The Know-It-Alls by Noam Cohen

Author:Noam Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972113
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Looking back two decades, Google’s rise from research project to Google Inc. may represent the last gasp of the Terman model at Stanford. Certainly innumerable start-ups have their roots in Stanford, including Instagram, but the university’s resources aren’t nearly as significant. Less than a decade from Google’s founding, an ambitious hacker could make his mark from his dorm room, using just the money in his pocket. Mark Zuckerberg was a twenty-one-year-old chief executive of Facebook when he returned to his old Harvard computer science class to tell the students how lucky he was to have started his company in the era he did. “The fact that we could sort of rent machines for, you know, like $100 a month and use that to scale up to a point where we had 300,000 users is, is pretty cool and it’s a pretty unique thing . . . that’s going on in technology right now.” A decade earlier, he said, eBay had to run off of two $25,000 machines from the start. Google was somewhere in the middle of these two poles and had some serious bills to pay.46

If Google was a last gasp for Stanford, what a last gasp it was. Because PageRank was developed at Stanford, the technology behind Google is owned by Stanford, which exclusively licensed it to Brin and Page for a portion of Google stock, the last of which Stanford sold in 2005 for a total payout of $336 million.47 The Google-Stanford connections are many and varied, as Terman imagined—students, faculty, alumni, and the university all helping each other make a fortune. Google has returned those good turns from Stanford in so many ways, from $1 million a year directly donated to the computer science department, to money donated to honor the memory of an inspiring computer science professor, to hiring Stanford graduates, and on and on. The recently departed president of Stanford, John Hennessy, is on Google’s board.

But, just as the building named after Terman was torn down to make way for an entrepreneur donor, this Stanford model for success ended up being replaced by other systems offering financial and social support, whether that meant informal networks of already successful entrepreneurs or specialized tech incubators like Y Combinator and Tech Stars. One Stanford graduate, Peter Thiel, proposed cutting through the pretense. Why pay tuition if you weren’t there to study? “College can be good for learning about what’s been done before, but it can also discourage you from doing something new,” his organization, the Thiel Fellowship, explains on its Web site. “The hardest thing about being a young entrepreneur is that you haven’t met everyone you’ll need to know to make your venture succeed. We can help connect you—to investors, partners, prospective customers—in Silicon Valley and beyond.”48

This was Thielism in its raw form—no half measures or false solicitousness. Stanford already was breaking down the purpose of academia by being so eager to turn research into profits, which it would share indirectly or directly. Why keep up

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