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Todd Surdey, as a sales executive at Theranos, played a significant role in the company's downfall. He realized that the company's revenue projections were overly optimistic and contingent on proving that their blood analysis system worked, which was often malfunctioning. He voiced his concerns to Don Lucas about the exaggerated revenue projections due to the unreliable state of the Theranos product. This led to an emergency board meeting where Elizabeth Holmes was asked to step down as CEO. Although she managed to regain the board's confidence, the issues raised by Surdey were a significant factor in the company's downfall.
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Learn why and how a $9 billion dollar company vanished in a few weeks. The story of Theranos is the Silicon Valley equivalent of the Enron scandal rep...
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Todd Surdey, a Theranos sales executive, realized that the company's revenue projections were wildly optimistic. Each contract with a pharmaceutical company was contingent on Theranos proving that its blood analysis system worked. Worse, the devices often malfunctioned. During a demo for Novartis, all three Edison readers displayed error messages. He took his concerns to Don Lucas saying that the revenue projections were vastly exaggerated given the unreliable state of the Theranos product. This time Don took the complaint seriously. He convened an emergency meeting and Elizabeth was asked to wait outside. The board decided that Elizabeth was too inexperienced to head the company and decided to make her step down. When Elizabeth was called in to be informed, she agreed that there were shortcomings and promised to correct them. In the course of the next two hours, she managed to win back the confidence of the board, in a manner that even experienced CEOs would have found hard to pull of...
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