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Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don\u2019t have: a book deal, a George Polk Award that he received for his investigative reporting<\/a> as a student journalist, and a front-row account of one of the most romanticized institutions in the world.<\/p>\n His forthcoming How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University<\/em> was excerpted<\/a> Friday in The Atlantic and based on that alone, I can\u2019t wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the same one Baker himself might be too close to answer, which is: Can a book like this actually change anything? Or does the spotlight, as it always seems to, send more students racing to the place?<\/p>\n The parallel that keeps coming to my mind is \u201cThe Social Network.\u201d Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was an indictment in many ways of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it seemingly did was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of the guy who \u2014 in the movie, at least \u2014 steamrolled his best friend on his way to billions didn\u2019t discourage ambition; it further glamorized it.<\/p>\n Judging by the excerpt, Baker\u2019s portrait of Stanford is far more granular. He talks with hundreds of people to roundly describe the \u201cStanford inside Stanford,\u201d an invite-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where \u201cpre-idea funding\u201d worth hundreds of thousands of dollars gets handed to students before they\u2019ve had a single original thought, and where the boundary between mentorship and predation is nearly impossible to discern. (The shame, if it ever existed, is gone; not chasing teenage founders is no longer an option for most VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school\u2019s legendary startup course, tells Baker that \u201cStanford is an incubator with dorms,\u201d which is not meant as a compliment.<\/p>\n What\u2019s new isn\u2019t that this pressure exists but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectation pressing down on them from outside. Now, many of them arrive on campus already expecting, as a matter of course, to launch a startup, to raise money, to become rich.<\/p>\n I think about a friend \u2014 I\u2019ll call him D \u2014 who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago, partway through his first two years, to launch a startup. He was barely past his teens. The words \u201cI\u2019m thinking of take a leave of absence\u201d had just escaped his mouth before the university, by his own account, gave him its cheerful blessing to dive full bore into the startup. Stanford doesn\u2019t fight this anymore, if it ever did. Departures like his are an expected outcome.<\/p>\n D is now in his mid-twenties. His company has raised what would register in any normal context as an astonishing amount of money. He almost certainly knows more about cap tables, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a decade of conventional careers. By every metric the Valley uses, he\u2019s a success story. But he also doesn\u2019t see his family (no time), has barely dated (no time), and the company, which keeps growing, doesn\u2019t seem inclined to provide him with that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already, in some meaningful sense, behind on his own life.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> This is the part that Baker\u2019s excerpt hints at without fully landing on, maybe because he\u2019s still inside it himself. The costs of this system aren\u2019t just distributed in the form of fraud \u2014 though Baker is direct about this, describing it as pervasive and largely consequence-free. The costs are also more personal: the relationships not formed, the ordinary milestones of early adulthood traded away in exchange for a billion-dollar vision that, statistically, almost certainly won\u2019t materialize. \u201c100% of entrepreneurs think they\u2019re visionaries,\u201d Blank tells Baker. \u201cThe data say 99% aren\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n What happens to the 99% at age 30? At age 40? These aren\u2019t questions Silicon Valley is set up to answer, and they\u2019re certainly not questions Stanford is about to start asking. <\/p>\n Baker also surfaces something that Sam Altman articulates best. Altman \u2014 OpenAI CEO, former Y Combinator head, precisely the kind of person these students aspire to become \u2014 tells Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become an \u201canti-signal\u201d to the people who actually know what talent looks like. The students doing the rounds, performing founder-ness for rooms full of investors, tend not to be the real builders. The real builders, presumably, are somewhere else, building things. The performance of ambition and the thing itself are increasingly hard to tell apart, and the system that was ostensibly designed to find genius has gotten very good at finding people who are good at seeming like geniuses.<\/p>\n How to Rule the World<\/em> sounds like exactly the right book for this moment in time. But there\u2019s a certain irony in the strong likelihood that this critically minded book about Stanford\u2019s relationship to power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people it critiques, and \u2014 if it does well (it has already been optioned for a movie) \u2014 used as further evidence that Stanford produces not just founders and fraudsters but important writers<\/a> and journalists<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n