Stanford freshmen who want to rule the world. . . I think I’ll probably try harder after reading this book.

Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t: a book deal, the George Polk Award for investigative reporting as a student journalist, and a front-row account of one of the world’s most romanticized institutions.

his coming How to Rule the World: Teaching Power at Stanford University It was excerpted in The Atlantic on Friday, and that alone makes me can’t wait to see the rest. The only questions worth asking are the same ones that Baker himself may have been too close to answering. In other words, can a book like this really change anything? Or will the spotlight, as it always does, cause more students to race to the location?

The analogy that keeps coming to my mind is “social networks.” Aaron Sorkin has written a film that is in many ways an indictment of certain social ills that Silicon Valley tends to reward. On the surface, it seemed to have made the younger generation want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. At least in movies, the story of a man who cheated his best friend out of billions of dollars didn’t dampen his ambitions. It glorified it even more.

Judging by the excerpts, Baker’s portrait of Stanford is much more detailed. He speaks to hundreds of people and outlines “Stanford within Stanford.” “It doesn’t matter whether you participate or not your freshman year,” one student tells Baker. It’s an inviting world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of “pre-idea funding” is passed on to students before they even have an original idea, and where the line between mentoring and predation is barely discernible. (The shame of chasing teenage founders is gone. Not chasing them is no longer an option for most VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” ​​and that’s not meant to be a compliment.

What is new is not that these pressures exist, but that they are completely internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt that the expectations of Silicon Valley were pressing on them from the outside. Now, many of them are already arriving on campus expecting to start a startup, raise money, and strike it rich.

I think about a friend (I’ll call him D) who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago and started a startup midway through his first two years. He is barely out of his teens. The words that just came out of his mouth before entering college, “I’m thinking about taking a leave of absence,” gave him the pleasant blessing of being able to focus on his startup, thanks to his own explanation. Stanford isn’t fighting this anymore. Such a start is an expected result.

Mr. D is now in his mid-20s. His company has raised a huge amount of money under normal circumstances. He almost certainly knows more about cap tables, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn over a 10-year traditional career. By every metric Valley uses, he is a success story. But he also hasn’t been able to see his family (no time), he’s rarely dated (no time), and his ever-growing company doesn’t seem willing to offer him that balance anytime soon. He is already, in a sense, behind his life.

This is something Baker’s excerpt alludes to without fully understanding it, perhaps because he’s still in it. The costs of this system are not just distributed in the form of fraud. Baker explains this directly, explaining that the system is extensive and has few consequences. The costs are also more personal. Relationships were not formed, and the mundane milestones of early adulthood were exchanged for billion-dollar visions that, statistically, would almost certainly never come to fruition. “100% of entrepreneurs think they have a vision,” Blank tells Baker. “The data shows that 99% of the time, they don’t.”

What happens to the 99% when they turn 30? At 40? This is not a question that Silicon Valley is set to answer, nor is it one that Stanford is about to start asking.

Baker also brings up what Sam Altman said best: Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former head of Y Combinator, is exactly who these students want to be. He tells Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become an “anti-signal” for people who actually know what talent looks like. Students who raise rounds while playing the role of founder in a room full of investors tend not to be actual builders. The actual architect is probably building things somewhere else. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the accomplishment of ambition and the thing itself, and systems ostensibly designed to find geniuses have become very good at finding people who are good at looking like geniuses.

How to rule the world I think this book is perfect for this moment. But there is an irony in that this book, with its critical thinking about Stanford’s relationship with power and money, is very likely to be praised by the same class of people it criticizes. And if it works well (it’s already been optioned for film), it will serve as further evidence that Stanford produces important writers and journalists as well as founders and fraudsters.