The Stanford Freshmen Who Think They Rule the World

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Updated at 8:22 a.m. ET on April 25, 2026.When I was a freshman at Stanford University, I learned to shotgun a beer from a guy in a frat. Soon after, he dropped out and started an AI company. Six months later, it was valued at more than $1 billion.For most students, Stanford is a normal competitive school, where people go to class and coffee shops and fall in love and freak out over finals. But a select few attend something else: a Stanford inside Stanford, where venture capitalists pursue 18- and 19-year-olds, handing out mentorships and money and invites to yacht parties in an attempt to convert promise into profit.Steve Blank teaches a legendary start-up class at the school, “Lean Launchpad.” Although students have always dreamed big, Blank told me that Stanford has changed in recent years, placing more and more emphasis on the young founders who may kick back some of their future billions to the university. Today, he said, “Stanford is an incubator with dorms.”AI seems poised to eliminate many entry-level jobs, but it has made this special cohort at Stanford only more valuable. “Our bread and butter is young students,” a VC explained once, while promising me and a small group of other freshmen and sophomores that if we ever had ideas, her firm would help us out. Investors spend all day hanging out at the Coupa Café on campus. Firms such as Sequoia and Pear VC employ talent scouts—a number of them Stanford upperclassmen—to identify the best of the young best. Then they sink their hooks in.These teenagers are sometimes handed “pre-idea funding”—hundreds of thousands of dollars, or in rare cases, even millions—before they have the glimmer of an actual company in mind. Plied with excess and access, they have little oversight; innovation and fraud co-develop. And all of this is happening as tech companies assume more power over our lives than ever before.This is a story about the kids being groomed to rule the world—and what they’re learning from those who already do.California was the site of the great Gold Rush that transformed America.

That population of young adventurers, Mark Twain wrote, “gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences.” Yet the fortune generated by Silicon Valley in the past few decades has exceeded the value of all the gold discovered during the first California boom 200 times over, even adjusted for inflation.Last year, the value of public companies based in the area was $23 trillion—greater than the GDPs of the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and the entire continent of Africa combined. Private companies add at least another $1 trillion. As a data-science professor once joked to me, “I bike past more billionaires on my way to work than there are in the entire Midwest.”This is an economy that runs on the assumption of potential—on the idea that tech founders will, through brute force, innovate their way into market domination and produce limitless riches. Without a product or revenue, Safe Superintelligence, an AI company with about 20 employees, was valued at $32 billion in 2025; it still hasn’t announced any tech and doesn’t plan to anytime soon.In this modern-day gold rush, the resource to mine is talent. And nowhere can you find more of it than at Stanford.Stanford and Silicon Valley are intertwined in a unique fashion. Although the Ivy League has long been a pipeline to Wall Street and Washington, much of Silicon Valley was built on university land. The Stanford Research Park has been home to the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, and Theranos. Nowadays, roughly 150 companies, including Tesla and Google, have offices on campus. (In 2025, Stanford earned $320 million in rent.) The venture-capital firms are just up the hill, ready to fund new start-ups from promising students, most of whom then set up shop nearby, hiring almost exclusively other Stanford students and cycling some of the proceeds back to the university. I took my first college programming course in the Nvidia auditorium, donated by Jensen Huang, the Stanford alum who started the world’s most valuable company. (The world’s second-most-valuable company, Alphabet, was also started by Stanford students.)For Silicon Valley investors, sorting out the students who can make it big from the wannabes has become a high-stakes competition.

Nobody sees value in a “wantapreneur,” as one investor put it to me; they want to identify the “builders.” That’s the name applied to the tech acolytes who have what it takes, and also a title assumed by many pretenders.The college has large entrepreneurship clubs—the Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students and the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, known as ASES and BASES. But joining won’t get you into the Stanford inside Stanford. Access to the spaces that actually matter is invite-only—determined less by technical skill than by who you know and by resumé status symbols, such as having done the Neo Accelerator or PearX summer fellowship, run by VCs. Those who have been plucked from the crowd congregate at secret clubs and lavish dinner parties.When it comes to this Stanford inside Stanford, “you sort of join it freshman year or you don’t,” one student turned founder told me. “It’s totally just vibes.” One funded undergrad told me, “You’re treated like royalty if you say the right things.” Another put it to me more bluntly: “Any VC is begging to shove money down our throat.”Some of the investors and CEOs competing for teenagers have good reputations. Ann Miura-Ko co-founded a fund that was an early backer of companies such as Lyft and Twitch. She is also an instructor at Stanford. "I look for super-builders and super-thinkers,” she told me; she gathers them in her Mayfield Fellows Program, which promises to transform “12 exceptional students into a cohesive community of entrepreneurs and leaders who define the next decade and shape the world.” Students I’ve spoken with describe Miura-Ko as a supportive and creative mentor. But some of those on the prowl are less interested in what they can do for students than in what students can do for them.A friend recalled attending a party as a junior and chatting with a former classmate who had gone to work for a company valued at more than $150 billion. “Hey, you should consider coming to work with me,” the guy said. My friend answered noncommittally. Three days later, he was having coffee with the company’s CEO and being offered a minimum $600,000 salary if he dropped out. “

