The Second Stanford
One Stanford searches for extraordinary people early. The other quietly asks who is still becoming.
Boomer.
That’s what someone called me at Stanford.
The funny part?
I was hopelessly lost.
My hotel was directly across the street.
Google Maps was open.
I had walking directions on my phone.
And I still managed to wander off course.
This is not unusual.
My wife navigates with ease; I can get lost leaving a hotel room. In our family, finding our way is her job.
Yet there I was on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in late 2025, wandering Stanford’s campus with a bag of six books on artificial intelligence from the campus bookstore. As I explored, old patterns resurfaced.
The sandstone arches glowed in the afternoon sun. Students drifted between buildings. Bikes cut silently through the crowds. The campus felt alive in a way that was difficult to describe.
My mood soared, beyond simple optimism.
Beatific might be the better word.
Suddenly, possibilities filled the air.
Stanford had occupied a strange place in my imagination for most of my life.
As a kid who struggled to learn to read, I found Stanford unimaginable.
As someone without an undergraduate degree, I found Stanford unattainable.
As someone who eventually built a career in technology, I came to see Stanford as something else entirely: an institution I admired deeply from afar.
Years earlier, while at Deloitte, I was given a research and study budget and a choice: MIT or Stanford. I chose MIT — partly for a different perspective, partly because Silicon Valley already dominated enough of the conversation.
Still, Stanford was Stanford.
A place where ideas mattered.
A place where the future often arrived early.
A place I had never visited.
There was another reason the visit felt different, which emerged before my trip even began.
Months before the trip, while exploring Stanford’s programs online, I had stumbled across something unexpected.
Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute.
The program fascinated me.
Its existence felt almost radical.
Not because it marked achievement.
Because it quietly challenged one of modern society’s deepest assumptions.
The assumption that human development is primarily a young person’s story.
DCI starts from a different premise.
That development continues.
That reinvention remains possible.
That purpose evolves.
That becoming never really ends.
I found myself unexpectedly drawn to the idea.
It wasn’t for another credential.
It wasn’t for access.
But because the program seemed built around a question I had been asking myself for years:
What comes after accomplishment?
As I read more, I found myself imagining what it might be like to belong to that community.
That surprised me.
Stanford had always felt distant.
But DCI felt human.
Perhaps because my own life has never followed a straight line.
All this was on my mind as I crossed campus with six AI books, enjoying one of my best afternoons in years.
Then, God damn it, I got lost.
Again.
I spotted a table of students.
“Excuse me, can you point me toward…”
A young woman pointed out where I needed to go.
I thanked her and walked away.
Then I heard it.
Boomer.
Not loudly.
Not maliciously.
Not even intended for me to hear.
Just loud enough.
The word stung, sharp as a slap.
Briefly.
I laughed.
Kept walking.
Found dinner.
The day was still magnificent.
The incident faded into the background.
Or so I thought.
Months later, I picked up Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World.
I expected a campus journalism story.
Instead, I found a study of power.
A study of ambition.
A study of how institutions identify talent, allocate opportunity, and create networks of influence.
Theo’s Stanford was not the Stanford I had visited.
Or maybe it was exactly the Stanford I had visited, and I simply lacked the vocabulary to understand it.
As I read about Coupa, the venture capitalists, the founders, the students being cultivated, observed, funded, and sorted, something unexpected happened.
The memory returned.
Not because of the word.
Because of the sorting.
Everyone at Theo’s Stanford seemed to be constantly sorting each other.
Who mattered.
Who belonged.
Who would succeed?
Who had potential.
Who was worth betting on?
The ecosystem appeared optimized for identifying future significance.
And suddenly I found myself back at that table.
Back hearing a single word.
Boomer.
What surprised me was not the memory.
It was my reaction to the memory.
I felt a hot surge of irritation all over again.
The pulse quickens.
The story began forming.
Privilege.
Judgment.
Entitlement.
Bitch.
Whoa.
That one word carried decades—assumptions, old resentments, survival instincts, and all the stories I’d built from a mere twenty-second encounter.
The irony escaped me at first.
She had reduced me to a category.
I had immediately done the same thing to her.
Then Marcus — my internal Stoic referee — arrived and asked the obvious question.
“What exactly do you know about her?”
The answer, of course, was nothing.
Nothing beyond a gesture, a smirk, and a single whispered word.
No family history.
No struggles.
No triumphs.
No idea how she got to Stanford.
No idea what she carried.
No idea whether she belonged there or still wondered every day if she did.
Nothing.
The same amount she knew about me.
So I took a breath and let the story collapse.
Once more.
There was another story available.
A truer one.
At her age, reading was still a struggle for me.
At her age, my path was utterly different.
At her age, Stanford was not merely unattainable.
It was unimaginable.
She could not have known that.
How could she?
She could not know about the kid who couldn’t read.
The kid for whom Stanford wasn’t a reach.
It was a fantasy belonging to other people’s children.
Then another realization arrived.
I did not know her story either.
Maybe she was the first in her family to walk that campus.
Maybe she had fought battles I could not imagine.
Maybe she, too, had arrived somewhere she once thought impossible.
Two human beings.
Each sees almost nothing.
Each is tempted to imagine the rest.
That realization lodged in me, persistent and raw.
Reflecting on all this, I realized Theo’s book is not really about Stanford.
It is about sorting.
And sorting is one of humanity’s favorite activities.
We sort people by age.
Education.
Income.
Politics.
Religion.
Profession.
Credentials.
Appearance.
Accent.
We do it instantly.
Often unconsciously.
Usually with great confidence.
Stanford simply makes the process visible.
The longer I sat with the memory, the less interested I became in the student and the more interested I became in the institution.
Stanford contains two very different ideas living side by side.
The Stanford most people know is optimized to identify extraordinary people early.
It admits a tiny percentage of applicants.
It searches relentlessly for signals of future achievement.
Potential.
Promise.
Trajectory.
The entire ecosystem Theo describes revolves around identifying who might matter tomorrow.
Founders.
Researchers.
Investors.
Builders.
Future significance.
Yet the Stanford that lingered in my imagination wasn’t really that Stanford at all.
It was DCI.
The second Stanford is asking a different question.
Not:
Who will become extraordinary?
But:
Who is still becoming?
That question feels increasingly relevant.
Not just for universities.
For all of us.
What if our institutions spend too much time trying to identify talent early and not enough time recognizing that human emergence is often nonlinear?
What if some of the most interesting lives are impossible to predict?
What if curiosity matters more than chronology?
The future certainly belongs to some young people.
Theo Baker is compelling evidence of that.
But perhaps the future belongs less to the young than to the curious.
The people who continue learning.
Continue adapting.
Continue changing.
Continue becoming.
Even after the world has already assigned them a category.
Even after the sorting machine has moved on.
Returning now to that day, I arrived at Stanford carrying six books about artificial intelligence.
Google Maps was open.
My hotel was across the street.
I got lost anyway.
A student called me a boomer.
Months later, Theo Baker helped me better understand the campus.
But Stanford left me with a different question entirely.
Not who gets selected.
Not who gets admitted.
Not who gets plucked.
Who is still becoming?
That may be the more interesting question.
For Stanford.
For all of us.