It sounds like they were up against huge obstacles and nowhere near capable of overcoming them. Makes me wonder how anyone thought they could.
Also did the other industry players pretty much know... they had to be full of it?
> When questions or issues came up that had to be taken back to Theranos, he would pipe up with what became a refrain: “I’ll talk to Elizabeth about it.” Larree Renda, the executive who had started out at Safeway as a teenage bagger in 1974 and climbed the corporate ranks to become one of Burd’s top deputies, and other executives involved in the project were surprised by how much latitude he gave the young woman. He usually held his deputies and the company’s business partners to firm deadlines, but he allowed Elizabeth to miss one after the other. Some of Burd’s colleagues knew he had two sons. They began to wonder if he saw in Elizabeth the daughter he’d never had. Whatever it was, he was in her thrall.
Jesus! That's horrible!
She also survived a coup attempt by her board, simply by convincing them to give her another chance. Then she fired the executives that moved against her.