Theo Baker

One of them is Phoebe Gates, who is the daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, which I thought was an interesting detail, you know, who has gone on to create her own startup.

And it's, you know...

I think it's sort of the ultimate manifestation of this no boundaries relationship that Stanford has very intentionally cultivated, you know, that that Stanford has made this sort of Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley that has enabled its meteoric ascent.

Right.

Like no other institution of higher education in the last few decades.

and has also allowed for something that's corruption.

No, I mean, it's fascinating, right, just how much selling access to students has become the business model.

You know, there are venture capitalists who teach classes at Stanford just so they can have access to students, right?

That's actually fairly frequently a thing that happens.

You know, there's this whole, this thing that some students call the Coupa Circuit, right?

These investors who literally spend all day, seemingly every day,

at the small little Koopa Cafe, this outdoor cafe on campus, where they are literally, from dawn till dusk, networking with teenagers and seeming to spend more time with them than their own families.

These venture capital firms employ talent scouts, many of whom are literally Stanford upperclassmen, to identify freshmen the second they step on campus.

And, you know, once you're in the Stanford inside Stanford, everyone is texting the same handful of billionaires for advice or going to meet them on the weekends.

It's profoundly odd.

But not only is it this sort of weird ecosystem, that's one part of it, but it's that the incentive structures, right, the way that they are set up.

encourage and enable deceit, that the logical end result too many times is the sort of cut corners mentality that breeds the larger frauds like Sam Bateman Freed or Elizabeth Holmes.

Yeah, well, you know, in the words of one of the investors I was talking to in the book, right, his job, he says, is to separate out the quote-unquote entrepreneurs from the quote-unquote builders.

That, you know, people come to Stanford now understanding this idealized, mythologized version of it, you know, believing that they can be the next billion-dollar dropouts.

And, you know, the job of the investors is to figure out, are you doing it just because you want to be rich and you want all the associated perks?