Bonfire of the VCs: Theo Baker's "How to Rule the World" goes inside secret Stanford
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Theo Baker, a Stanford history major who'll graduate 26 days from now, is out today with a vivid, dishy exposé of the sometimes comical, at times seemingly corrupt, efforts by tech funders to seduce undergraduates who smell like future moguls and geniuses, and vice versa.
- "I've had more one-on-ones with billionaires than I've been on formal dates," Baker writes in "How to Rule the World," which takes its title from an unofficial, exclusive seminar at Stanford run by a Silicon Valley CEO. "I've encountered genius and misdeed at every stage, from wide-eyed freshman wannabes to accomplished masters of the universe."
Baker's signature revelation about the "Stanford inside Stanford": Bay Area venture capitalists and tech giants try to sniff out unicorn talent among the freshmen, then get them to drop out or take money, betting on future genius. Upperclassmen aren't as hotly pursued: If you're good, the thinking goes, you'd already have been discovered.
- "Stanford is an incubator with dorms," a serial entrepreneur told him.
The backstory: Baker, 21, has elite journalism in his blood. His dad, Peter Baker, is a New York Times star. His mom, Susan Glasser, is a columnist for The New Yorker. But Theo ran with it: His investigative reporting for The Stanford Daily triggered the resignation in 2023 of the university president over flawed research data.
- Theo tells me his honors thesis was about "Americanism" and the forgotten origin story of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1930s. "Broadly speaking, I studied demagogues and illiberalism," he texted.
Among Baker's findings inside the "Stanford success machine": "As Stanford was becoming more powerful, it was becoming increasingly corporate, less like a vibrant hub for teenage exploration and more like a business — a thriving one at that."
- "Once you're in with the right crowd, all sorts of invitations start showing up. 'Any VC is begging to shove money down our throat,' [said a friend] who took VC money for a startup."
- "[P]eople I got to know in the tech world would admit ... to tax evasion and tax fraud, research misconduct, embezzlement and misappropriation of funds, securities fraud, insider trading, academic dishonesty, operating slush funds and shell companies, hacking, reckless endangerment, and abetting foreign dictators."
