Marketing Problem or Business Problem?
Elizabeth Holmes had a brilliant product—new technology that would change blood testing. No more needles. No more drawing vials of blood at the doctor’s office. In 2014, Business Insider described the vision of Holmes’s company Theranos this way:
“You might be able to walk into a Walgreens pharmacy for a reportedly painless fingerprick that will draw just a tiny drop of blood . . . The company can run hundreds of tests on a drop of blood far more quickly than could be done with whole vials in the past — and it costs a lot less.”
Lured by the transformation Theranos promised to bring to the lab testing industry, investors poured money into the company. Elizabeth Holmes had founded the company in 2003 and by 2015 it was valued at $10 billion. Time magazine named Holmes, now CEO, to its list of “100 Most Influential People.”
However, 2015 was also the year that Holmes’ empire started to fall apart. The Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that most of the blood tests Theranos completed were not done using the company’s supposedly revolutionary new technology. Rather, the article claimed that behind the scenes Theranos was using the same machines everyone else in the industry used.