Another thing made Maslow’s hierarchy a convenient shorthand in a TED Talk: it’s an idea with strong regional ties. Maslow spent some of the last years of his life in California. He became important at Esalen, the New Age retreat along the Pacific Coast Highway; he worked for a private foundation in Menlo Park, just up El Camino Real from Stanford. One thing that surprised me in writing this book is just how local these kinds of ideas are. There are thinkers in this book who, had they not relocated to the Bay Area, or, in the case of Maslow, literally pulled into the driveway of the Esalen Institute, surely wouldn’t be looming nearly as large in the reservoir of tech’s received ideas. There may be some local pride at work in Kelley’s mentioning Maslow. There may be a sense of genealogy, a line of tradition being drawn from New Age psychotherapy and leftist intentional communities to the TED Talk.
Still, the localism is pretty remarkable, given that one of the great achievements of this industry has been to open up the world in hitherto-unimaginable ways. But it is a local story. The tech industry recruits from specific milieus, nations, schools, social classes, and so forth. The age spread, especially at the smaller and fast-growing companies, can be extremely limited, and many of the older figures these companies interact with (the venture capitalists and lawyers, for example) are basically them five years older. Silicon Valley loves the words “everyone,” “universal,” and “people,” but what they usually mean is “people I went to school with,” “my housemates in East Palo Alto,” or “my four immediate subordinates.” The universality that their business model pushes them toward exists in tension with the fact that they actually know very few people.
It’s also characteristic that, even though he teaches at Stanford, Kelley didn’t invoke a university professor. Maslow was an academic, but he worked at a private research institution in the Valley. What tech calls thinking is done largely outside, but within shouting distance of, the university. One of the more famous protagonists of tech’s love-hate relationship to academia is Peter Thiel, who made a fortune by working at PayPal and investing in companies like Facebook, and who is famously wary of higher education. The Thiel Fellowships pay young people not to go to college, and Thiel publicly asserts that he thinks the university is a bubble—but he nevertheless spent almost a decade at Stanford, where he received both a bachelor’s degree and a law degree, and, when he visits, is a welcome presence at the Faculty Club. Elon Musk likes to portray himself as having an autodidact’s mind, and, indeed, he dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford—but he too spent a lot of time at universities, in both Canada and the United States. The ideas in this book are university-adjacent, academish. They cannot free themselves of the institution any more than they can be made fully at home there. And the mode by which they are best acquired is the subject of the first chapter: dropping out.
.1.Dropping Out
In the fall of 2007, Denise Winters was working at the registrar’s office at Stanford University as a student services officer. One of her duties was handling forms that students filled out in order to take a leave of absence from the university. The forms asked students to provide some information as to why they were seeking to take time off from college. Most of them wrote about sick relatives, medical problems, feeling overwhelmed. “Don’t write a novel,” she’d tell them. “In the end, it’s your business.” Still, even by that standard, the reason given by one student that fall was unusually terse. “What’s a 23andMe?” she remembers asking.
No one knows exactly how many Stanford students have left the university to join or start companies in information technology or biotech without attaining their degrees. The university doesn’t collect data on reasons students leave, which itself is a holdover from a time when dropping out was a blot on your CV, not something you trumpeted all over CNBC. Stanford administrators say the numbers are probably higher than at other universities of Stanford’s caliber, but they’re not huge. Still, that fairly contained number of dropouts has had an outsize purchase on the way the public imagines the tech industry and the whiz kids who have shaped its most recent iteration. You weave one sort of legend when you say you are “Harvard educated,” but there’s a certain other kind of legend you weave only if you can say that you dropped out of Harvard.
Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of the biotech startup Theranos, who is currently on trial for wire fraud and conspiracy in a San Jose court, seems to have understood that better than anyone. SHE’S AMERICA’S YOUNGEST FEMALE BILLIONAIRE, a CNN headline declared in October 2014, AND A DROPOUT. Almost every fawning profile published over the years mentioned the fact that Holmes had dropped out of Stanford, perhaps more religiously than they would have mentioned Stanford if she’d actually graduated. It felt like another item on her CV. And almost every article referenced a rogues’ gallery of famous prior dropouts (whose memories Holmes certainly meant to invoke when she decided to leave the Farm prematurely): Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.
In fact, Holmes had left Stanford a little more than ten years before the CNN headline, and raised a million dollars from
