What It Was Like on the Elizabeth Holmes Jury for 18 Weeks

Away from the media frenzy, jurors dealt with the trial’s disruption to their lives and had little idea of the case’s implications.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — If you wondered what it was like to serve as a juror in Silicon Valley’s trial of the decade, Susanna Stefanek can tell you.

For 18 weeks, Ms. Stefanek juggled her family, her work as an editorial manager at Apple and her duty as one of 12 jurors in the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the failed blood testing start-up Theranos. Ms. Holmes, whose case was viewed as a referendum on Silicon Valley’s start-up excesses, was found guilty last week of four of 11 counts of fraud for lying to investors about Theranos’s technology.

Her case was closely scrutinized because Ms. Holmes was the rare entrepreneur to be indicted, igniting a media frenzy and a zillion hot takes about what her conviction meant — or did not mean — for the tech industry. But for the eight men and four women on the jury, such issues were far from their minds, said Ms. Stefanek and another juror in the case, who declined to be named.