Is The Drop Out Edmond Ku Based On A Real Person?
The American drama series “The DropOut”, created by Elizabeth Meriwether, is based on a podcast hosted by Rebecca Jarvis and produced by ABC News. This series follows the story of young woman Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), a Stanford dropout who has developed her own company, Theranos, to make blood testing procedures less complex and less expensive.
Who is Edmond Ku?
Edmond Ku is one of the most important employees in the Theranos company; after Elizabeth creates her own company, she teams up with engineers named Rakesh Madhava and Edmond Ku to develop a special device to simplify blood testing procedures, a device that can test blood with only one drop of blood.
She hired Edmond and Madhava; both of them are engineers and work on device development.
The role of Edmond Ku is portrayed by actor James Hiroyuki Liao, who is famous for his roles in Cowboy Bebop and Manifest. In contrast, the role of Madhava is played by Utkarsh Ambudkar.
In The Dropout series, Edmond Ku is based on real Ku; Edmond is an engineer in silicon valley and renowned for his problem-solving skills. He was born in Hong Kong and later on moved to the USA. Holmes hired Ku in 2006 as the head of the Engineering Division; he worked at Theranos until 2008; he was given the task at Theranos to come up with the first Theranos Prototype, known as Theranos 1.0.
Why Did Edmond Ku Quiet?
In the third episode of “The DropOut,” Elizabeth Holmes comes under pressure to prove that she can handle the responsibility of being a CEO. And to prove this, she wants to speed up the development of the prototype, but the technology required to make it work flawlessly is still years away. As a result, Elizabeth hires Brendan Morris, a different engineer, to lead his own competing engineering team. Further, Elizabeth pits the two teams against each other in order to accelerate development.
Elizabeth monitors the KU team all the time but soon after, she fires KU because she isn’t satisfied with the team’s progress.
Soon after KU was fired, Madhava also quit the company because he wasn’t satisfied with Elizabeth’s methods.
The device created by the Morris team is named “The Edison” , but it was incapable of producing accurate results.
Elizabeth’s lack of understanding and knowledge of the more refined elements of her company’s engineering and technology aspects ultimately led to Theranos losing employees like Ku and Madhava.
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