Whom did you meet at university? Your friends? Your spouse, maybe? Several people who took a lot of drugs who are now trusted as doctors?
Theo Baker met billionaires. “I’ve had more one-on-ones with billionaires than I’ve been on formal dates,” he writes in How to Rule the World, a book chronicling his time at Stanford, the California university that helped to birth Silicon Valley.
Former students include Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel. Because of this, venture capitalists roam the campus, trying to spot teenagers who might be the next big thing. They could be walking around in plain sight, scraggly-haired and hungover but destined some day soon to disrupt the world.
Baker, who is a student at Stanford, found himself being sized up and studied like a horse in a trainer’s paddock. He was wined and dined and confided in. People told him of their private islands. It’s very nice, said the girlfriend of a crypto billionaire, but you can’t get decent French toast. A senior AI executive told him about “Iliad wrestling parties”, where you read passages of The Iliad and take your clothes off, grappling with Homer while also grappling with others.
There was a lot of money to go around for anyone with an idea for a start-up. Campus clubs raised huge sums and a small coffee shack outside a library was crowded with investors hearing pitches. There was even “pre-idea funding”, to the tune of seven...
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