Theo Baker

It's great to be here.

Well, I've now, I guess, been in love with Stanford for the greater part of my life.

I was seven years old when I first had my heart set on Stanford.

And I remember, you know, just this image becoming embedded in my mind of these teenagers and their Stanford t-shirts and their flip flops lounging in the shade of a palm tree and leaning up against the self-driving car they had just helped to build.

And I thought, this is the coolest place in the world.

All of the most brilliant people are making the future out here.

And that part of Stanford, it exists.

That is true.

There's just another side that the school is less than willing to talk about.

really into being a tech billionaire, but I definitely wanted to do something in tech.

By the time I got to high school, I was the kid who was coding machine learning in my models at night in my bedroom, and I thought that was a fun Friday night, which is very obviously nerdy.

But there was just something so cool about the future is being remade at this institution, in this place where people are empowered to dream big and work on big problems.

And that was definitely the ethos that I anticipated Stanford having.

Well, it didn't take very long at Stanford to realize that things didn't work the way that I thought that they might.

There's this sort of Stanford inside Stanford, I learned.

This sort of parallel reality for those who have been tapped on the shoulder and identified as the next trillion dollar startup founders.

And for them, there are yacht parties and slush funds and

and something called pre-idea funding, which still boggles my mind.

Pre-idea funding.

So before you even have the glimmer of an idea of what you're going to do for a company, you know, venture capitals will reach out if you are one of these special few and offer you hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than a million dollars sometimes, just because they're trying to network with the next generation of talent and they will go to some extraordinary lengths to do so.