Tyler Shultz on What It Was Really Like Inside Theranos
Tyler Shultz describes the culture of secrecy and dysfunction at Theranos before he became one of the first whistleblowers to expose the fraud.
What was it actually like to work at Theranos?
Tyler Shultz, grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz and one of the first people to blow the whistle on Theranos, has described a workplace built on secrecy, siloed teams, and a product that barely worked. He joined the blood-testing startup fresh out of Stanford, first as an intern and then as a full-time employee, and watched a company that marketed itself as the future of healthcare run almost entirely on improvisation and fear. Patients getting tested at Walgreens still got a needle in the arm, not the single drop of blood the company promised, and many of those samples were quietly run on third-party machines instead of Theranos’s own device.
TL;DR
- Tyler Shultz met Elizabeth Holmes at his grandfather’s house while still a Stanford student and described her as magnetic, able to make anyone in a conversation feel like the most important person in the room.
- He interned at Theranos and noticed that colleagues who had worked there for years had never actually seen the device the company was famous for building.
- The company enforced strict internal silos, barring employees from discussing work even with coworkers in different labs, justified as protection against corporate espionage.
- On his first full day as an employee, the manager of the lab validating Theranos’s blood tests quit after a confrontation with Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes.
- Patients at Walgreens received a standard needle draw, and samples were frequently sent to be run on third-party lab equipment rather than the Theranos device itself.
- Shultz says he initially dismissed warning signs, including a colleague’s parting advice to “go somewhere else and learn how to do real science.”
- He describes Sunny Balwani as broadly disliked even by people close to Holmes, including Shultz’s own grandparents, who rarely invited Balwani to family events.
Everyone else built a construction worker.
We built the contractor.
One file at a time.
UI, API, database, deploy.
How did Elizabeth Holmes recruit and retain believers?
Shultz’s first encounter with Holmes happened almost by accident. His grandfather, who lived on the Stanford campus, invited him to sit in on a conversation with a woman he called brilliant. That woman was Elizabeth Holmes, wearing the black turtleneck she modeled after Steve Jobs. Shultz describes her voice and presence as almost hypnotic, the kind of person who could silence a room just by starting to speak.
What stuck with him wasn’t just charisma. It was the pitch itself: a machine that could run any lab test a hospital could run, using a single drop of blood, anywhere there was electricity. Battlefields, medevac helicopters, patients’ homes, a Walgreens aisle. No limitations. Shultz says he was completely sold, stayed in touch with Holmes as something like a mentor, and even switched his college major from mechanical engineering to biology at her urging, despite ending up with a biology degree after only two quarters actually studying it.
That kind of personal buy-in, cultivated before he ever drew a paycheck, is part of why the internal dysfunction took so long to register as alarming. He wasn’t just an employee. He felt like part of a mission.
What red flags did he see before joining full time?
During his internship, Shultz worked in a research lab engineering antibodies for the blood tests, several steps removed from the actual testing device. He says the most telling detail, in hindsight, was that people who had worked at Theranos for three, four, five years had never seen the product they were supposedly building toward.
The company ran on strict internal walls. Locked doors, separate badges, aggressive nondisclosure agreements, and an explicit rule against discussing work with coworkers in other labs, even friends. Management framed this as necessary protection against corporate espionage, citing competitors and foreign actors trying to steal Theranos’s technology. Shultz says he accepted that explanation at the time, since plenty of startups operate in stealth mode before launch. The difference, he notes now, is that this secrecy was enforced inside the company, between employees who were supposed to be collaborating on the same product.
The clearest warning came from a colleague he’d become friendly with during the internship. On his last day, she told him he shouldn’t come back, that he should go somewhere else and “learn how to do real science.” He brushed it off. He had no reference point for what a normal science job looked like, since this was his first real job out of a university setting.
What happened on his first day as a full-time employee?
Shultz’s first day happened to coincide with Theranos’s public product launch, the day Holmes cut the ribbon at a Walgreens in Palo Alto. He describes walking into a company riding high after eleven years in stealth mode, finally telling the world what it had built.
The reality inside didn’t match. The manager of the team responsible for validating blood tests before they reached real patients quit that same day, reportedly after a confrontation with Sunny Balwani and Holmes that ended with her crying in the parking lot. Shultz’s own manager pulled the team aside and explained that the validation lab, nicknamed “Normandy” for its supposed role storming the beaches of healthcare, had zero validated tests on launch day. Patients walking into Walgreens got a standard needle draw, and their samples were either sent to outside labs or run on third-party machines from companies like Siemens, not on the Theranos device the company had just unveiled to the public.
Within days, the first test (HbA1c, a comparatively simple one) was validated on the platform. But the broader picture Shultz describes is a company launching a medical product to the public while still scrambling to make it function at all.
Why did he stay despite the warning signs?
Shultz is candid that he didn’t treat any of this as disqualifying at the time. He says he genuinely believed he’d spend his entire career at Theranos, maybe thirty years, and retire there. The company’s celebratory internal meetings, the sense of mission, and Holmes’s own magnetism kept him invested even as the operational reality grew stranger.
He also describes watching the validation team burn through staff at a rapid pace, with people joining and leaving within weeks, and Balwani conducting 3 a.m. walkthroughs of the lab to confirm people were physically present and working. Shultz frames the high turnover among technically skilled employees, contrasted with the company’s aggressive hiring, as something that should have registered as a bigger warning sign than it did.
Was Sunny Balwani a problem from the start?
Yes, according to Shultz, almost universally so. He says nearly everyone who interacted with Balwani, including Shultz’s own grandparents, found him difficult to be around. Despite Holmes becoming close enough with the Shultz family to attend Christmases, Thanksgivings, and birthday parties, the family reportedly avoided inviting Balwani unless necessary. Shultz describes him as abrasive, comparing his personality to gravel. Text messages between Balwani and Holmes later surfaced in litigation, which Shultz says confirm that impression of his temperament.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Tyler Shultz?
Tyler Shultz is a former Theranos employee and the grandson of George Shultz, the late U.S. Secretary of State who served on Theranos’s board. He became one of the earliest whistleblowers to raise internal concerns about the company’s testing practices.
What company did Tyler Shultz work for?
He worked at Theranos, the blood-testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that claimed it could run comprehensive lab tests from a single finger-prick blood sample.
What did Tyler Shultz discover at Theranos?
He found that patients were given standard needle draws rather than finger pricks, that many samples were tested on third-party lab equipment instead of Theranos’s own device, and that the company had validated very few tests on its platform even after its public product launch.
What is “Bad Blood” and how does it relate to Tyler Shultz?
“Bad Blood” is a book by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou that first broke the Theranos fraud story in detail. It documents Shultz’s experience as an employee and his role in raising early concerns that contributed to the company’s unraveling.
What was Sunny Balwani’s role at Theranos?
Sunny Balwani was Theranos’s president and chief operating officer, as well as Elizabeth Holmes’s romantic partner during much of the company’s operation. Shultz describes him as widely disliked and abrasive, including by people close to Holmes personally.