By Femi Falodun
Elizabeth Anne Holmes is not your average pretty face. Sure she’s beautiful and sexy (with a capital S), and could’ve had a successful modelling career strutting her stuff on runways from Paris to Milan and New York. However in 2003, this American girl-next-door chose a path uncommon with most girls her age. She started her own company based on a cool blood testing procedure she invented!
Here are 15 facts about this young lady that will totally blow your mind.
- 1.) She dropped out of Stanford in her second year of Chemical Engineering, to start her own blood testing company Theranos – a combination of the words therapy and diagnose.
- 2.) Today, Elizabeth’s net worth is $4.6 billion, while Theranos is valued at $9 billion. She retains control of over 50% of Theranos.
- 3.) Holmes is the world’s youngest female billionaire and third youngest on the global billionaires list.
- 4.) Her uncle died from cancer because it wasn’t caught early, motivating Holmes to develop a way to potentially detect diseases earlier.
- 5.) As of 2014, Holmes had 18 US patents and 66 non-US patents in her name and is listed as a co-inventor on over a hundred patent applications.
- 6.) Holmes states that she works every day from the time she wakes up until she goes to sleep.
- 7.) Elizabeth invented methods of blood test that are faster, cheaper and less painful than other tests, using just a drop or two of blood drawn from a pinprick in the finger to detect dozens of medical conditions. These include high cholesterol and cancer at a fraction of the price of commercial labs, and can run up to 70 different tests simultaneously.
- 8.) While still in high school, Holmes completed three college Mandarin courses and sold C++ compilers to Chinese universities.
- 9.) Part of Holmes’s inspiration came from her aversion to needles; her mother and grandmother even fainted at the sight of needles.
- 10.) Like the late great Steve Jobs, Holmes wears a daily “uniform” of a black suit with a black cotton turtleneck.
- 11.) The board of her company is stocked with prominent former government officials, including George P. Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William H. Foege.
- 12.) According to a report, Holmes “no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in 10 years … She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery.”
- 13.) Her parents were regular middle class folks. Father worked with USAID and mother was a government worker.
- 14.) Elizabeth doesn’t take caffeine, limits the amount of time she sleeps, and works seven days a week.
- 15.) Holmes is notoriously secretive, and while she’s been criticized by industry peers for this, she insists she must protect her technology from the prying eyes of competitors.
- Wow! What a girl!
Credit: Askmen.com, Forbes.com, Inc.com, Fortune.com