“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain

I’ve been listening to The DropOut podcast about the trial of Elizabeth Holmes that is starting this week and it’s got me hooked. Elizabeth Holmes is the woman who dropped out of Stanford after one year and started Theranos, a company she said would revolutionize the blood testing industry because with just one drop of blood they could analyze for up to 200 factors. She raised billions of dollars of investor money, signed a huge deal with Walgreens, was on the cover of Fortune magazine, and lived a 5 star lifestyle. The technology never worked. Now she’s standing trial for 12 counts of fraud and facing 20 years in prison. She maintains her innocence saying this is the resistance you meet when you try to change the world.

This is not the uplifting, inspiring content that I usually listen to but I find it so reminiscent of my early career in tech that I can’t helped be taken in by the characters. When I graduated from college with my electrical engineering degree, I spent a lot of time working on projects as a consultant at Microsoft in its early days. They were growing so fast they gobbled up engineers. The narcissistic, massive egos, show-off-smart, bullying personalities they describe at Theranos remind me of some of the people I worked with back then.

Microsoft revolutionized the idea of giving stock to employees and they did it at all levels of the company so when the company did well, everyone made money. It was a big change from the old days when the engineers were paid a salary and when a company was successful, it was usually the sales people and the executives that got rich. At Microsoft in those early days when the stock went up so fast, everyone was getting rich. I remember working at a trade show with a Microsoft employee who just sat and watched the stock ticker all day so that they could calculate what “they made” during that day.

It made their employees very loyal and very proud but created a lot of arrogance and petty behavior.  I observed people who met with resistance to an idea and would throw a fit announcing that “they were going to retire.” Usually it was someone that was in their mid-30’s. <eye-roll> Once I working on a tech conference where we were practicing the keynote speech and a MS executive didn’t like the version of the script he was given. He shamed and bullied the person who had stayed up all night working on the recent revisions in such a loud and vocal way that it made me physically feel ill just to watch.

I probably learned more about human behavior, leadership and integrity in those days than all the rest of my career combined. I don’t work with those types of clients any more and other than the lessons that I’m grateful to have gleaned, I don’t miss those days. My 6-year-old daughter said something about someone in the news the other day – “Well, they are famous so they must be good.” We had to take a minute to talk about how character and values don’t necessarily come with fame and fortune.

In the coming months we’ll find out whether the jury will hold Elizabeth Holmes accountable for the billions of dollars she lost or whether that’s the price of doing business. In the years since Theranos went defunct in 2018, she’s started a relationship with a man from a wealthy hotelier family and they had a baby born just 6 weeks before the trial started. However it turns out, listening to the details as they are presented, being reminded of my days watching the power of money makes me so grateful for my life now in the slow lane where I earn my living with no drama attached.