I felt like I was being swept off my feet,” he told me. After doing some digging, though, he concluded that the company was shady—he suspected that it had misled investors about the effectiveness of its technology—and turned down the offer. A number of our mutual friends didn’t. One by one, they were persuaded to drop out. “That’s how they recruit,” my friend said. “They’re assassins.”Stanford students aren’t just going to networking events, of course; they’re also doing plenty of cool things. I know a student who cobbled together a robot to drive around parties serving drinks; another built a tool that can determine exactly where and when video clips were taken through the fluctuation of electromagnetic fields in the background noise.It’s fun and a little bit surreal to be told that you can just go out and make whatever it is you want to exist. Who wouldn’t want a $10,000 “micro-grant” from the Friends and Family club to spin up a nifty gadget? Or an investment from Z Fellows, which pays students to ignore their coursework for a week and dream up something interesting?But kids know that even the most lighthearted exercise in creativity can be their ticket to Silicon Valley riches. The project you tinker with in your dorm room goes on your résumé; hacking sessions have corporate sponsors. Z Fellows is “Your Fast Track Into Silicon Valley.” Many students carefully copy the model they’ve seen lead to success: DoorDash started with a few students getting food delivered to their dorm; Snapchat was created when a frat bro wanted to send disappearing sexts to a girl.But students have the ambition to work on big issues too—and many make substantial advances. Amber Yang made the Forbes “30 Under 30” list at 18 for developing promising technology to track space junk. Her algorithms could predict the position of debris with 98 percent accuracy—far better than NASA models. From almost the second she arrived on campus, the VCs began their pursuit.“When you’re 18 and you have that amount of attention, you sort of feel like you don’t have a choice but to say yes,” Yang told me over coffee. Yes to the funding, to the programs, to starting a company that might ensure generational wealth before you can legally rent a car.

Yang felt herself getting sucked in: “I struggled a lot with figuring out what I really wanted versus how people saw me.”But when she was offered the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious program that paid students $100,000 (now $250,000) to drop out of college, she turned it down—an almost-unheard-of decision. Instead, she finished her education. She also helped spin up a club called No Filter. Each week, she and a friend, Noor Siddiqui, invited a tech CEO to come talk to a group of 30 students. With confidentiality rules in place and an invite-only policy, No Filter immediately gained cachet as a place where insiders congregated. VCs, in turn, happily paid for the club, because it provided them with access to this cohort of students. “There were a few VCs who would just give us—and to them, it was nothing—but they gave us $20,000 for the quarter to just go out to dinners, and then we’d meet with the VCs,” Yang said.Now Siddiqui runs a start-up that lets you select which genes you want your child to have (“Sex is for fun,” she says; “embryo screening is for babies”), and Yang has since become a venture capitalist herself. “I love the Valley, I love Stanford, and I’m, like, the biggest proponent of it,” Yang said. Still, she has come to reject the mythology around Stanford’s success machine, and the idea that it can predictably pluck the unconventional geniuses from the student body—especially when so many of the potential geniuses are just trying to copy the path to success they think older innovators followed.“From the outside, everyone’s looking in, and they’re like, Oh, this person got that job because they’re just really great, and it’s meritocratic. And that’s what Silicon Valley tells everyone, that it’s meritocratic, right? That’s not the case,” she told me. Success is about “knowing the right person and being connected in a very specific way.”When Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford in 2005 to start a company, “it was a very different time,” he told me. Today’s wining and dining and systematized recruiting had yet to sweep campus. “