Stanford and Startup Theater

In February, Stanford undergrad Bassel Ojjeh wrote an article asking if YC was for cowards. In it he described the feeling on campus that it’s harder to get a job than to get into YC, and that the once revered accelerator had diluted the talent of its batches by accepting more and more teams every year.

At the heart of Bassel’s piece is a recognition of Stanford’s optimization culture. He points out how our school attracts a “manicured intelligence,” the student body president/valedictorian/app builder who frenetically pursued exceptionalism in high school.

Yet this archetype, he argues, does not breed courage, but rather cowardice. The same desire to appear universally exceptional leads the manicured student to avoid true risk. Instead they opt for the prestige-hedged risk, consulting and business clubs run by “the boba mafia,” which act as another badge for LinkedIn rather than forcing functions to develop conviction around an idea.

To him, YC is no different, a risk which gives you transferable credibility even if your startup fails, in other words, “a risk for cowards.”

As the co-president of Stanford’s largest entrepreneurship club, BASES, I guess I’m a boss of the boba mafia Bassel indicted. I think he’s right. Clubs on campus are badges, YC is increasingly seen as a de-risked summer camp you can always come back from, and if you asked me where the founders of the next generational companies congregated, I couldn’t tell you, sometimes, I’m not even sure they’re here.

To many it is obvious Stanford’s once contrarian character has given way to a culture which forges appreciably fewer great founders. Prod started at MIT and Harvard, not here, for a reason.⁽¹⁾

Why?

The application process of any elite institution rewards a cohesive narrative, the 18 year old who can present a polished version of themselves, which, for many, is part veneer. We were rewarded for optimizing against opaque metrics of promise, to seem admittable after a 10 minute examination. Should we be surprised that when an admissions reader is swapped for a venture partner, who offers a much clearer recipe to convey potential, students do what they were taught? To weave with white lies and false conviction whatever story is necessary to convince those in power of their upside.

Why Stanford in particular? By my framework, any Ivy should fall victim to the same serial posturing. They do, but not to the magnitude seen here.⁽²⁾ Our school has a history inextricably intertwined with Silicon Valley since the days of HP and Frederik Terman. As an institution, we have generated the most venture returns of anyone, and as such our borders are lined with the offices of nearly every private investor, ready to deploy billions.⁽³⁾

Where there is money there will always be those there for the wrong reasons, and Stanford has more than its fair share of students pursuing entrepreneurship for wealth and status, not because they want to change the world.⁽⁴⁾

“I’m doing a startup on the side”

I’ve heard this phrase come up more and more often. In the past people would’ve told you “I’m building a side project,” “I’m hacking on some stuff with my friends,” now, it’s a “startup on the side.”

Hearing this has always baffled me. The best founders never saw their startup as a side hustle, at least not for long, it was their passion, an obsession the world rebuked, something they had to defend with their lives. Now the risk of a startup has been so watered down with the ease of raising capital, people see it as yet another badge, a resume padder, something to throw in when asked what you’re up to, “I’m interning, oh, and building a startup on the side.”

The lack of maturity in Stanford’s startup culture has further consequences, it has repelled the school’s true talent, pushing people who take building a company seriously away from the places they would normally aggregate. The best engineers see Stanford’s business clubs as flashy, full of those who signal potential without real underlying competency. They want no role in this adulterated ecosystem, as such, there is no place where they can pitch each other their thesis and proceed to have them ripped apart. The clubs are full of people chasing prestige, too busy going to dinners to iterate on real ideas, leaving the campus fragmented, with the bad taste of startup theatre in everyone’s mouth.

This mass dilution of entrepreneurship is also due to the incentive structure of Venture Capitalists. The venture asset class has institutionalized, growing immensely with more wealth to deploy than ever, and only so many founders to go around.

In his new book, How to Rule the World, Stanford’s Theo Baker detailed for the first time to many the myriad ways in which venture partners wine and dine pre-idea kids to get in early. It’s all true, and I wouldn’t blame them, after all, a VC’s job is to meet and keep tabs on the best people. However, the promise of investment before anyone is forced to prove themselves against adversity is deeply corrosive.

Last summer, with nothing but the badges of Stanford and BASES on my LinkedIN, YC’s CEO Garry Tan invited me to his house for dinner. Across from me, with his parents and younger sister, sat an eleven year old.

He was a Junior studying Math and CS at Waterloo.

Afterwards, Garry gave all of us there his phone number, offering himself as our personal concierge if we ever wanted to start a company. To the boy I sat with, he gave his contact to the parents.

How could people not be indoctrinated into thinking they are special, that they should drop out, when half a million dollars is all but handed to you because of where you got in to college?

I liken this to pulling flowers too early from the soil.

The willingness to push further and further into the talent pool, all the way to child prodigies, is breeding a generation who think they’re entitled to capital based on credentials alone, who think the work to gain conviction comes after you raise, not before. Venture is polluting its own well, muddying the signal once associated with those who’d sacrifice their frictionless futures in pursuit of passion.

In order to restore maturity to Stanford’s culture, organizations like BASES need to become places where people go to push each other towards greatness, and make no mistake, we will lead the way in this reformation.

Entrepreneurship has defined Stanford as a world class institution, to see it treated with such nonchalance belittles the legacy of the founders whose shoulders we stand on.

This school has an immense amount of latent potential. Gathered here are some of the brightest minds and hardest working people on the planet. If we can just filter out the noise and get back to doing what matters, we too can have at shot at changing the world.