Theo Baker arrived at Stanford as a coder, planning to hack his way to startup glory. Instead, he spent four years exposing how the university's venture capital ecosystem turns ambitious teenagers into walking investment opportunities - and wrote a book about it. His first semester, he broke the story that forced Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign, earning a George Polk Award and a Warner Brothers option deal. Now, with graduation looming, Baker publishes How to Rule the World, a chronicle of Stanford's insidious talent-extraction machine.

Baker's journey began with a hobby: joining the student paper to feel close to his late grandfather. That hobby metastasized into an investigation of Tessier-Lavigne's scientific misconduct, fueled by anonymous comments on a site called PubPeer. Despite pushback - including the board of trustees launching an investigation overseen by a member with an $18 million stake in Tessier-Lavigne's biotech company - Baker persisted. The president never responded to requests for comment, instead denouncing Baker's reporting as "breathtakingly outrageous" to the entire faculty. The president resigned anyway.

The book's title is literal: a secret class called "How to Rule the World," taught by a Silicon Valley CEO, where students learn not to code but to network. It's part of a larger system where VCs deploy older students to scout freshmen, yacht parties substitute for lectures, and the primary qualification is who you know. Baker notes that joining big entrepreneurship clubs is now an "anti-signal" - real builders supposedly congregate in secret feeder groups, because nothing says authenticity like exclusivity.

Baker arrived as FTX collapsed and ChatGPT launched, watching crypto boosters pivot to AI with the speed of a startup pivot. "It's easier to raise money for a startup right now than to get an internship," he observes, which is either inspiring or terrifying depending on your risk tolerance. His advice to incoming freshmen: do things for the right reasons, not because they're easy - or because you want to get rich. As for his own plans, Baker says he's fallen in love with journalism. "It's a temperament, almost an affliction, more than a career." Presumably one that pays less than being a founder, but offers better material.