GoKawiilMost members of Stanford’s class of 2026 are smart, ambitious, and poised for remarkable careers. Theo Baker already has one. In his first semester of college, Baker broke the story that forced Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign — work that earned him a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors. Warner Brothers and producer Amy Pascal have optioned the rights to that story. And Tuesday, with graduation less than a month away, Baker publishes How to Rule the World, a sweeping account of his time at Stanford and the school’s often insidious relationship with the venture capital industry. Judging by early interest, it has every chance of becoming a bestseller.
We’ve been anticipating this one (we shared some related thoughts about it just a few weeks ago). We talked with Baker last Friday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You showed up at Stanford as a coder. How did you end up breaking one of the biggest stories in the university’s history before your freshman year was even over?
I arrived thinking tech and entrepreneurship was the path for me. I joined the student hackathon, Tree Hacks, helped run it, skipped ahead to the CS weeder class. But my grandfather, with whom I was very close, had passed away a few weeks before I arrived, and he talked about working on the student paper more than anyone I’d ever known. So I joined the student paper to feel connected to him — it was supposed to be a hobby, a way to meet people and explore campus.
Very quickly things spiraled from there. My first few stories got more reception than we’d imagined, tips started flooding in, and one led me to a pseudonymous website called PubPeer, where scientists dissect published research. There were comments, seven years old at the time, suspecting that papers co-authored by Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had images that were duplicated, spliced, or otherwise irregular. I was a month into my time at Stanford when that investigation began, and by the time I was back for sophomore year, the president had resigned.
Were you warned off the story?
Multiple times, before I’d even published my first article. People warned me that Tessier-Lavigne was a person of very high integrity with a sterling reputation — that I didn’t want to do this, that it was going to place me in a very uncomfortable position within the institution. Which, of course, was not wrong. Over the course of the next 10 months, as the story widened, the pushback grew steeper. Within 24 hours of my first story, the board of trustees announced their own investigation. I quickly learned that one of the board members overseeing it had an $18 million investment in Denali Therapeutics, the biotech company Tessier-Lavigne co-founded. And the statement announcing the investigation praised his “integrity and honor”— in an investigation that was theoretically looking into his scientific integrity. So the investigation itself became an object of reporting. Tessier-Lavigne never once directly responded to a request for comment during my freshman year. Eventually he began sending missives to all of the faculty — which included all of my professors — describing my reporting as “breathtakingly outrageous and replete with falsehoods.” And then I began hearing more from his lawyers.
The book is really about something broader, though — what you call the Stanford inside Stanford. What does that mean?
Very soon after I arrived, I realized there was this parallel reality — an inside world — where the kids identified early as the next trillion-dollar startup founders are plucked from the crowd and placed into a world of access and resources. Yacht parties, slush funds, everyone texting the same billionaires for advice on weekends. As Stanford has become more famous as the home of great startups, it has become, according to some people at the university, increasingly difficult to spot actual talent. So many people arrive thinking they can be the next billion-dollar dropout that there’s an entire system of hangers-on whose job is to separate what they call the “wantrepreneurs” — people doing it because it looks good — from the so-called builders who actually have potential. It’s a system designed to sniff out the teenagers you can make a buck off of as early as possible.
The title of the book, it turns out, isn’t just a metaphor.
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