I have an ongoing joke about how I’m full of great ideas but no one ever listens to me. Like, teleportation would be great! Why won’t the scientists listen to me and invent it? Do I have to do everything around here?

Yeah, it’s lame. But I’m now reading Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. He’s the Wall Street Journal reporter who started exposing Silicon Valley darling Theranos as a fraud a few years ago, and the book is…

…just astounding. From reading Carreyrou’s Journal pieces, I thought I more or less knew the Theranos story. But no. It’s basically a real-life version of my joke. Elizabeth Holmes had an idea: wouldn’t it be great if we could do hundreds of blood tests with just a tiny thumb prick of blood? And that was it. She was a freshman chemical engineering major who dropped out of Stanford and had no idea how to do this. She literally had nothing. She just thought it was a good idea. Based on that, she was able to raise millions of dollars and hire hundreds of people to see if they could bring her idea to life.

They couldn’t. It was sort of like someone saying, wouldn’t it be great if we could cure diabetes? It sure would! Now go invent something that does it.

But as bizarre as this sounds, that was Theranos. And even more bizarrely, it’s not even the weirdest thing about the whole story. [...]