Stanford freshmen who want to rule the world. . . he will probably read this book and try even harder

Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t: a book deal, a George Polk Award he received for his investigative reporting as a student journalist, and a first-hand account of one of the world’s most romantic institutions.

His next How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University it was excerpt Friday in The Atlantic and based on that alone, I can’t wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the same question Baker himself could answer, which is: Can a book like this really change anything? Or is the spotlight, as it always seems, sending more students into the fray?

The parallel that keeps coming to mind is “The Social Network”. Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was in many ways an indictment of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What he seemingly did was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruiting video. The story of the man who—at least in the movie—led his best friend on the road to billions didn’t discourage ambition. charmed it further.

Judging from the quote, Baker’s portrait of Stanford is much more detailed. He talks to hundreds of people to summarize the “Stanford within Stanford.” “You can get in first year or you can’t,” one student tells Baker. It’s an invite-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars in “pre-idea funding” are handed out to students before they have an original idea, and where the lines between mentoring and predatory are almost impossible to distinguish. (The shame of chasing teenage founders, if there ever was one, is gone. Not chasing them is no longer an option for most VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup class, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator of dormitories,” which is no compliment.

What is new is not that this pressure exists but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe even 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectation pressing in on them from the outside. Now, many of them arrive on campus already expecting, of course, to start a startup, raise money, get rich.

I’m thinking of a friend—I’ll call him D—who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago, part way through his first two years, to start a startup. He had just passed his teenage years. The words “I’m thinking of taking a leave of absence” had barely left his mouth before the university, by his own account, gave him his happy blessing to dive headlong into the startup. Stanford isn’t fighting it anymore, if it ever did. Departures like his are an expected result.

D is now in his twenties. His company amassed what would in any normal context be listed as a staggering amount of money. He almost certainly knows more about capital tables, business dynamics, and product-to-market fit than most people learn in a decade of conventional careers. By any measure Valley uses, it’s a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), he’s just dated (no time), and the company, which continues to grow, doesn’t seem willing to offer him that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already, in some essential sense, behind his life.

This is the part that Baker’s quote hints at without fully landing, perhaps because he’s still in it. The costs of this system aren’t simply distributed in the form of fraud — although Baker is direct about it, describing it as pervasive and largely without consequence. The cost is also more personal: the relationships not formed, the usual milestones of early adulthood traded for a billion-dollar vision that, statistically, almost certainly will not come to fruition. “100% of entrepreneurs think they are visionaries,” Blank tells Baker. “Evidence says 99% are not.”

What happens to the 99% at 30? At 40? These are not questions that Silicon Valley is set up to answer, and they are certainly not questions that Stanford is about to start asking.

Baker also displays something that Sam Altman articulates best. Altman — CEO of OpenAI, former head of Y Combinator, exactly the kind of person these students aspire to be — tells Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become an “anti-brand” for people who really know what talent looks like. The students who make the rounds, running founder rooms full of investors, tend not to be the actual builders. The real builders are probably somewhere else, building things. The performance of ambition and the thing itself is increasingly difficult to distinguish, and the system ostensibly designed to find genius has become very good at finding people who are good at looking like geniuses.

How to Rule the World sounds like just the right book for the moment. But there is a certain irony in the strong possibility that this critical book about Stanford’s relationship with power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people it criticizes, and—if it does well (it’s already been optioned for a movie)—used as further proof that Stanford produces not just founders and crooks, but important ones. authors and journalists too.