1984 On February 3rd, a man named elizabeth holms was born in Washington State, DC, USA. Her family conditions are very good. Her father is the vice president of Enron, and her mother is employed by the US Congress. When he was a child, Holmes had a lofty ideal-to become a billionaire.
In 2002, after graduating from high school at the age of 18, Holmes was admitted to Stanford University with excellent results to study chemical engineering. During her college years, as a student researcher, she worked with the dean of the School of Engineering and several doctoral researchers. Her clever mind and sweet appearance make her very popular in the laboratory.
In the next semester, Holmes got an internship at the Singapore Genome Research Center, when SARS was sweeping the world. When Holmes participated in the research of SARS virus in the laboratory, he found that the whole process of research, experiment and analysis was relatively traditional. This gave her some innovative ideas.
In March 2004, 20-year-old Holmes made a bold decision to drop out of school and start a business.
She used the education fund prepared by her parents as venture capital, and established a company called "Real-time Treatment" in California, which was later renamed Theranos. The name is taken from the English words of treatment and diagnosis, and the development direction of the company is aimed at the blood test market in the United States.
According to herself, the original intention of setting up the company comes from her own fear of needles, so she wants to develop a technology that can achieve hundreds of tests with only a very small amount of blood at her fingertips.
Holmes, who became the boss, kept promoting his unique ideas and some unconstrained medical methods in public places. There is such a concept: "test box = reader", which simply means that after obtaining a small amount of blood from patients, a variety of test results can be obtained.
Needless to say, this concept really raised $6 million in 2004, of which the first $6.5438+0 million came from Tim draper, the founder of Defengjie Venture Capital Company, at which time the company's valuation reached $30 million.
In 2005, Hilalos Company built a prototype according to the previous idea and named it "Hilalos 1.0". Because R&D needs to consume a lot of money, it didn't take long for Holmes to start the second and third round of financing, obtaining 9 million dollars and 32 million dollars respectively, and the company's valuation also rose to 65.438+97 billion dollars.
With money, in September, 2007, the company improved the first-generation prototype and added a manipulator to the old equipment to avoid the problem of mutual pollution of blood and reagents. The upgraded equipment is called "Edison".
The device claims that as long as a few drops of blood are collected from the patient, 240 test results can be obtained after 4 hours. But the fact is that there are many problems with this equipment. When the machine is running, the test tube often breaks. Because there are too few blood samples tested, the machine will take many measures to dilute the blood, resulting in inaccurate results.
However, under the trend of huge interests, these are not the key points. On the contrary, Holmes is more high-profile, claiming to be an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs and recruiting many Apple employees. In most public occasions, he will deliberately imitate Jobs and wear a black turtle neck, and the information of new products will only be announced at the new product launch conference. The posture used to display the products is also strikingly consistent with that of Jobs, who also spoke with a strong baritone and shouted a series of beautiful slogans:
In PPT, Holmes never lost to Jia Yueting. With these PPT, the company has attracted great attention in the capital market. In the next few years, Hobbes won the favor of more investment companies with his superb PPT speech level.
By the end of 20 10, Hilalos had received more than $92 million in venture capital, and its market value once climbed to 10 billion.
20 1 1 In July, Holmes was introduced to former Secretary of State george shultz. After a two-hour meeting, Schultz decided to join the company's board of directors. In the following three years, Holmes formed "the most outstanding board of directors in the history of American companies". The members of the board of directors include celebrities such as former Secretary of State, former Secretary of Defense and former Senator.
In the United States, the traditional blood test market is huge. The annual cost of blood test is more than 75 billion dollars, but it is basically monopolized by "American Holding Laboratory Company" and "Quest Diagnostics Company", with a market share of more than 60%, and Holmes has just begun to seize the market share with his strong board background.
On 20 13, walgreen, an American drugstore chain, announced the cooperation with Hillary Clinton. Walgreen is the largest food and drug retail store in the world, with more than 4,000 chain pharmacies. The achievement of this cooperation is undoubtedly the greatest affirmation to Hilalos, and at one time other medical institutions also came to you, hoping to be next to Hilalos' thigh.
At this time, Holmes began her great career, hoping that she could change the whole medical industry like Jobs changed the mobile phone.
In the future America, there will be a Hillary Health Center every five miles.
Such a beautiful blueprint, coupled with "the most outstanding board of directors in the history of American companies", has enabled Holmes to obtain more investment with a total amount of more than 400 million US dollars.
