Here’s What Happened to the Theranos Headquarters

There’s a satisfying irony in a medical school replacing a company that grew briefly rich and famous for fraudulent medical devices

Photos courtesy of the author

Theranos had a thing about circles. In early discussions about the company’s logo, founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was drawn to a pagan-era pattern of overlapping circles re-christened the “Flower of Life” by more recent New Age writers, journalist John Carreyrou explained in Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Circles appeared frequently in the company’s marketing materials; its logo highlighted the “o” in the company name.

So when the blood-testing company moved to a new corporate headquarters in late 2014 — back when Theranos was valued at $9 billion and no federal charges had been filed against any of its chief executives — South African architect Clive Wilkinson, who had been hired to redesign the interior, doubled down on the circle motif.

Desks fanned out from conference rooms in circular patterns. The floors were dotted with giant round brass meeting tables with embedded sinks. Arcing brass strips inlaid in the atrium’s marble floor formed the Flower of Life, a spiritual symbol that Theranos employees walked all over every day.

The circle-studded building at 1701 Page Mill Road in Palo Alto was a 116,000-square-foot behemoth whose size and prime location in Stanford Research Park underscored the company’s success. Rent was reportedly $1 million per month.

Theranos is gone, obviously, dissolved in 2018 after Carreyrou and whistleblowers revealed its signature technology to be a sham of impressive proportions. Holmes and former chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted on federal wire fraud charges; her trial is scheduled to begin in August. A struggling Theranos vacated its Palo Alto headquarters in 2017 and spent its remaining months squeezed into its industrial laboratories across the bay in Newark, California.

But the building of the original headquarters remains, and the failed company’s specter evokes a different kind of circularity: the rise and fall of fortunes in a place built on the myth of inexorable forward progress.

In May 2018, the Stanford University School of Medicine announced it was taking over the lease of 1701 Page Mill Road. A variety of med school labs and offices moved into the building later that year.

Stanford University owns the land beneath the building; Los Angeles-based Kilroy Realty bought the leasehold in December 2016. Spokespeople for both Stanford and Kilroy declined to comment on current monthly rent or any other particulars, citing a confidentiality clause in the lease.

Already the tenure of Silicon Valley’s most famous fraud is little more than a footnote, its former space repurposed for new work, new innovation, new potential next-big-things.

On a visit in October, the interior of the building was still recognizable from footage of Holmes walking around headquarters in the 2019 HBO documentary The Inventor. The giant, circular brass sink tables were still there, their flashy modern design contrasting awkwardly with the new rows of standard-issue cubicle desks nearby. White worktables set up in the lobby obscured the Flower of Life on the floor. The custom desk in Holmes’ old office was gone, but the bulletproof glass in the windows remained.

On a more recent visit in January 2020, Stanford’s own remodeling project was underway. A section of the upper floor — used for lab work during Theranos’ tenure — sat unoccupied behind glass doors while it awaited remodeling. Most of the company’s clinical work was based in Newark, but as Carreyrou reported, company officials would stick willing dignitaries’ fingers during visits to headquarters and make a show of placing the blood drop in a proprietary miniLab for testing. Then they would remove the blood sample and run it on a commercial analyzer as soon as the person left the room.

Architectural drawings on an easel propped near the main entrance showed renderings of an attractive but generic future interior. Already the tenure of Silicon Valley’s most famous fraud is little more than a footnote, its former space repurposed for new work, new innovation, new potential next-big-things.

Silicon Valley unabashedly favors the new and next, an ethos far more interested in history’s unwritten chapters than its dusty archives. “I don’t even know why we study history,” former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski told the New Yorker in 2018. “What already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” (Federal prosecutors charged Levandowski in August with stealing trade secrets; he’s currently out on bail.)

But a Stanford researcher whose offices are in the Page Mill building said he makes a point of telling new hires about the building’s history, and reminding them of who and what once worked where they do. The Theranos story is a watershed moment for this area, he says; the apex of Silicon Valley’s pursuit of wealth and dominance at the expense of consumer well-being.

He wants his team to remember the public and bitter consequences of failing to follow health care’s most primary oath: First, do no harm.