Freshmen at Stanford University who want to rule the world. . . He will probably read this book and try harder

Theo Baker will graduate from Stanford University this spring with something most seniors don’t have: a book deal, the George Polk Award he won for his investigative reporting as a student journalist, and a front-row account of one of the world’s most romantic institutions.

expected of him How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University It 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 question that Becker himself might be very close to answering: Can a book like this actually change anything? Or does the spotlight, as it always seems to do, send more students racing to the spot?

The analogy that keeps coming to my mind is “social network.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was in many ways an indictment of the sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it seems to have done is make a generation of young people want to become Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of a man who — in the movie, at least — crushes his best friend on his way to billions doesn’t dampen ambition; It added to his charm.

Judging by this excerpt, the picture Becker paints of Stanford is much more detailed. He speaks with hundreds of people to comprehensively describe “Stanford within Stanford,” an invitation-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars in “pre-concept funding” are handed to students before they have a single original idea, and where the lines between mentorship and predation are nearly impossible to discern. (If such an idea ever existed, there is now no shame in pouncing on teenage founders.) “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup course, tells Becker, which is not meant as a compliment.

What is new is not that this pressure exists, but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10 or maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectations pressing down on them from the outside. Now, many of them arrive on campus already expecting, of course, to launch a startup, raise money, and become rich.

I’m thinking of a friend — I’ll call him D — who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago, during his first two years, to launch a startup. He was barely out of his teens. The phrase “I’m thinking about taking a sabbatical” had just come out of his mouth before the university, at his own expense, gave him its cheerful blessing to dive fully into the startup. Stanford isn’t fighting this anymore, if he ever did. The departure of someone like him is an expected outcome.

D is now in his mid-twenties. His company has raised what in any ordinary context would be recorded as an astonishing sum of money. He certainly knows more about cap schedules, project dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a decade of traditional careers. By any measure the valley uses it, it is a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), barely dates (no time), and the company, which continues to grow, doesn’t seem inclined to provide him with that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already, to some extent, behind in his own life.

This is the part that Baker’s excerpt alludes to without fully addressing, perhaps because he’s still inside it himself. The costs of this system are not just distributed in the form of fraud – although Becker is frank about this, describing it as widespread and largely consequence-free. The costs are also more personal: relationships are not formed, and the normal stages of early adulthood are replaced by a billion-dollar vision that will almost certainly never be achieved statistically. “100% of entrepreneurs think they are visionaries,” Blank tells Becker. “The data says 99% are not.”

What happens to the 99% at the age of thirty? At the age of forty? These are not questions that Silicon Valley is set up to answer, and they are certainly not questions that Stanford is set out to ask.

Baker also brings out something that Sam Altman expresses best. Altman — CEO of OpenAI, former head of Y Combinator, and precisely the kind of person these students aspire to become — told Becker that the VC dinner circuit has become a “hostile signal” to people who already know what talent looks like. The students who do the rounds, playing founder to rooms full of investors, tend not to be the real builders. Presumably the real builders are somewhere else, building things. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the performance of ambition and the thing itself, and a system that was ostensibly designed to find genius has become very good at finding people who are good at looking like geniuses.

How to rule the world It seems like just the right book for this moment in time. But there is a certain irony in the strong possibility that this critical book about Stanford’s relationship with power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people it criticizes, and — if it is a success (it has already been optioned for a movie) — used as further evidence that Stanford produces not only founders and hustlers but also important writers and journalists.