Meet Elizabeth Holmes, America’s Youngest Female Billionaire Whose Fear Of Needles Inspired Her Success

Elizabeth Holmes is America’s youngest female billionaire, and the story behind how she made her money is both heart-warming and inspirational.

There are many different avenues where you could board Elizabeth’s tale and find yourself inspired. We could start in 2003, when at age 19 she dropped out of Stanford University and then spent the next decade secretly developing a simpler way to test blood.

However, let’s instead go back to her youth, when she first realized that she had a fear of needles. This phobia meant that she was constantly looking for a new and improved way to test blood. She believed that the current system, which simply sees a long, needle probed into someone’s skin, was archaic. Not only was it slow but it was also painful, and she was certain there was another method out there.

This lead to Holmes dropping out of Stanford, where she was studying chemical engineering. She then used her tuition fee to develop Theranos. This device requires just a finger prick of blood to be drawn for a patient, and its technology is so advanced it can determine 30 lab test results from just one drop. All in less than four hours. Plus it completely eradicates the need to send vials off to laboratories.

Holmes explained to CNN that the Theranos brings “the testing closer to where people live.” She also added that it is “changing the hours of operation, so that on a weekend or late at night you can get access to these tests. You don’t have to leave work, leave your job during the day.”

The Theranos Wellness Center, which is based in Palo Alto, California, has recently partnered with Walgreens and now the Theranos is being sold in 20 of their stores. This now means that people can simply walk into a store, get their finger pricked, and then have their results with them in hours. All at a cost of just $30. Holmes has admitted that she wants Theranos to end up in every single Walgreens in the United States Of America within the near future.

All of the risks and effort that Holmes has put in to Theranos is now paying off, too. The 30-year-old currently holds a 50 percent stake in the company, which is valued at $9 billion. This means that she was the youngest self-made woman on the Forbes 400 rich list. Abram Brown, the associate editor for the magazine, told Yahoo that this could just be the start of Holmes’ riches though. “She could totally overturn an entire industry if Theranos is as successful as it seems to be,” he explained. In conclusion, Mark Zuckerberg + Florence Nitghtingale = Elizabeth Holmes.

[Image via Gizmo Crazed]