
Stanford – The Get Rich University (2012) - ignoramous
http://newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/30/get-rich-u
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hugozap
I always wonder if they really think they are "changing the world" it seems
like a very well optimised system that bonds rich investors with already
affluent students to generate money for themselves and other already rich
people in rich countries.

However the social impact and real innovation ( the one that improves
drastically people lifes ) is lacking.

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michaelochurch
_it seems like a very well optimised system that bonds rich investors with
already affluent students to generate money for themselves and other already
rich people in rich countries._

This is a good first-order approximation. One generally admirable thing about
American culture is that it's not acceptable to just inherit wealth and try to
rule society. Where this backfires is that it means that rich kids get dumped
into the mainstream labor market and, with their superior social resources,
take most of the top jobs. VC-funded startups are mostly a mechanism for
taking parental wealth and influence (a socially unacceptable thing for the
child to live off of) and laundering it into shares of newly-created
businesses, so that the sponsee looks like a genuine tech entrepreneur rather
than the beneficiary of a managed outcome (acqui-hire!) put together by his
parents' friends.

There is a lot of technology work, even right now, that improves peoples'
lives in immensely meaningful ways. Perhaps the people doing such work are a
"silent majority" of technology. The problem is that you never hear about it
on Hacker News or TechCrunch, and the contemporary crowd of Valley king-makers
runs away from it.

If something is worth doing, it's usually hard to do and even harder to
control. If several of the constraints are socioeconomic arrangements (e.g.
Joffrey _must_ get at least $10M and a VP-level position in the inevitable
acqui-hire; and we _must_ let Squabbling Hen Capital in on this deal, with a
board seat, because we owe them a favor) then it becomes a lot harder to
actually do anything useful. Instead, it becomes "tech is hard, let's go
Snapchat".

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tptacek
Can you provide a list of successful or long-term viable startups that you
feel were the products of parental wealth transfer?

Can you provide a single example of an acqui-hire that you believe --- with
any evidence at all --- to have been the result of a favor to the parents of
the founders of that company?

I feel like I talk to a lot of people at VC-backed startups managing boards
--- in addition to having founded such a company many moons ago --- and while
I've heard a lot of horror stories, one story I've never heard is the one
where a board seat was given away as quid-pro-quo. Can you help me understand
your claim more clearly, for instance with an example?

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foobarqux
Chelsea Clinton, d'Alosio, Oscar Health, AppDirect, Microsoft.

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wglb
In what way was Microsoft a result of parental wealth transfer?

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foobarqux
Bill Gates received a large trust fund when he was born. Microsoft's first
major deal, with IBM, was facilitated by his mother's connection to the IBM
board.

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wglb
But as I recall, the company had to pull its own weight financially, and was
effectively bootstrapped.

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littletimmy
Stanford doesn't sound like a "university" in the traditional sense of the
world. Perhaps a vocational centre, where the pursuit of knowledge comes
secondary to application?

It is interesting to note that Stanford is a "true" American university
(unlike east coast universities which were meant to be copies of oxford and
cambridge), and that may explain its readiness to embrace the juggernaut of
the capitalism.

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pigscantfly
Stanford is absolutely a research university in the truest sense of the world.
There have been 31 Nobel laureates on the staff as well as 19 winners of the
Turing award. It's also worth pointing out that the CS department, though
important, comprises a small minority of faculty and students on campus. There
are lots of professors and grad students doing research in archaeology,
physics, medicine, classics, materials science, etc. who most people hear
little of.

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darkmirage
Actually CS comprises of around 15% of undergrads and commands a dominating
influence over the rest of the school.
[http://stanfordvisualized.soraven.com/](http://stanfordvisualized.soraven.com/)

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pigscantfly
I would describe 15% as a small minority. I agree that the department is
important to the school (possibly the most important single department), but I
think your characterization of its influence as dominating is totally
incorrect. I'm guessing that you have a lot of CS major friends, live with
many CS majors, and probably study it yourself. However, there are plenty of
places on campus which have almost no influence from the department. Examples
which immediately come to mind are the co-op I lived in last year which had 2
CS majors out of 56 residents, the several-billion-dollar medical school, and
the school of humanities (which in aggregate dwarfs the CS department in terms
of enrollment). Even the rest of the School of Engineering isn't really
influenced by departmental decisions. I think that most members of these
communities would strongly disagree about being dominated by the department;
your perspective likely stems from sampling bias in some regard.

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United857
Financial gain as the primary motivator for the majority of students to pursue
a university education and subsequent career is hardly new.

30 years ago, s/startup/Wall Street/.

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lalos
Somewhat complimentary read:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/frank-
bruni...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-best-
brightest-and-saddest.html?_r=0)

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wiggumz
In my experience talking with Stanford alums and just walking around the
Stanford campus most people there appear to be already rich. It is not
Berkeley, where regular people go.

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walshemj
I remember my cousin who went to UMIST Top 3 Uk uni) how adjusting to being
around lot of students who where far wealthier was quite hard.

I suspect going to Oxford and Bumping into students who are members of the
bullingdon club is the same but far more so

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gaius
UMIST is top 3 in what rankings? It's not even Russell Group!

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laurencerowe
UMIST was subsumed by the University of Manchester in 2004 which together
brought them to a distant 5th in the UK rankings by research income. (Oxford,
Cambridge, Imperial and UCL are the only UK institutions that can really claim
to be world class, though all those lists tend to be rather anglo-centric.)

Engineering tends to attract a slightly more economically diverse intake than
the arts, but UMIST's was still very skewed towards the offspring of the
professional middle classes. I'm not surprised to hear that someone who did
not share that background might have felt a little socially alienated.

~~~
walshemj
Actually he was from the well off side of the family - he was talking about
wealth beyond upper middle class.

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michaelochurch
Stanford is at a crossroads right now, because it could take its immense
wealth and influence to clean up the Valley and, if it did so, that would be a
great thing for everyone. What other institution would be capable of bringing
the moral leadership that the Valley needs? (You can't say, "you, Michael O.
Church". While technically correct, you'd need to get people to listen to me.
In 3000 years there may be a NoSQL database named after me, just as there is
one for Cassandra now.) Stanford has clout and wealth and immense power. It
also has (despite the bad ones who get lots of press) a lot of really good
people in its student body and professoriate. Unfortunately, these resources
aren't being used right, because the culture of the Valley is anti-
intellectual, status-driven, clubby, and run through with every dark aspect of
human nature that universities were supposed to educate and elevate humans out
of. It needs to show moral leadership rather than caving in to crass
commercialism.

It could start by de-degreeing some bad actors, and making it public. Evan
Spiegel's earned it with his frat-boy era behavior, and Lucas Duplan with that
stupid fucking name (Clinkle) and that picture of him with the fat stacks. I'd
go further. Caught red-handed in age discrimination? Degree's gone, and
professors will be disciplined if they refer students to you or invest in you.
Put stack-ranking in your company? Congratulations, you're no longer an
alumnus, and the reason why will be made public.

Stanford isn't a bad institution at all, but it needs to show some leadership
if it wants to gain the respect of the East and the North. It very much can.
Plenty of the professors and classes are top-notch already.

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superfx
Why does Stanford need to "gain the respect of the East and the North"?

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SamReidHughes
Because recently its graduates implemented stack-ranking.

