Stanford freshmen who want to rule the world. . . maybe he will read this book and try harder

Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford at the end of this year with what most seniors don’t have: a book, the George Polk Award he received. his research report as a trained journalist, and the front page of one of the world’s most romantic organizations.

His coming How to Rule the World: Power Studies at Stanford University he was taken Friday at The Atlantic and based on that alone, I can’t wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the one Baker himself might be closest to answering, which is: Can a book like this really change anything? Or does focus, as it always seems, send more students to the area?

An analogy that comes to mind is “The Social Network.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was in many ways a critique of the society that Silicon Valley likes to reward. Which seems to have made a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of a man who – in the movie, at least – steamrolled his best friend on his way to billions did not give up desire; it made it even sweeter.

Based on this passage, Baker’s picture of Stanford is very positive. He speaks to hundreds of people to explain clearly about “Stanford within Stanford”, the only invited world where capitalists feed and eat 18-year-olds, where “idea money” of thousands of dollars is given to students before they have a single original idea, and where the line between advice and innovation is impossible. (The shame, if it ever existed, is gone; not chasing young startups is no longer an option for many VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s undergraduate courses, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” ​​which is no compliment.

What is new is not that this compulsion exists but that it has been fully implemented. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley’s hopes pressing in on them from the outside. Now, most of them come to school expecting, of course, to start a startup, to earn money, to become rich.

I’m thinking of a friend of mine – I’ll call him D – who left Stanford a few years ago, after two years, to start a startup. He had just passed by. The words “I’m thinking of retiring” had just come out of his mouth before he started university, and with his story, he gave him his happy blessing to be recognized at the beginning. Stanford is no longer struggling with this, if ever. A departure like his is an expected result.

D is now in his mid-twenties. His company has raised what would in any way register as a staggering amount of money. He knows more about cap tables, business dynamics, and market fit than most people learn in ten years of ordinary work. By any metric Valley uses, it’s a success story. But he doesn’t see his family anymore (no time), he doesn’t have a boyfriend (no time), and the company, which is growing, doesn’t seem to want to give him that kind of thing any time soon. He is already, in a good sense, on his life.

This is the part that Baker’s words are pointing to without fully reaching, perhaps because he is still in the middle of it. The cost of this system is not only classified as a fraud – although Baker mentions it, he describes it as widespread and ineffective. The money is also personal: the relationships that are not made, the great experiences of adulthood that are traded in exchange for multi-billion dollar visions that, statistically speaking, are almost impossible to achieve. “100% of entrepreneurs think they are visionaries,” Blank tells Baker. “Statistics say 99% are not.”

What happens to the 99% when they turn 30? At 40 years old? These are not the questions that Silicon Valley was founded to answer, and they are not the questions that Stanford has begun to ask.

Baker also demonstrates what Sam Altman says so well. Altman — CEO of OpenAI, former head of Y Combinator, exactly the kind of person these students want to be — tells Baker that the VC dinner scene has become an “anti-signal” for people who know exactly what talent looks like. Students walking around, pitching startups to rooms full of investors, don’t tend to be real developers. Real builders, maybe, are somewhere, building things. The action of desire and object is becoming difficult to distinguish, and a system ostensibly designed to find experts has found great success in finding people who appear to be geniuses.

How to Rule the World sounds like the right book for the moment. But there is another strong surprise that a book that thinks seriously about Stanford’s relationship with power and money will be celebrated by the same group of people who oppose it, and – if it does well (it has already been chosen for a film) – it is used as another proof that Stanford produces not founders and frauds but what is important. writers and journaliststoo.