In 20 14, Hilalos Company was valued at over 9 billion dollars and became a "star company in Silicon Valley" with more than 500 employees. As the founder, Holmes holds 50% of the company's shares, worth more than $4.5 billion. Among the top 500 companies published by Forbes this year, Hillary ranked 1 10. Media attention to her reached its peak. Holmes frequently appeared on the covers of many famous magazines such as Fortune, Forbes and Time, and participated in various high-end programs. Ma Yun once shared the stage with Holmes and had an exchange on the topic of "doing good".
At the end of 20 14, Holmes' name appeared in 18 American patents and 66 foreign patents, and he was appointed as an academician of Harvard Medical School, and was selected as "one of the most influential people in the world" by Time magazine. At this time, she is simply popular all over the world.
The blood test service project reached between Hiilos and walgreen has been delayed. Even though it started under great pressure, the project is still full of problems. The so-called "Edison" blood test equipment either doesn't work, or the test results are far from the real results.
In order to cope with the inspection of investors, institutions and patients, Holmes has done his best:
Holmes demands that all employees in the company must be extremely loyal. Before joining the job, they not only have to sign a confidentiality agreement, but also ask about things other than work. Moreover, they are strictly divided into classes and groups, which leads many employees to know only what their team has done and nothing else.
In fact, in 2007, the former employees of the company publicly said that there was a problem with the company's blood test technology, but the top team of lawyers hired by the company made it bankrupt. Such negative news was quickly suppressed with the strong background support of the board of directors, but the sea ship pieced together by Holmes with one lie after another will eventually come to nothing.
20 15 John Carrieu, a journalist of The Wall Street Journal who won the Pulitzer Prize twice, received a message from a professional medical expert that Hillary Ross forged and exaggerated the facts, so he launched an investigation into the company for several months. When Holmes learned about this, he used the company's contacts to put pressure on John, but John stopped his career and Holmes.
20 15 10 15 After collecting enough evidence, John published an investigation article in The Wall Street Journal entitled "Hilary Company's blood testing technology faces difficulties". The publication of this article thoroughly exposed the shocking scam behind Holmes.
This paper quotes the testimony and evidence provided by several former employees and users of Hilalos. A senior employee of Hilalos said: Until February 2014,65438, their company's Edison testing equipment could only carry out 15 blood tests, which was far from the 240 test results claimed by Holmes, and the blood testing equipment was tested by a large number of diluted collected blood. What is more exaggerated is that most users' blood tests are carried out by purchasing traditional blood test equipment from other companies. These two traffickers have gone to extremes.
On the night when the scandal was reported by the Wall Street Journal, Holmes also appeared on the famous American program Crazy Money. When the host mentioned it to her, she responded:
Although Holmes hit back with successful language, the relevant American departments launched an investigation into his company. During the investigation, the American Medical Insurance and Medicaid Service Center found that the operating procedures of laboratory staff, the design and quality of testing equipment were not standardized. Since its establishment, the company has never established a control system for internal quality audit, and there are no relevant rules and regulations to control the progress of internal quality audit. This is a stone that stirs up a thousand waves.
From July 2065438 to July 2006, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the United States officially banned Holmes from operating blood test services for two years. The US Food and Drug Administration also ordered the company to stop using its invented blood collection device nanotubes. Walgreen, a chain pharmacy giant, also announced the termination of its cooperation with Hilalos and the closure of blood collection centers in its stores.
20 17, Arizona filed a lawsuit against Hilalos, claiming that the company sold 65438+50 million false blood test reports to the people of Arizona. In this lawsuit, Holmes agreed to refund the test fees to these subjects, plus civil litigation fees and attorney fees, which cost a total of 4.65 million US dollars.
From 2065438 to May 2007, creditors came to our door one after another, and Forbes updated Holmes' asset valuation from $4.5 billion to zero. Fortune magazine also called Holmes "the most disappointing leader in the world, and then the US Securities and Exchange Commission intervened in the investigation and finally decided that the company had deceived investors.
In order to solve the lawsuit faced by the company, Holmes gave up his voting control over Hilalos, banned him from holding senior positions in listed companies in the next decade, fined him $500,000, and faced the risk of imprisonment. Hilalos Company initiated dissolution and bankruptcy procedures, and the remaining cash and assets will be distributed to creditors. In this way, this "star company" with a valuation of more than 9 billion US dollars once stepped down from the altar.
2065438+On June 5, 2008, after two years' investigation, the federal grand jury charged Holmes and company president Mace Barwani with nine counts.