Not many people can survive the strict work regimen Elizabeth Holmes subjects herself to, but for the thirty one year old billionaire and founder of blood testing company, Theranos, it is the price she has to pay to improve access to testing facilities for the worlds 7 billion people.
An ambitious project you may say, but she is no stranger to dreaming big.
Born in 1984 to Christian Holmes, a scientists who worked for a number of international aid agencies including USAID, and Noel Anne Daoust, a congressional committee staffer, her childhood was divided between the United States, Africa and China where her father was posted for his humanitarian work.
It was in China that she cut her entrepreneurship teeth at the age of nine, selling computer compilers.
Her aim however was to make the world a better place. In a letter she wrote to her father when she was just nine year old, she is quoted as saying
“I want to discover something mankind did not know was possible to do”
Whether she has indeed stayed true and changed the world is a matter of perspective, but due to a lingering fear of blood, she opted to study Chemical engineering at Stanford rather than medicine, where she won a $3,000 research grant in her freshman year.
Passionate about research, she was frequent at laboratories meant for PhD students, before she dropped out a couple of years later, setting up her company Real Time Cares, later renaming it Theranos short for therapy and diagnosis.
For nine years, Theranos worked in stealth mode, patenting over 200 inventions all of which Ms Holmes is a co inventor.
Her first invention was a wearable drug patch that delivered drugs directly to the patients system depending on intrinsic systemic factors.
Along the line, she has gone on to invent a radical new method of carrying out blood tests where only a drop of blood is needed from a finger prick, as against the conventional method of venipuncture, reducing the cost of medical tests by a third, and increasing the number of people who would otherwise not take a test due to their fear of needles.
Her new technology codenamed Edison is touted to be a game changer in the $76 billion testing industry in the united States and she plans to increase its worth to $92 billion by 2020.
Achieving such a lofty aim would be daunting for the bravest of men, but the only female CEO in an industry dominated by men sees each challenge as an opportunity to perfect her practice.
She is known to work past midnight at her headquarters and begin her day at dawn. A vegetarian, Elizabeth consumes no meat or animal product, consuming only veggie shakes specially prepared for her.
Her daily uniform is a black Steve jobs style turtle neck sweater she wears everyday thereby eliminating the need to spend time on fashion decisions.
Always a hard worker, Ms Holmes has said that she neither owns a TV at home or at work, does not date and has no friends except her brother Christian Holmes who is a manager at Theranos.
She may lead a straight laced lifestyle for the youngest female billionaire on the planet, valued in 2015 by Forbes at $4.5billion, but to her, no sacrifice is too great to pay for her lifelong ambition.
As she is quoted to have said
“I do not have an exit strategy from Theranos. I’m in this for life”
https://moneyandfameblog./2016/01/06/elizabeth-taylor-youngest-female-billionaire-set-to-radicalize-american-healthcare/

Wooow very impressive

MoonChildng:
Wooow very impressive

it really is

Freiburger , r231

Nigerian women depend on their husband.
The government depend on Oil.

While some are fighting to be the first to comment on nairaland, some are out there making billions.



On a serious note, this is not only impressive, it is humbling.

Guess hw much shez worth now --- 0 dollars

She is actually worth zero dollars now because theranos didn't scale the hype and the test were frought with a lot of irregularities so she is back to the drawing board again

handsomebanana:
Guess hw much shez worth now --- 0 dollars

How did that happen

Acepen:

How did that happen

her company went belly up due to regulatory issues. Though I believe Theranos' share value will still shore up soon enough.