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Showing posts from June, 2020

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup Book by John Carreyrou

Elizabeth Holmes is a Stanford Engineering dropout with a hare brain idea of a product that was touted to save the world. Though the theory of the blood test machine was flimsy, Theranos and the mini blood tester ignited the imagination of venture capitalists. Together with Balawi, her partner, she  cheated billions of dollars off billions in the product that was not. Theranos, the unicorn and Apple in healthcare, could neither take off and was rotten in business practices to the core. Holmes promise of many tests based on a pin prick sized blood did not materialized and she used commercial testers to do the job. The results were   passed   off as results from her miniLab. Many false positives in many diseases caused much harm to patients and Walmart's venture into healthcare a pipedream.  Why would a company whose board of directors are not from the industry or discipline able to be the unicorn in Simi Valley? The rich and powerful executive board attracted the VCs like bees to ho

The Spy Who Couldn't Spell by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Brian Regan grew up in a underprivileged family. He did not do well in school due to his dyslexia and struggled with low self esteem. The only way out of his situation was to sign up for the military. There he found his strength in cybercrime related espionage support work. From it, he gained the respect from those who used to step on him, including his family. But his autism issues caught up with him at work and he no longer was respected among younger colleagues. He was forced to change his posting at NRO and eventual retirement which he opted. Unhappy with his lot and mounting debts due to his mismanagement of his money, he did what would be considered treason. Regan began a long period of collating the information that was freely available to him in the NRO for the purpose of selling them to the enemies of the country so that he could resolve his financial problems. However because of his lack of spy experience and poorly spelt extortion letter (due to dyslexia), he was never taken