To raise the money she needed, she leveraged her family connections. She convinced Tim Draper, the father of her childhood friend and former neighbor Jesse Draper, to invest $1 million. The Draper name carried a lot of weight and helped give Elizabeth some credibility: Tim’s grandfather had founded Silicon Valley’s first venture capital firm in the late 1950s, and Tim’s own firm, DFJ, was known for lucrative early investments in companies like the web-based email service Hotmail.
Another family connection she tapped for a large investment, the retired corporate turnaround specialist Victor Palmieri, was a longtime friend of her father's. ... In addition to Draper and Palmieri, she secured investments from an aging venture capitalist named John Bryan and from Stephen L. Feinberg, a real estate and private equity investor who was on board of Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center. She also persuaded a fellow Stanford student named Michael Chang, whose family controlled a multibillion-dollar distributor of high-tech devices in Taiwan, to invest.
- Bad Blood, pg 16
это напоминает старый анекдот про парня, который продавал карандаши, а потом дядя завещал ему миллион. и еще историю про финансирование одной из первых bitcoin exchanges, там тоже парень сидел в подвале без денег со своими компьютерами, а потом один из его приятелей уговорил другого приятеля вложить 20 миллионов.
еще там познавательно, особенно учитывая, что это 2007-й год и речь идет о Калифорнии
...when Matt called the second moving company and explained the situation, a person there strongly advised him to drop the idea. Unionized moving companies were all mob controlled, the person said. What Theranos was proposing to do risked devolving into violence. - Ibid., p. 42ну и Theranos board [Wiki]:
[John Careyrou on San Fransisco-area biotech company Theranos risking organized crime violence by dropping a contract with a unionized moving company.]
In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former Secretary of State George Shultz, who joined the Theranos board of directors that month. Over the next three years, Shultz helped to introduce almost all the outside directors on the "all-star board," which included William Perry (former Secretary of Defense), Henry Kissinger (former Secretary of State), Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator), Bill Frist (former U.S. Senator and heart-transplant surgeon), Gary Roughead (Admiral, USN, retired), James Mattis (General, USMC), Richard Kovacevich (former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO) and Riley Bechtel (chairman of the board and former CEO at Bechtel Group). The board was criticized for consisting "mainly of directors with diplomatic or military backgrounds."еще из книги:
He said she wasn't the one running Theranos day-to-day. A man named Sunny Balwani was. Alan didn't mince his words about Balwani: he was a dishonest bully who managed through intimidation. Then he dropped another bombshell: Holmes and Balwani were romantically involved. ... If what Alan was saying was true, this added a new twist: Silicon Valley's first female billionaire tech founder was sleeping with her number-two executive, who was nearly twenty years her senior. - pg 227
My source said it was hard for the agency to take any adverse action against a company that portrayed itself as the lab world's biggest advocate of FDA regulation, especially one as politically connected as Theranos. At first, I thought he was referring to its board of directors, but that was the least of his concerns. He pointed out how chummy Holmes had gotten with the Obama administration. He had seen her at the launch of the president’s precision medicine initiative earlier in the year, one of several White House appearances she’d made in recent months. - pg 260
see also Why wasn't Theranos's board or its investors able to see that Elizabeth Holmes was continuously demonstrating unethical behavior?
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