Theo Baker will graduate from Stanford University this spring with something that most seniors don't have. A book deal, a George Polk Award for investigative reporting as a student journalist, and a front-row seat to explain one of the world's most romantic educational institutions.
His recent book How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was excerpted from Friday's The Atlantic, and based on that alone, I can't wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the same one that Baker himself may be too close to answering. The question is, “Can a book like this actually change anything?” Or will more students rush to the spot when the spotlight shines on them, as they always do?
The analogy that always comes to my mind is “social networks”. Aaron Sorkin has written a film that is, in many ways, an indictment of a certain sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. Apparently it made the younger generation want to be Mark Zuckerberg. That lesson became a recruiting video. At least in the movie, the story of a man who crushes his best friend on his way to billions doesn't discourage ambition. It glorified it even more.
Judging by the excerpt, Baker's image of Stanford is much more detailed. He speaks to hundreds of people and details “Stanford's Stanford.” “It’s like you’re either in it or out of it as a freshman,” one student told Baker. It's an invitation-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where students are handed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of “idea money” before an original idea is born, and where it's nearly impossible to tell the line between mentoring and plundering. (The shame of chasing teenage founders, if it ever existed, is gone; not chasing them is no longer an option for most venture capitalists.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school's legendary startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” and that's not a compliment.
What is new is not that this pressure exists, but that it has been completely internalized. There was a time, perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, when students at Stanford University felt the weight of Silicon Valley's expectations being thrust upon them from outside. Now, many of them, understandably, arrive on campus already expecting to launch a startup, raise money, and get rich.
I think of a friend of mine — I'll call him D — who dropped out of Stanford University in the middle of his first two years a few years ago to launch a startup. He was still in his teens. The words “I'm thinking of taking a leave of absence” had just escaped his lips, but by his own account, the university was happy to give him the blessing to make a full-fledged move into a startup. Stanford University won't fight anymore, if it ever fights. A departure like his was an expected outcome.
Mr. D is currently in his mid-20s. His company raised an amount that would be recorded as an astonishing amount under normal circumstances. He almost certainly knows more about cap tables, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a traditional 10-year career. By every metric the Valley uses, he is a success story. But he hasn't even met his family (don't have time), hasn't gone on much of a date (don't have time), and it doesn't seem like his ever-growing company is going to offer him that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already behind in his own life in some ways.
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This is the part Baker's excerpt hints at without quite landing, perhaps because he's still in it himself. The costs of this system are not only distributed in the form of fraud. However, Baker is upfront about this, saying it is widespread and has few consequences. The costs are also more personal. Relationships are not formed, and mundane milestones of early adulthood are sacrificed in exchange for billion-dollar visions that are statistically almost certain to never come true. “100% of entrepreneurs think they are visionaries,” Blank tells Baker. “According to the data, 99% of the time they don't.”
What happens to 99% of people when they turn 30? Around 40 years old? These are not the questions Silicon Valley is trying to answer, and these are not the questions Stanford University is about to start asking.
Baker also reveals what Sam Altman best describes. Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former head of Y Combinator, exactly the kind of person students want to be, told Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become a “counter-signal” to people who actually know what talent looks like. Students who do rounds and play founder-ness to a room full of investors tend not to be true builders. The real builder is probably building something else somewhere else. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish performance of ambition from itself, and systems ostensibly designed to find geniuses are very good at finding people who are good at looking like geniuses.
How to Rule the World seems like the perfect book for these times. But there's a certain irony in the fact that this critical book about Stanford University and its relationship to power and money is likely to be praised by the same class of people it criticizes, and, if it's successful (already set to be made into a movie), to be used as further evidence that Stanford has produced important writers and journalists as well as founders and fraudsters.
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