Stanford – The Get Rich University (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Stanford – The Get Rich University (2012)

newyorker.com

65 pointsignoramous42 comments

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.

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".

I agree with your point that you don't read about the "silent majority" on Hacker News and TechCrunch. Consumer internet touches more people's lives so you hear about it more, especially when said founders are 22 and straight out of school. It's a story the media likes to tell.

Google, Cisco, Kiva, HP, Sun Microsystems, Theranos, Yahoo, Trulia, StubHub, Lytro, Coursera, Bonobos, Snapchat, and Instagram came out of Stanford in one way or another. These companies showcase a diverse range of tech that IS useful.

It's unfair too to say that social media doesn't do anything useful. Facebook reports 1.4 billion MAUs and works to bring the internet to more and more corners of the world. Snapchat's social component has given it the platform on which to innovate.

True, many Stanford students are already wealthy. True, there's a recent trend toward social media companies. But, Stanford continues to be a place where students work incredibly hard and remain motivated to do impactful work. Stanford has a storied history of entrepreneurship that begins before Snapchat and will continue after it.

Sure there are outliers, but if Snapchat makes your short list of 'useful' innovation I think you lost the argument.

There are 11 other companies in that list, so no, disagreeing with regard to one company should not affect your reception of the argument.

Personally Trulia, StubHub, Coursera, Bonobos, Snapchat, and Instagram also fail to make the useful innovation cut. If 20+ companies do the same thing and 1 one them wins that does not mean the winner is 'innovative'.

lytro is actually innovative. It might not be successful, but again that's a seperate category.

I decided I hate this comment and zorched it.

Why? Linux was increadably well managed and great software, but not nessisarily innovative at the outset. Android is arguably much worse as software, but innovative both as a project and somewhat less so as a phone OS.

Sure, you can argue that every piece of software is 'new' and thus innovative, but IMO that's a somewhat meaninglessly low bar.

Sorry, I was referring to the comment I'd originally written, and replaced with that text.

When one company in the world makes pants that fit me (Bonobos), I call that useful if not technologically innovative. Though I admit that I may well be in the large-butted minority here, and the slick user experience of their conversion funnel + shipping pipeline is really just icing on the pants-fit cake.

> you don't read about the "silent majority" on Hacker News

If the stories are out there, this should be easy to fix. Consider this an open invitation to post everything substantive about such things that you can find. I can't tell you how happy we'd be to see them.

Off of the top of my head I think You Need a Budget (YNAB) is an example of software that is measurably improving many people's lives. As far as I know they haven't looked for or received VC funding or had any flashy events that would have generated press coverage.

Fitbit is another example of a company improving people's lives but not generating a lot of press (though I do imagine they have been featured on HN and Techcrunch from time to time).

I use Dashing (developed by Shopify) for a personal dashboard to track things.

Every day I use bluetooth, video and music streaming, Kindle, the software utilities use to make sure I have gas, water, and electricity.

Sometimes the silent majority is featured on HN but receives less than reasonable responses. An example are the stories on high frequency trading which decrease spreads and thus are a benefit to anybody with a 401(k).

> 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.

By "mostly," to what greater-than-50% degree to which they are this sort of mechanism do you have in mind? Are founders of greater than 50% of startups actually children of people that work at VC firms?

(In actual reality, they aren't.)

> 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.

This is completely false because we hear about technology improving people's lives all the time here, and usually when I see anything about snapchat or Valley kings it's because you decided to talk about it.

> If something is worth doing, it's usually hard to do and even harder to control.

Well uh, that's a nice premise, but it's actually often easy to do things that are worth doing. Especially when there's a new untapped market.

> 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".

Which VP-level positions at Snapchat are held by the sort of people you refer to?

> One generally admirable thing about American culture is that it's not acceptable to just inherit wealth and try to rule society.

How did you come to believe that? Most of the recent presidents and presidential candidates would tell against that theory.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/11/george-p-bush-u...

> There is a lot of technology work [...] that improves peoples' lives in immensely meaningful ways. The problem is that you never hear about it on Hacker News.

Why don't you post some articles about it, then? I believe this community would love nothing better than to learn about immensely meaningful technical work that they've never heard about. I know I would.

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?

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

Of these, d'Alosio seems the closest to an example of what Church is talking about, and it's noteworthy in being noteworthy; an exception to prove the rule.

I concede the point though, is what I should say.

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

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.

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

I remember reading something about Nick D’Aloisio of Summly. I doubt a 15 y/o could get Wendi Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono as investors without his parents help, then sell the company to Yahoo! for 30 million, who immediately shut it down.

Do friends and family rounds not count as familial wealth transfer?

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.

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.

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

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.

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/.

Somewhat complimentary read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni...

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.

My thoughts exactly. This has caused some amount of cognitive dissonance because I know a significant number of people who are Stanford students and coming from a modest socio-economic background.

That being said there is definitely a lot of money hanging out around there. It'd be a hasty generalization to say that everyone at Stanford is part of that Silicon Valley Elite though.

It's more nuanced than what it seems.

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

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

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.

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

Top 3 or 4 for Computing back in the 70's when my cousin went well supposedly back then there where only 5 or so Computing Degrees that where considered any good.

Its also based in Manchester and was where Baby was built you know one of the first computers :-)

I was never much of a school rivalry kind of person until one Big Game where the Stanford crowd marched by, chanting "one day you will work for us." Go Bears.

Not rich, but well off. Upper middle class.

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.

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

Because recently its graduates implemented stack-ranking.

I'm on the East Coast right now, and I think Stanford can gain our respect exactly as it always has: by publishing great research.

Frankly, outside the Silicon Valley start-up bubble, nobody cares about the internal gossip of the Valley clique.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com