Google was founded by two Stanford graduate students,
Instagram by two Stanford alumni, Snapchat by a Stanford dropout. WhatsApp, Netflix, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and HewlettPackard were all founded by onetime Stanford students; the earliest investors in Facebook and Amazon were Stanford graduates. Even Elizabeth Holmes, symbol of Silicon Valley self-delusion and fraud, was a student at Stanford when she dropped out to found Theranos. About the only two famous tech founders with no immediately apparent Stanford connection are Steve Jobs
and Bill Gates—though is it a coincidence that each had a daughter attend the school?
Stanford, nestled south of Facebook and west of Google, is more than a kind of finishing school to the burgeoning independent commonwealth of tech. It’s already to the 21st century what Harvard, or maybe the University of Chicago, was to the 20th: the institution that grooms an elite class for power and imbues it with the reigning ideology. And for the students destined to rule over megaplatforms and other digital fiefdoms, Stanford is less a college than it is a kind of incubator or accelerator—a four-year networking opportunity for the next Systrom, Spiegel, or Thiel, as everyone who goes there knows. “I don’t remember there being that much emphasis on serving others or what is the broad philosophical points of a Stanford education,” a political-science major from the class of 2017 told us. “It really always felt like it’s that gold mine, like you’re just there to find that random idea and hop on that train and have $100 million by the time you’re 30.”
No wonder, in that case, that Stanford has been the “dream school” of both parents and high-school students nearly every year for a decade, according to Princeton Review surveys, or that it boasts the lowest acceptance rate among major universities. This may seem like a recent development— and only over the past decade has the school shorn the pretense of a liberal-arts education, turning classrooms into job fairs and students into entrepreneurs-to-be, and effectively handing the keys of the campus to venture capitalists. But it’s the realization of a long-term project begun in the 1950s by then-provost Frederick Terman, who sought to expand what had been a western backwater into an academic powerhouse by creating a virtuous cycle of growth: The school would encourage students to become entrepreneurs, and those entrepreneurs, once rich, would give back to the school. Terman, known as the
“Father of Silicon Valley,” was an originator of the entrepreneurial, metrics-obsessed attitude that became the Valley’s defining ethos; at graduation ceremonies, he would take notes on the back of his program about which departments were producing the most doctorates.
Today, it’s hard to deny that Terman’s project has been a roaring success—for Stanford, at least, if not for equal income distribution in the U.S. Between 1939, when Terman set up
William Hewlett and David Packard in a Palo Alto garage, and
1998, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page dropped out of the graduate computer-science department to pursue their new
search engine, Stanford’s endowment increased by more than a hundredfold. But in the 20 years since Brin and Page left Stanford, the engineer-entrepreneur mind-set has shifted. Once, companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Cisco, and Google brought the school’s academic research to market and therefore relied to varying degrees on the institutional support of Stanford—whether through the encouragement of administrators, the use of its wirednetwork infrastructure, or even the relicensing of intellectual property. The most important support system today is the network of people—and cash— who now populate and surround the institution, hunting for investments.
No one has noticed this more than Stanford students themselves, many of whom, it should be said, don’t like that their school has been so thoroughly penetrated by money and ambition. Of course, many more are turned on by it, as would not surprise anyone who has been following the recent “Varsity Blues” college-admissions scandal, which gives a clear sense of just how desperate American high achievers are to secure even the tiniest sliver of additional advantage. “There were probably one in ten or maybe one in five people at Stanford who are really interested in technology, who were doing it for reasons that I would consider pure,” one former engineering student complained. “I think the remainder were strictly in it to get rich and 20 years ago would have worked on Wall Street.”
To Stanford’s credit, some of the fiercest critics of the university’s most venal tendencies have come from within, like the early Holmes antagonist Phyllis Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford, or the M.B.A. student Adam Allcock, who went public with his discovery that Stanford’s business school was granting financial aid to students based on their perceived worth to the school, not their need. The whistle-blower whose
information ultimately revealed Elizabeth Holmes’s fraud
was a Stanford graduate—and the grandson of Hoover Institution fellow George Shultz.
If you’re cynical, though, you might want to just keep quiet. The guy sitting outside Coupa Café in the fleece vest might be an engineering professor, or he might be a VC. He might even be both: At Stanford, professors don’t just introduce you to potential investors; they often invest in student projects themselves. Want to impress those guys, bag yourself a big seed round, and escape into billionairedom? Read on. max read