Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with a book deal, a George Polk Award for investigative reporting, and a front-row account of one of the most romanticized institutions in the world. His forthcoming “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University” was excerpted in The Atlantic, and it reads like exactly the kind of critical examination Silicon Valley deserves but probably won’t listen to.
The book paints a portrait of Stanford’s “Stanford inside Stanford” - an invite-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where pre-idea funding worth hundreds of thousands gets handed to students before they’ve had an original thought, and where the line between mentorship and predation has become nearly impossible to see. Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” and he doesn’t mean it kindly.
But here’s what’s gnawing at me about this entire situation: Will this book actually change anything?
The Cautionary Tale That Becomes a Recruitment Video
The parallel that won’t leave my mind is “The Social Network.” Aaron Sorkin made a film that functioned as an indictment of the particular sociopathy that the technology industry tends to reward. What it seemingly did was make an entire generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of the guy who steamrolled his best friend on his way to billions didn’t discourage ambition; it glamorized it further.
The same thing could easily happen here. Baker’s portrait is granular and deeply reported, based on conversations with hundreds of people. He describes pressure that has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectation pressing down from outside. Now many of them arrive on campus already expecting, as a matter of course, to launch a startup, to raise money, to become rich.
The Invisible Cost Nobody Talks About
What makes Baker’s excerpt compelling is that he hints at something Silicon Valley isn’t equipped to discuss: the personal costs of this system aren’t just distributed through fraud, though he’s direct about that too. The costs are more intimate. They’re the relationships not formed, the ordinary milestones of early adulthood traded away in exchange for a billion-dollar vision that, statistically, almost certainly won’t materialize.
“100% of entrepreneurs think they’re visionaries,” Blank tells Baker. “The data say 99% aren’t.”
I think about someone I know who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago to launch a startup. He was barely past his teens. The university, by his own account, gave him its cheerful blessing to dive full bore into the venture. He’s now in his mid-twenties, his company has raised an astonishing amount of money, and by every metric the Valley uses, he’s a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family, has barely dated, and the company doesn’t seem inclined to change that anytime soon.
He’s already behind on his own life. At 30, at 40, what happens to the 99%? These aren’t questions Silicon Valley is set up to answer, and they’re certainly not questions Stanford is about to start asking.
The Anti-Signal Problem
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO and former Y Combinator head, articulates something Baker surfaces in the book: the VC dinner circuit has become an “anti-signal” to people who actually know what talent looks like. The students doing the rounds, performing founder-ness for rooms full of investors, tend not to be the real builders. The real builders are somewhere else, building things.
The performance of ambition and the thing itself are increasingly hard to tell apart. The system ostensibly designed to find genius has gotten very good at finding people who are good at seeming like geniuses.
The Irony of Critical Success
Here’s where it gets genuinely uncomfortable. “How to Rule the World” sounds like exactly the right book for this moment. But there’s a particular irony in the strong likelihood that this critically minded examination of Stanford’s relationship to power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people it critiques. If it does well (it’s already been optioned for a movie), it’ll probably be used as further evidence that Stanford produces not just founders and fraudsters but important writers and journalists too.
The book becomes part of the machine it’s trying to critique. Another feather in Stanford’s cap. Another reason for ambitious teenagers to apply.
Which raises the real question: Is any book about Stanford’s seductive power strong enough to actually keep people away, or does the attention itself just make the place more appealing?
