As Holmes' business began to grow, she recruited more and more accomplished professionals to join her team. According to ABC News' "20/20," she even managed to get some big names from Apple, including Avie Tevanian, one of Steve Jobs' closest colleagues, and Ana Arriola, one of the designers behind the iPhone. Initially, the two former Apple employees were intrigued and swayed by Holmes' vision and charisma, just like the many other Theranos employees and investors.
But despite how appealing Holmes' ideas might have sounded, it wasn't long before employees began to question what was actually being done by the company. Tevanian stood out as one of the first people to ask a lot of questions that Holmes tried to avoid addressing, which later resulted in him being fired. In the series, he met privately with Arriola to inform her that the company had been performing trials on terminally ill cancer patients despite the fact that their tech wasn't working properly. Arriola confronted Holmes about that and quit on the spot along with her whole team.
The real Ana Arriola resigned in a slightly different way. Rather than quitting on the spot, she simply "slid her resignation letter underneath the office door of the head of human resources and left," according to ABC News. Holmes then tried to contact Arriola via phone call, presumably to see if she could get her chief design architect to change her mind and stay at the company. Arriola refused to respond, permanently cutting ties with Theranos and its CEO.
