GoKawiilTheo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t have: a book deal, a George Polk Award that he received for his investigative reporting as a student journalist, 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 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 one Baker himself might be too close to answer, which is: Can a book like this actually change anything? Or does the spotlight, as it always seems to, send more students racing to the place?
The parallel that keeps coming to my mind is “The Social Network.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was an indictment in many ways of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it seemingly did was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of the guy who — in the movie, at least — steamrolled his best friend on his way to billions didn’t discourage ambition; it further glamorized it.
Judging by the excerpt, Baker’s portrait of Stanford is far more granular. He talks with hundreds of people to roundly describe the “Stanford inside Stanford,” an invite-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where “pre-idea funding” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars gets handed to students before they’ve had a single original thought, and where the boundary between mentorship and predation is nearly impossible to discern. (The shame, if it ever existed, is gone; not chasing teenage founders is no longer an option for most VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” which is not meant as a compliment.
What’s new isn’t that this pressure exists but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectation pressing down on them 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.
I think about a friend — I’ll call him D — who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago, partway through his first two years, to launch a startup. He was barely past his teens. The words “I’m thinking of take a leave of absence” had just escaped his mouth before the university, by his own account, gave him its cheerful blessing to dive full bore into the startup. Stanford doesn’t fight this anymore, if it ever did. Departures like his are an expected outcome.
D is now in his mid-twenties. His company has raised what would register in any normal context as an astonishing amount of money. He almost certainly knows more about cap tables, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a decade of conventional careers. By every metric the Valley uses, he’s a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), has barely dated (no time), and the company, which keeps growing, doesn’t seem inclined to provide him with that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already, in some meaningful sense, behind on his own life.
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