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EC Erika Cheung On Start Here

“The thing that I hope people realize if they're working for a company is it's one thing to pay attention to what people are saying. It's another to pay attention to what they're doing. Holmes has always been remarkably good at saying things that make you believe her, that make you empathize with her, that make you be inspired by her. But when you really get into the details of the way she behaves and the way she treats people, it paints a whole different narrative.”

Start Here · Policy · November 2026

“The thing that I hope people realize if they're working for a company is it's one thing to pay attention to what people are saying. It's another to pay attention to what they're doing. Holmes has always been remarkably good at saying things that make you believe her, that make you empathize with her, that make you be inspired by her. But when you really get into the details of the way she behaves and the way she treats people, it paints a whole different narrative.” — Erika Cheung, Start Here

Context

Reacting to a new documentary about Theranos, she gives the lesson she hopes employees take from it about charismatic founders.

Transcript

Start Here Around 12:23 into the episode
Speaker 1

…argue, risked your career. You risked your ability to make money and you didn't have a safety net there. And in return for taking that risk, you faced, like you said, cars showing up at your new place of work. There was cruelty at the heart of what you faced after you told the truth about Theranos.

Speaker 2

Yeah. I think people don't realize the amount of retaliatory behavior that Holmes exhibited. Right. And it's very hard if you weren't there and you didn't see it firsthand of how many people were fired. How many people were

Speaker 4

screamed at? How many people were threatened to lose their jobs? And that was the same case for me, right? Like for me, coming forward and sharing my concerns about what was happening with the patient testing, you know, I thought this was me doing my job. And to come back and realize, oh, this company spent $150,000 to hire intelligence agencies and private investigators to follow me when I was 22 years old because they didn't want to confront that reality and that bad news. Like that's just so extreme. Like there are these things that I think people are unable to see in this film. And my hope, you know, there's this unsettlingness. I think when I was watching the film, just like you were saying, like there's so much to process. And I think it was a remarkable job that Lance and Nathan did in making us all realize how vulnerable we are to being deceived by what people say. And I think coming out of it, like we're describing, all the former employees, everyone else, the thing that I hope people realize if they're in this position and they're working for a company is it's one thing to pay attention to what people are saying. It's another to be pay attention to what they're doing. And that takes time and that takes just experience with them. And I…

Speaker 1

I completely agree. Did you see the movie with anyone else or did you go alone?

Speaker 4

I saw it with my brother and I saw it with my partner. So yeah, it was good. It was good to, I think being a boyfriend of someone involved in this case is always challenging because you're like, you know, you want, you want to be protective of me because, you know, I'm in the position, like…

Speaker 1

We are definitely going to dig into the work that you are doing now to try to help people who might find themselves in similar situations in the future. But I want to talk to you a little bit about this thing that I always admired about you. You paint the picture. This was your first job. You're 22…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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