Inside Apple ‘iPhone designer’ Ana Arriola’s short stint at Theranos

After Ana Arriola left Theranos they’ve gone on to work with Meta (Facebook,) Sony, Samsung, Playstation, and Microsoft. At the time they started working at Theranos, however, they’d made the bold decision to leave Apple and a whopping 15,000 shares of Apple stock. Once they came on to Theranos, they eventually realized that the product at the heart of Theranos, the Edison machine that Ana had been tasked with improving the design of, didn’t work. They were just one of many powerful and influential people duped by Elizabeth’s aggressive drive to succeed at any cost.

Elizabeth was obsessed with Steve Jobs and wanted to emulate him. Part of that involved poaching his employees to help her make what she envisioned to be “the iPod of healthcare.” Ana Arriola met Elizabeth at a hip Palo Alto coffee spot called Coupa Café where Elizabeth sold them on her dream. Ana didn’t know much about medicine, so they had no idea that Elizabeth didn’t either. Ana had Elizabeth meet with their wife Corrine on a second meeting, and Elizabeth charmed them both. Ana decided to come on to Theranos as “chief design architect.”

While Elizabeth’s intense, unblinking stare and fake deep baritone voice seem odd in recorded interviews, especially since the fraud of Theranos has been exposed, it can also make the person she’s speaking to feel incredibly important.

Elizabeth’s vision for the blood testing machine, then called the “Edison,” was to look like the original iMac with two colors separated by a diagonal line. The first iMac was see-through, but the Edison had to be opaque.

Ana also used her design skills on Elizabeth, who often dressed in frumpy Christmas sweaters. After Ana’s consultation, Elizabeth decided to take on Steve Jobs’ wardrobe as well: black turtlenecks and black pants almost every day. Elizabeth also took a note from the lore of Steve Jobs’ diet. The legendary CEO was known for going fruitarian for a while and was usually at least vegan. He even thought that his vegan diet prevented him from needing to shower, which his former coworkers strongly disagreed with. Thankfully, there’s no indication that Elizabeth took her Steve Jobs emulation so far as to not shower.

While working at Theranos, Ana found that all the different departments were hindered from communicating with each other, making progress difficult and slow. Also, the turnover rate at Theranos was high because people got fired all the time.

Ana was shocked when they gave Aaron Moore, an engineer, a ride one and learned that the science end of things was failing badly. Because they had been kept out of the loop of what was really going on inside the machine they were designing, they had no idea that it wasn’t actually working. Part of the problem was that even the engineering and chemistry departments weren’t communicating. In short, the Edison machine was a disaster, and working on a new model wasn’t going to be much better because everyone was working in the dark as to what everyone else was doing. Ana was especially disturbed to learn that they were conducting tests using a faulty machine on cancer patients for a Tennessee study.

Ana’s personal relationship with Elizabeth also started to get shaky because they had several times told Elizabeth a word that was essentially forbidden at Theranos: “no.”

After they found out about the faulty machines, Ana also decided to plead with Elizabeth to stop the study with cancer patients until they could get their machine working. This made Elizabeth ask Ana if they thought Theranos was really the right place for them.

Ana decided that afternoon that it wasn’t the place for them, and resigned immediately. They had only been at Theranos for four months. Ana declined all of Elizabeth’s phone calls. Ana told her colleagues that they wanted to leave the company because Elizabeth was lying about the tech and wanted to go be a full-time chef for their family. Of course, Ana didn’t stay home for long, they have since gone on to work in design with big players in the tech industry.

According to The Decider, in December 2021 Ana explained that they had decided to work at Theranos because they had been “blinded” by the cult of Elizabeth. They also referred to Elizabeth’s rigid, unrealistic vision of creating a machine that could perform hundreds of complex blood tests from a single droplet of blood as a “science fiction project.”

“When I took the job as Elizabeth’s Vice President and Chief Design Architect,” Ana Arriola wrote. “I was an eager employee blinded by fame and opportunity and the cult of working for Elizabeth. She was on her fast ascent, convincing everyone that her science fiction project was real and could change the world. I left my job at Apple to follow her leadership at Theranos.”

Ana Arriola has an air of myth around them as well. They are often referred to as the person who designed the iPhone, including on episode 3 of Hulu’s >The Dropout, a fictionalized telling of the Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos story. While Ana did have a big role in helping design and develop the very first iPhone, they didn’t design it all by themselves. Still, they were involved enough to deserve a great deal of the credit they receive. Ana served as Senior Product Line Manager for Apple between August 2005 and September 2007 where they “Led the creation of Apple’s hardware acceleration of iPhone and Apple TV’s UX and iOS SDK.” Steve Jobs was also involved in the design of the iPhone, as well as Jony Iva, an Apple former product designer.

Sources: Bad Blood (affiliate link) by John Carreyrou and The Dropout podcast with Rebecca Jarvis

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