Armed with lessons from Theranos fraud, whistleblower Erika Cheung takes aim at Hong Kong’s start-up scene

Five years ago and fresh out of college, she was an engineer at a multibillion-dollar tech start-up in Silicon Valley that turned out to be a massive fraud

Now, the medical researcher-turned-technology and innovation ecosystem builder is in Hong Kong – and she’s looking to ensure entrepreneurs keep a strong sense of ethics

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Erika Cheung, programme director at Betatron. Photo: SCMP/Xiaomei Chen

Published: 7:37pm, 26 Mar 2019Updated: 8:14am, 27 Mar 2019

Erika Cheung’s career in Silicon Valley faced what she calls an “inflection point” soon after it began, when in 2014 – as a young engineer fresh out of university – she discovered that the tests she was running for health technology start-up Theranos were defective.

The company, valued at US$10 billion at the time, had told investors its machines could run a series of blood tests for a fraction of the cost of standard tests, using just one drop of blood.

The machines were already in use across the United States when Cheung discovered the problem, running the risk that thousands of patients could make decisions based on faulty information.

After repeatedly raising her concerns to Theranos’ founder Elizabeth Holmes, Cheung reported the company’s defective tests to health regulators and quit. She was 23 years old.

Erika Cheung at Causeway Bay on March 19. Photo: SCMP/Xiaomei Chen

Today, Cheung is part of the founding team of Hong Kong start-up accelerator Betatron and founder of non-profit venture Ethics in Entrepreneurship, which has outposts in Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and southern China.