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

Theo Baker graduates from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t: a book deal, a George Polk Award his research report as a student journalist and a front-row account of one of the world’s most romantic institutions.

His future How to Rule the World: A Study of Power at Stanford University was received Friday on 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 might come very close to answering, namely: Can such a book really change anything? Or does the limelight, as it always seems, send more students into the race?

A parallel that comes to mind is “The Social Network”. Aaron Sorkin has written a film that is in many ways an indictment of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. Apparently, it made the younger generation want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became the recruitment video. At least in the movie, the story of the man who made his best friend billions didn’t stop the ambition; charmed him even more.

Based on the excerpt, Baker’s portrait of Stanford is more refined. He talks to hundreds of people to thoroughly describe the “Stanford inside Stanford.” “It’s kind of either you join freshman year or you don’t,” one student tells Baker. It’s an inviting world where venture capitalists win and dine 18-year-olds, students are given hundreds of thousands of dollars in “pre-idea funding” before they have an original idea, and the line between mentorship and predation is almost impossible to draw. (The shame of pursuing teenage founders, if it ever existed, is gone; not pursuing them 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,” and that’s not meant as a compliment.

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

I’m thinking about a friend of mine—I’ll call him D—who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago and launched a startup halfway through his first two years. He was barely past his teenage years. The words “I’m thinking about taking a sabbatical” had just come out of his mouth before university, by his own account, giving him a cheerful blessing to go full-time with the startup. Stanford no longer struggles with that, if ever. Such departures are the expected result.

D is now in his mid-twenties. His company raised what in any normal context would register as a staggering amount of money. He knows almost more about cap charts, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a decade of a typical career. By any measure that Valley uses, it is a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), barely dates (no time), and a growing company doesn’t seem inclined to provide him with that kind of balance any time soon. He is already behind his own life in some ways.

This is the part Baker’s quote hints at without quite landing, perhaps because he’s still in it. The costs of this system are not simply distributed as fraud – although Baker is direct about it, describing it as widespread and largely ineffective. The costs are also more personal: unformed relationships, ordinary stages of early adulthood, were bought in exchange for a billion-dollar vision that, statistically speaking, is almost impossible to achieve. “100% of entrepreneurs think of themselves as visionaries,” Blank tells Baker. “The data says 99% don’t.”

What happens to the 99% at age 30? 40 years old? These are not the questions that Silicon Valley is designed to answer, and certainly not the ones that Stanford will begin to ask.

Baker also brings out something that Sam Altman put it 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 scheme has been an “anti-signal” for people who really know what talent looks like. Students pitching for rooms full of investors tend to be real builders. The real builders are probably somewhere else, building things. It’s getting harder and harder to separate the performance of ambition from the thing itself, and a system supposedly designed to find genius has gotten pretty good at finding people who can pretend to be geniuses.

How to rule the world sounds like just the right book for the moment. But there’s a certain irony in the fact that a critical book about Stanford’s relationship to power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people it criticizes and — if it’s good (it’s already been optioned for a movie) — used as further evidence that Stanford matters, not just founders and crooks. writers and journalistsalso.