she really think she could pull it off? Maybe that can't be answered by anyone but Holmes, and she's not saying. Even if you're very generous with your impression of her, the "adults" should have more realistic and looked out for things.

In the end, it's a cautionary tale from which I doubt anyone will learn anything.

Well, Elizabeth Holmes is still a mystery. Every media incarnation of hers (from magazines/newspapers to the book to this doc to the film version currently in production with Jennifer Lawrence) Holmes becomes a little more clear - and it's good to hear her infamously deep voice - but "The Inventor" hardly solves her. Didn't anyone know her in high school or college (short a time as that may have been)? Can't the filmmakers interview them? What about family? Surely someone must be willing to talk about her psyche. The people they interview is more or less the same as the book and hold no surprise in this medium, although Rochelle Gibbons was very powerful to hear, more so than the book. There were also opportunities in the doc to explore themes like Gen Y arrogance, the power of branding, and the cluelessness of companies like Walgreens - which did not do any vetting in the least...but they focused on the Silicon Valley Unicorn theme. It was a good watch, overall, especially if you like learning new and awful things about humanity and seeing some really awkward footage...like Elizabeth Holmes in a bouncy house. But the most harrowing segment-where "The Inventor" almost took off- was the focus on the (literally) hot mess inside of the Theranos machine. A lot of spilled blood, broken glass, and basic slime...all with the risk of transmitting fun stuff like Hepatitis to the many Theranos lab techs. But "The Inventor" is mostly a soft peddle of the Theranos story. It should have made much more of an emotional impact. I also suspect the folks whose health was damaged by Theranos's false diagnoses in the Arizona testing facilities are suing and therefore could not be filmed. Their filmed experiences would have been amazing. Overall, I would have appreciated more theorizing on the motivation of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, although this doc suggests that she is basically bananas.

Like others, I followed the Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes story and in addition read the excellent book that investigative journalist John Carreyrou authored and published last year (Bad Blood).

It felt that the first part of this documentary was a hagiography rather than an incisive investigative documentary - the focus on the "female Steve Jobs" perspective dominated and she certainly seemed to have the same "reality distortion field" powers he had. However, having read the book my perspective was that she, and her boyfriend/COO Sunny Balwani were bullies (via lawyer David Boies, security guards and others) to their staff , associates and others and who benefited by manipulating otherwise smart, powerful people and taking advantage of their wishful thinking. Eventually the documentary got to the reality but it felt like a long time and frankly I found some of the interviews (eg with the respected behavioral economist Dan Ariely) to be somewhat ethereal and did not add value to the story.

I have been around start-ups and understand the notion of "faking it a bit" to get to the final "vision". However, to compare her to an Edison, a Jobs or a Musk was inappropriate. in terms of her ability to manipulate, tell brazen lies and intimidate I feel a much more appropriate comparison would have been Bernie Madoff.