Stanford’s star reporter takes on Silicon Valley’s ‘money-soaked’ startup culture

Theo Baker is actually an outlier.

Whereas journalism as a serious has seen shrinking enrollment for years and is even being dropped by some faculties solely, Baker, a senior at Stanford College, has doubled down on old-school investigative reporting, and it’s paying off spectacularly.

Baker first made headlines as a university freshman when his reporting for The Stanford Each day led to the resignation of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. After uncovering allegations of analysis misconduct spanning twenty years, Baker — only one month into faculty — discovered himself “receiving nameless letters, conducting stakeouts, and monitoring down confidential sources,” according to his publisher. In the meantime, high-powered legal professionals tried to discredit his work. By 12 months’s finish, Tessier-Lavigne had resigned, and Baker grew to become the youngest-ever recipient of the George Polk Award, one in all journalism’s most prestigious honors.

Shortly after, Warner Bros and famed producer Amy Pascal gained a competitive auction for the movie rights to his story.

But when that scandal put Baker on the map, his upcoming e-book could cement his repute because the uncommon younger journalist prepared to problem Silicon Valley’s startup machine.

“Tips on how to Rule the World,” out Could 19 — three weeks earlier than he graduates — guarantees an explosive take a look at how enterprise capitalists deal with Stanford college students as “a commodity,” wooing favored undergrads with slush funds, shell corporations, yacht events, and funding provides earlier than they even have enterprise concepts of their hunt for the subsequent trillion-dollar founder.

“I watched in actual time as my friends had been taught to chop corners and plied with monumental wealth by individuals who wished to take advantage of their expertise,” Baker, who turns 21 subsequent month, tells Axios. Drawing on greater than 250 interviews with college students, CEOs, VCs, Nobel laureates, and three Stanford presidents, the e-book goals to reveal what Baker describes to Axios as a “bizarre, money-soaked subculture that has a lot affect over the remainder of the world.”

It’s maybe an unsurprising transfer from somebody who grew up round high journalists. His father is New York Instances chief White Home correspondent Peter Baker, and his mom is The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Whereas his friends chase enterprise capital funding and six-figure startup salaries, Baker spent his sophomore 12 months reporting and took his junior 12 months off to put in writing, together with two months on the Yaddo writers’ retreat.

That selection turns into much more placing towards the backdrop of journalism’s present struggles. Whereas conventional journalism applications fail to fill courses and media outfits face seemingly relentless layoffs, Baker represents one thing each thrilling and more and more unusual: a star scholar betting his profession on accountability journalism. Whether or not he’s a harbinger of renewed curiosity in investigative reporting stays to be seen, however we’d guess his e-book will seize the eye of loads of faculty college students — and it’ll virtually actually make waves in Silicon Valley whereas doing it.