Most members of the Stanford Class of 2026 are smart, ambitious, and poised for remarkable careers. Theo Baker already has one. In her first semester of college, Baker broke the story that forced Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavin to resign — work that won her the George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors. Warner Brothers and producer Amy Pascal have optioned the rights to this story. And on Tuesday, less than a month before graduation, Baker published How to rule the worldAn extensive account of his time at Stanford and the school’s often insidious ties to the venture capital industry. Due to early interest, it has a chance to become a bestseller.
We were waiting for it (we shared some related thoughts about it just a few weeks ago). We spoke with Baker last Friday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You appeared as a coder at Stanford. How did you break one of the biggest stories in college history before your freshman year was over?
I came in thinking that technology and entrepreneurship was the path for me. I joined a student hackathon, Tree Hacks, helped run it, took a CS weeder class. But my grandfather, who I was very close to, had passed away a few weeks before I arrived, and he talked about working on the student paper more than anyone I knew. So I joined the student paper to feel connected to it—it was supposed to be a hobby, a way to meet people and explore campus.
Things went very quickly from there. My first few stories got more acceptance than we imagined, tips started flooding in, and one led me to a pseudonymous website called PubPeer, where scientists peer-review published research. The documents, co-authored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, contained comments that suspected duplicate, spliced or otherwise irregular images. I had been at Stanford for a month when this investigation began, and when I returned for my sophomore year, the president had resigned.
Did you catch the story?
Many times before I published my first article. People have warned me that Tessier-Lavigne is a person of very high integrity and has a very high reputation – I don’t want to do that and it would make me very uncomfortable within the establishment. It certainly wasn’t a mistake. Over the next 10 months, as the story unfolded, the backlash grew. Within 24 hours of my first story, the board of trustees announced its investigation. I quickly learned that one of the board members who oversees it has invested $18 million in Denali Therapeutics, a biotech company that Tessier-Lavigne co-founded. A statement announcing the inquiry praised his “integrity and honor” in the inquiry, which theoretically examines his scientific integrity. Thus, the investigation itself became the object of the report. Tessier-Lavigne never directly responded to a request for comment during my freshman year. Eventually, he began sending news stories to all the faculty, including all my professors, describing my reporting as “breathtakingly outrageous and full of lies.” And then I started hearing more from his lawyers.
The book is really about something broader—what you might call Stanford within Stanford. What does this mean?
Very soon after I arrived, I realized that there was this parallel reality—the inner world—where the guys identified early on as the next trillion-dollar startup founders were 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 became known as the home of big startups, it became increasingly difficult to spot real talent, according to some people at the university. So many people will come in thinking they can be left out of the next billion dollar education that there is an entire system whose job it is to separate what they call “builders” – people who do it because it looks good – from the so-called builders who actually have potential. This is a system designed to sniff out teenagers, where you can make money as quickly as possible.
It turns out that the title of the book is not just a metaphor.
No. It’s literally the name of a secret class taught by a Silicon Valley CEO at Stanford. It’s not really a class. It’s more like Skull and Bones for the ambitious tech elite. People don’t get course credit, but there are weekly lectures, discussions, and guest speakers on campus during the winter quarter. When I was coming up, it was a status symbol to even know it existed—it made you “adjacent to the rule,” as one person told me. What this guy Justin was trying to do — as the students in the class told me — was what everyone else was trying to do: go in and interact with teenagers who might be useful to you, young people. Only he understood how to cloak himself in this mystique and how to bring these talented, promising children to him, because he promised them how to rule the world. He promised that the brightest students at Stanford would come together for this 12-person seminar, and that the only way to learn these secrets was to go through it. This is a very sad example of how the system of extracting talents shows itself in a strange way.
What does this talent scouting system actually look like on the ground?
There are VCs who hire older Stanford upperclassmen to identify freshmen as soon as they arrive on campus. It is purposefully kept dark. People have told me that it seems like an anti-signal to join one of the big entrepreneurship clubs because it seems like you’re doing it for the title as opposed to being in one of those secret feeding groups where real builders gather. But as much as there is real talent among kids in this world, it’s what you recognize as the main quality – whether you get tapped on the shoulder or not. I had a CEO cold email me my freshman year, wanting to get to know me. The first time we went to dinner, we went to the Rosewood Hotel, and he’s sitting there spoon-feeding his eight-month-old calf and casually mentions that his first contract was for Muammar Gaddafi. This randomness is something that fascinates me. And this whole system goes a long way to explaining how great frauds develop. It starts by putting huge amounts of authority, money and power in the hands of teenagers without adequate safeguards for when things go wrong.
You arrived just as the FTX collapse happened and ChatGPT was launched. What was it like to observe up close?
The timing was almost absurd. We’ve come to the end of cryptocurrency – when it first came out, there was an assumption that cryptocurrency was how you would make your fortune. SBF begins its descent on November 2. ChatGPT comes out on November 30th. And immediately everything revolves. I remember being at a dinner shortly after the launch of ChatGPT, sitting with one of the biggest crypto boosters on campus, and he told me that SBF was “directionally correct” – that was the phrase – but everyone was trying to figure out how to get the legitimacy. Many of those people soon realized that AI was the new fad they could jump on. They told me they could reach the same heights as SBF, using the latest new thing, preferably without falling. Silicon Valley operates in cycles, but this one has been particularly fascinating to observe up close because the scale is simply unimaginable.
Do you think your peers are turning to entrepreneurship partly out of concern about the job market?
Absolutely. The rush to AI has turned talent into a resource to be tapped in a modern gold rush – the most valuable researchers and founders are more valuable than ever, but entry-level positions are starting to disappear. There is a common hesitation among people in this world that right now it is easier to raise money for a startup than to get an internship. Which is remarkable, right? Entrepreneurship has become an expected path rather than the non-conformist fringe it once might have been associated with. This completely changes its nature.
What advice would you give to a 17-year-old going to Stanford or any elite university today?
You have to be really conscious of whether you’re doing what you’re doing because you believe in it and it’s the right thing to do, or if it’s something that’s easy. It’s all too easy to get caught up in trends and technological maelstrom, and find yourself wasting away in a job you don’t really want because you’re following the expected path. Following the expected path is less interesting than going out and doing something for yourself. I admire the best founders that come out of this place because they empower themselves to truly make a difference. You just have to be careful that you’re doing it for the right reasons – and not just because you want to get rich.
You came here thinking you were going to be a founder. Still want to start something?
To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it that much – it was so hard to finish the book and make it to graduation, amazingly only a month. But I think the book shows that I really fell in love with journalism. It’s more of a trait than a career, almost an affliction. Whatever I do will intersect with it.
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