Theranos Founder & CEO Elizabeth Holmes in Conversation with KQED's Michael Krasny

Elizabeth Holmes believed from an early age that starting her own company would afford her the greatest opportunity to make change in the world. She left Stanford's School of Engineering in 2003, at the age of 19, to found Theranos – a new paradigm of diagnosis designed to detect the onset of disease in time to do something about it, without having to wait for the emergence of physical symptoms. It’s now worth more than $9 billion, with just under 700 employees, and is headquartered in Palo Alto. In addition to being its founder & CEO, she is a named inventor on 98 U.S. and 205 foreign patent applications, of which 19 in the U.S. and 75 abroad have been issued.

Holmes believes that access to real-time, affordable diagnostic information is a basic human right. Theranos is thus on a mission to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere in the world at the time it matters, enabling early detection and intervention of disease. She has led the creation of a laboratory infrastructure that requires just a few drops of blood to perform up to 70 tests on a single sample. By optimizing the chemistries used and leveraging software, Theranos’ labs can perform these tests faster, cheaper and with much less discomfort, to fundamentally redefine the paradigm of clinical diagnosis.

We’re very pleased to welcome KQED’s Michael Krasny back to our stage to moderate an in-depth conversation with a woman who wants nothing less than to revolutionize the health care system using technology, creativity and innovation.