#carreyrou

A group of writers, including Theranos whistleblower and “Bad Blood” author John Carreyrou, is filing a lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the companies of training their models on pirated copies of their books. If this sounds familiar, it’s because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of…

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Re-read Week 12, Chapters 19 through Epilogue

I decided to complete the content portion of the re-read this week.   From a team-level perspective, I believe we can all recognize some if not all of the behaviors seen in Bad Blood, albeit on a far less sociopathic scale. If this were a business novel, it would be easy to assume that the behavior shown in the book is hyperbole used to make a grand point.  In Theranos’s case, the supporting…

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Re-read Week 11, Chapters 16, 17 and 18: The Grandson, Fame and The Hippocratic Oath

My intent is to complete our re-read of Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup in three more weeks.  The book has 24 chapters and an epilogue, therefore there will be two more weeks on the book and then a wrap-up.  We will re-read The Tipping Pointby Malcolm Gladwell next. This week we tackle three more chapters in which we learn money is thicker than blood (something I learned…

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Re-read Week 8, Chapter 11 and 12: Lightning a Fuisz and Ian Gibbons

We are re-reading Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 – Buy a copy and read along). This week we tackle two related chapters.  Over the course of the book to date, we have seen secrets and lies (hence the title), intellectual theft, poor diagnostics and careers being destroyed.  This week we add a suicide to the hot mess…

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Re-read Week 8, Chapter 10: Who Is LTC Shoemaker

We are re-reading Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 – Buy a copy and read along).  Chapter 10 focuses on what when Hollywood makes a movie from Bad Blood will be a titanic battle between the indomitable Elizabeth and what a career military officer, but what is really a struggle between right and wrong.  In the chapter,…

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Re-read Week 7, Chapter 9: The Wellness Play

This week the fallout from overpromising the on the ability to deliver the miniLab spreads to Safeway in our re-read of Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.  Overpromising is a problem every team and organization faces. Almost all humans want to say yes and make people happy. As trained problem solvers, we rarely meet problems that we can not overcome, and hence we are…

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Re-read Week 6, Chapter 7 – The miniLab

  We are back with Chapter 7 of Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 – Buy a copy and read along!). Chapter 7, titled The miniLab, focuses on overpromising and continues to layer of toxicity to the Theranos story. (more…)

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Re-read Week 5, Chapter 6 – Sunny

I am continuing to tune the approach to Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 – Buy a copy and read along!) Today we tackle a single chapter.  Chapter 6, titled Sunny, introduces Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to the story.  Sunny, Holmes’ live-in boyfriend (the stress on the live-in part is to shine a light on just how close Holmes…