He skipped ahead to the brutal introductory computer science course, helped run the TreeHacks hackathon, and imagined a future in startups. Grief quietly redirected him. His grandfather, who had recently died, had spent his youth on a student newspaper and talked about it for the rest of his life. To feel close to him, Baker joined The Stanford Daily. It was supposed to be a hobby.
Instead, it became the axis of his college career. Early stories drew unexpected attention and tips. One led him to PubPeer, a niche forum where scientists scrutinize published research. There, he found years-old allegations that papers co-authored by Stanford’s president, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, contained manipulated images. Baker was a month into his freshman year when he began digging. By the time he returned for sophomore year, Tessier-Lavigne had resigned, and Baker had won a George Polk Award for his reporting.
The investigation was anything but smooth. Administrators and insiders warned him off, insisting Tessier-Lavigne’s integrity was beyond question and hinting that pursuing the story would make his life at Stanford uncomfortable. After Baker’s first article, the board of trustees announced its own inquiry, overseen in part by a trustee with a multimillion-dollar stake in Tessier-Lavigne’s biotech company, Denali Therapeutics. The board’s statement praised the president’s “integrity and honor” even as it purported to examine his scientific record. Tessier-Lavigne refused to answer Baker’s questions directly, instead sending campus-wide messages denouncing the reporting as “breathtakingly outrageous and replete with falsehoods.” Lawyers followed.
Baker’s new book, How to Rule the World, argues that the scandal is only one symptom of a deeper ecosystem he calls “the Stanford inside Stanford.” In this parallel campus, venture capitalists and founders quietly scout undergraduates, separating “wantrepreneurs” from the teenagers deemed commercially exploitable. Some VCs pay upperclassmen to identify promising freshmen. The most coveted opportunities are not in public entrepreneurship clubs but in opaque “feeder” circles and off-the-books seminars.
At the center of this world is a not-quite-class, also called How to Rule the World, run by a Silicon Valley CEO. It functions like a miniature secret society: no credit, tiny enrollment, big promises. To be invited is to be told you are destined to matter. Baker portrays it as a case study in how power brokers wrap themselves in mystique to attract the most ambitious students, then mine their talent early.
He arrived as crypto collapsed and generative AI exploded, watching classmates pivot overnight from token schemes to language models. In that whiplash, he saw a generation pushed toward entrepreneurship less by idealism than by fear: it can be easier to raise a seed round than to land an internship. His warning to future students is simple: know whether you are chasing a calling or just the current craze.
Baker leaves Stanford less certain he wants to found a startup and more convinced he is, for better or worse, a journalist. The institution he dissected may yet define his career as much as his degree.
