A gripping excerpt hints at a campus where prestige fuels pre idea funding and ambition eclipses ordinary life, prompting uncomfortable questions about who truly benefits.
Theo Baker is finishing his studies at Stanford this spring with a bag of achievements that graduates typically don't accumulate: a contract to publish a book, the George Polk Award for investigative journalism earned during his student activity, and a direct view of one of the most romanticized institutions in the world.
His forthcoming book How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was published in excerpt in The Atlantic on Friday, and from this fragment alone I can't wait for the rest. The only question that Baker himself likely sees far off sounds like this: can such a book really change anything? Will the spotlight, as it seems, push more students toward this place?
A parallel that keeps surfacing in my mind is The Social Network. Aaron Sorkin created a film that, in many ways, served as an indictment of the sociopathy that Silicon Valley often rewards. The cautionary story turned into a montage of scenes. The story of the guy who – at least in the film – pushed his best friend on the path to billions did not diminish his ambitions; on the contrary, it presented them even more glamorously.
From the excerpt, the portrait of Stanford sounds more grounded. He talks to hundreds of people to describe in detail “Stanford inside Stanford†– a world where invitations are by invitation, where venture capitalists “snatch up†18-year-olds, where “pre-idea funding†worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is provided to students before they birth even a single original idea, and where the boundary between mentorship and predatory behavior is barely distinguishable. Steve Blank, who teaches the school's legendary startup course, tells Baker that
“Stanford is an incubator with dormitories.â€
– Steve Blank
.
The Cost of Ambition and the System's Internal Consequences
The novelty isn't that the pressure exists, but that it's fully internalized. There used to be a belief that external pressure from Silicon Valley pushed students and narrowed their horizons. Now many arrive on campus already expecting to launch a startup, raise money, and become as wealthy as the real norm.
I recall a friend – let's call him D – who a few years ago left Stanford in the middle of his first two years to launch a startup. He was almost a teenager. The phrase “I think I'll take a leave of absence†barely left his lips before the university, in his words, gave him a wholehearted blessing to dive into the startup completely. Stanford no longer fights this, if it ever did. A departure like his is the expected outcome.
Now in his twenties. The company has raised money that would be astonishing outside the ordinary context. He almost certainly knows more about cap tables, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people over an entire decade of traditional careers. By all accounts, the Valley counts him as a success story. Yet at the same time he has no time for family, virtually no time for a personal life, and the company keeps growing and shows no signs of leaning toward balance. He is, in a sense, already behind his own life.
The third part of Baker's excerpt points to this, but perhaps does not fully reveal it – perhaps because the author himself remains inside this environment. The costs of this system are not only in the form of fraud – Baker speaks of it directly, describing it as all-encompassing and largely without consequences. The costs are more personal: unformed relationships, ordinary markers of adulthood missed in pursuit of a billion-dollar dream that, statistically, almost never comes to pass. “All entrepreneurs think they are visionaries,†Blank says. “According to data, 99% of them are not.â€
“All entrepreneurs think they are visionaries.†According to data, 99% of them are not.
– Steve Blank
What will happen to the 99% in their thirties? In their forties? These are not questions Silicon Valley is ready to answer, and certainly not questions Stanford should be asking right now.
Baker also highlights what Sam Altman most clearly articulates. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the former head of Y Combinator, indeed the person these students look up to. He tells Baker that dinners with venture investors have become an “anti-signal†for people who truly know what talent looks like. Real developers are probably elsewhere – those who actually build things. The pull of ambition and the thing itself are increasingly hard to distinguish, and a system that supposedly was meant to identify geniuses has become very adept at spotting people who look like geniuses.
How to Rule the World sounds like exactly the book for this moment. Yet there is irony: this critically minded book about Stanford's relationship to power and money will likely be celebrated by the same crowd of people it criticizes, and – if it succeeds (it has already been optioned for a film) – will become additional evidence that Stanford produces not only founders and fraudsters, but also important writers and journalists.
In short, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University offers a piercing look at Stanford's environment and its pressure on young people, raising questions about balancing ambition with life outside the academy. It is an important contribution to understanding how modern startup culture shapes our notions of success and values.
Ultimately, the book raises not only questions about the self-organization of the university environment but also the role of journalism and prose in rethinking these processes. It may prompt readers to reconsider their own priorities and views on what it really means to “rule the world†in an era of high technology and rapid finance.
With respect for the real lives of students and their balance between ambition and personal time, Baker's work offers a pointed look at what contemporary academic-professional anxiety looks like in America's most prestigious academic environment.
Ultimately, the book leaves a simple conclusion: ambition does not automatically mean success, and Stanford's story and its culture ask whether it is worth paying for the dream in full – with personal life, friendships, and other values at stake.
