A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled

December 24, 2014 8:01 AM

The New York Times looks back at the Stanford Class of 1994 and what they are all up to today.
posted by reenum (27 comments total)

It's kind of weird how much the article focused on a few members' political leanings while they were at Stanford.
posted by gyc at 8:05 AM on December 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

I had to 'lol' at the 'If anyplace is a meritocracy Silicon Valley is' I wonder which of these guys/ladies commissioned this article.
posted by sfts2 at 8:19 AM on December 24, 2014 [17 favorites]

Agree, gyc, though some of those members ended up having a disproportionately large influence on the culture of Silicon Valley. I can assure you from personal experience that working for a startup (one of many) funded by a few of those very individuals was as close to living in a libertarian, misogynist "paradise" as one might expect.
posted by Atrahasis at 8:21 AM on December 24, 2014 [8 favorites]

Dilullo Herrin gave an interview in 2010 in which she says that working at Dell was something she planned:

"One of my mentors and board members at WeddingChannel told me that if I ever wanted to learn how to run a big company, I had better go work at one. All I had ever done in my career was work at start-ups, but as an entrepreneur who wanted to build a big business one day, I took his advice and went to work at Dell."

But this piece makes it sound like she just gave up and settled for a cube job.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:34 AM on December 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

But Mr. Sacks did not entirely lose his touch for provocation. For his 40th birthday, just after the Yammer sale was announced, he threw himself a Marie Antoinette-themed bash, shipping cakes as invitations, hiring the rapper Snoop Dogg to perform, and appearing at the party in head-to-toe 18th-century French court dress.

posted by ennui.bz at 8:55 AM on December 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

David Sacks comes off as such an incredible piece of shit in this, both in 1994 and currently.
posted by joyceanmachine at 8:56 AM on December 24, 2014 [9 favorites]

Many of the most interesting members of the Stanford Class of 1994 may have had better things to do than attend a goofy reunion. Do you really go out of your way to interact with people you went to school with twenty years ago? Twenty years is enough time to acquire and shed about three or four new personalities with little available memory storage space for that sort of thing.
posted by bukvich at 8:57 AM on December 24, 2014 [6 favorites]

Reunions with people who are successful themselves counts as networking, not nostalgia.
posted by jaguar at 9:05 AM on December 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

I tried to read this but I rage-quit a third of the way in. Was this justified? Am I missing out on ~~~~insights~~~~ on how systems of power perpetuate themselves?
posted by lineofsight at 9:06 AM on December 24, 2014 [8 favorites]

Stanford has always had an outsized influence in Silicon Valley, even before the so-called "pioneering" Class of 1994 (I guess Jodi Kantor has never heard of William Hewlett, Class of '34, or David Packard, '38, or if she has, she mentions them not once in the article), back to ARPANET and beforehand. You can't really talk about the history of that influence without going back pre-1994. A very odd article and unintentionally creepy framing in many ways, including the lush, overly-reverential design (why do we need to see a looping video of the graduating class?). Something's weird here.

Many of the most interesting members of the Stanford Class of 1994 may have had better things to do than attend a goofy reunion. Do you really go out of your way to interact with people you went to school with twenty years ago?

At Stanford? Hell yeah, they do, and the goofier the reunion the better. The idea of "The Farm" as the cult-like paradise/family that you longingly come back to again and again for the rest of your life like a prodigal to the womb is inculcated there early, as often as possible, and hard.
posted by blucevalo at 9:12 AM on December 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

I tried to read this but I rage-quit a third of the way in. Was this justified? Am I missing out on ~~~~insights~~~~ on how systems of power perpetuate themselves?

Yes. No.

There was a lovely line in which "identity politics" at Stanford were blamed for keeping black students away from the white students who ended up with socioeconomic power, in a way that blamed black students for being clique-y rather than white students and alumni for being exclusionary, at which point I probably should have quit. The rest of it seemed mainly concerned with explaining that it's hard to run a start-up and have primary care duties for young children.
posted by jaguar at 9:22 AM on December 24, 2014 [13 favorites]

I tried to read this but I rage-quit a third of the way in. Was this justified? Am I missing out on ~~~~insights~~~~ on how systems of power perpetuate themselves?

Not really, though you did miss the bit around the middle where a throwaway aside mentions that most of them have disavowed some of the more extreme conservativism (I got a good chuckle at the homophobe coming out as gay, because, of course he did). College students say some monumentally shitty things that they walk back when they're older and more mature; news at 11.
posted by Itaxpica at 9:22 AM on December 24, 2014 [5 favorites]

Those guys need to find productive jobs and stop living off the taxpayer.
posted by spitbull at 10:09 AM on December 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

I quit when I got to the

If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley

line mentioned above. Is there a term of art for a collection of douches? Is "douche canoe" that term?
posted by maxwelton at 10:19 AM on December 24, 2014 [10 favorites]

Probably worth noting the term "meritocracy" comes from a satirical essay mocking the entire concept.
posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on December 24, 2014 [9 favorites]

Do you really go out of your way to interact with people you went to school with twenty years ago?

