America's youngest female billionaire
America's youngest self-made female billionaire is 30 years old and a college dropout. The company she founded has the potential to change health care for millions of Americans. Elizabeth Holmes left Stanford University at 19 with a plan to start her own company. For money, she cashed out the funds her parents had saved for tuition. Now, she counts billionaire Larry Ellison as an investor and has former secretaries of state on her board.
Holmes, through her company Theranos, has taken on the $76 billion laboratory-diagnostic industry as her target. It's an industry that was just waiting to be disrupted, since blood testing has not changed since the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s.
"My father worked in disaster relief and so I grew up in a house that had pictures of all these little children in really tough parts of the world," she said. "I was absolutely convinced that was what I was going to do. Then when I started realizing that a company could be a vehicle for having very direct impact over a change that you are trying to make, I started thinking about the concept of what could I build that could impact a lot of peoples' lives?"
The solution she's built is the Theranos Wellness Center, which has calming music, glossy magazines and offers a blood test with a relatively painless prick. Holmes' ultimate goal is to have one center within five miles of any American (or one mile for folks in big cities). Theranos teamed up with Walgreens pharmacies to help make that happen, and the centers are built within existing Walgreens stores. There are currently centers in California and Arizona, with plans for a gradual rollout into 8,200 neighborhood Walgreens across the country.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/16/technology/theranos-elizabeth-holmes/?hpt=ob_articleallcontentsidebar&iid=obnetwork
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