Maybe not when you went part-time to Purdue North Central, but when you went to Stanford or any elite college, it was a formative experience for you, and reunions are special.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 11:14 AM on December 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

lol. Elite colleges are the only ones where students have formative experiences? give me a fucking break.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:15 AM on December 24, 2014 [6 favorites]

I prefer the quote: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime" (from The Godfather, where Mario Puzo misquoted Balzac), which makes "Meritocracy" and "Kleptocracy" synonymous.

But seriously, honesty and morality really are MAJOR liabilities, NOT assets for succeeding in Business (or most money-making areas), and I'm sure Stanford includes lying and cheating in its curriculum as much as Harvard.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:32 AM on December 24, 2014

ennui.bz: "hiring the rapper Snoop Dogg to perform, and appearing at the party in head-to-toe 18th-century French court dress"

"Thank you, Florida."
posted by mhum at 12:11 PM on December 24, 2014 [5 favorites]

I realize that YouTube link I posted might be a little too cryptic if you haven't seen the HBO show Silicon Valley. The guy talking is the character Peter Gregory, who appears to be largely influenced by Peter Thiel, but really stands in as a composite of a kind of big-shot Silicon Valley venture capitalist/entrepreneur/important asshole guy that David Sacks comes off as in the article (minus the social awkwardness?). In that clip, he's thanking the rapper Flo Rida (whose name he mispronounces like the state) who he has hired to perform at his excessively extravagant party.
posted by mhum at 12:22 PM on December 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

After graduation, he and Mr. Thiel published “The Diversity Myth,” a book-length critique of Stanford’s efforts. Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review.

If you want to make the big money - the really big money - you have to understand, instinctively or outright, that keeping the money in "the family" is almost as important as making the money in the first place. The price of any product, Silicon Valley innovation included, can be driven down to worthless levels if there's too much production of it. Creating that "close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs" is vital to controlling the market and maintaining price levels. It's the same principle as Mafia control of garbage collection, or of any Old Boys' Club in any guise anywhere.
posted by clawsoon at 12:35 PM on December 24, 2014 [4 favorites]

> "... when you went to Stanford or any elite college, it was a formative experience for you, and reunions are special."

When I went to such a college, it was a formative experience for me, and reunions are a pointless and boring waste of time and money that I would never consider bothering with.

(If I hadn't gone to such a college, that time in my life still would have been a formative experience for me -- almost like that period still would have been a four-year section of a human being's early adulthood!)
posted by kyrademon at 1:31 PM on December 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley

Technically, if the antecedent is false, the consequent can be anything you like and the proposition remains true.
posted by uosuaq at 2:41 PM on December 24, 2014 [6 favorites]

I had to 'lol' at the 'If anyplace is a meritocracy Silicon Valley is' I wonder which of these guys/ladies commissioned this article.

Given all the lulz in this thread about that line, it's probably worth mentioning that it's a direct quote attributed to David Sacks, noted asshole, and not like a conclusion asserted by the article's author or a general feeling of the assembled crowd or anything like that.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 3:10 PM on December 24, 2014

Yeah, I read it.
posted by sfts2 at 9:13 PM on December 24, 2014

With no iPhones, text messages or even websites to distract them, students immersed themselves in long discussions about how sexism had expressed itself in their families back home

Oh yeah, iPhones and the Internet are totally the reason all my students don't spend their spare time sitting around talking about sexism.
posted by lollusc at 1:07 AM on December 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

Not that anyone should give a crap in a look who's laughing now sort of way. But I recall taking a field trip from San Jose State to Stanford in 1993 or 4 to a graduate design show. My friends and I were astonished how fracking boring much of the work looked. If that was your time, then you might recall it was the heyday of Macintosh layout insanity (Raygun, Emigre, and much more not so easy to find). Honestly, I can't recall what the show was exactly. It could have been an Industrial Design grad show, or a mixed design grad show. The point is it was so easy and enticing to embrace the freedoms of digitally illustrated layouts, few students could resist.

I'm far from being the person to put such 'nonsense' on a marbled pedestal, but I was astonished--What could these designers be thinking about to ignore the gestalt aesthetics so prevalent? LOL. Even in a discipline where the worst designer could grab your attention inspired by tons of examples. Stanford being 'Stanford'.
posted by xtian at 7:41 AM on December 25, 2014