Hi Larry! OT OT
How are you? I am doing well. Just read this article on Stanford and thought it was interesting. Daniel will be class of 2020, for college. Of course he can go wherever he wants. I am not into pressuring kids. His Aunt was in the class of 1985 and his Uncle, the class of 1983. His cousins may be his classmates! :)Leigh
nytimes.com
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- In the fall of 1995, two years after graduating from Stanford University, Diane Barrum received a call from her sophomore roommate, Srinija Srinivasan, asking her to join a company recently founded by two other young Stanford alumni, Jerry Yang and David Filo. The deal was this: In exchange for 18-hour days, grinding away in overcrowded conditions, Barrum would get in early on a hot phenomenon called the Internet. But Barrum, happily employed by a biotechnology company based in Seattle, said, "I just was not ready to take the risk."
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Barrum, as it happens, turned down the chance to be employee No. 30 at Yahoo, the wildly successful Internet portal, or gateway, which has a current market value of about $82 billion. Now she is back in Palo Alto and, after a hiatus of traveling and joblessness, has recently joined an Internet start-up, too. "Of course, I wish I'd taken it," she said of the Yahoo job. "One can only imagine what I'd be worth."
Such tales of quick riches and missed opportunities can be heard in many places these days, among people of all ages. But probably nowhere else was the swift, unexpected divergence of fortunes thrown into such stark relief as among Barrum and her peers in the Stanford undergraduate class of 1993, who burst on the scene just as the World Wide Web was coming into its own.
Of course, only a small percentage of recent college graduates have become Internet millionaires. But there are enough from elite universities, like Harvard, MIT and Stanford, that they are influential far beyond their numbers. A look at a sampling from this one Stanford class -- among the earliest to have so many success stories -- makes this phenomenon clear.
The university says it does not track the wealth of its alumni, but school officials acknowledge that many in the class of '93 have become wealthy unusually early. It includes five of the six founders of the Internet portal Excite (now Excite(at)Home); three founders of the online retailer of sporting goods, FogDog; one of the first employees of Yahoo; a pioneer of Trilogy Software; and a top executive with LinkShare. Many of these 20-somethings are now worth tens of millions of dollars, if not more. When the class gathered in 1998, it donated $163,000, then the largest class gift for a five-year reunion -- only to be surpassed last year by the Internet-rich class of '94.
In part, these technology Wunderkinder strike a chord with their peers because they have achieved the dual aspirations that have defined Generation X: being passionate about work and free from authority. But their existence has also raised the whole generation's visions of early wealth and, for some, served as a nagging reminder of what might have been.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Even by the standards of elite universities, Stanford has sent a remarkable number of graduates to early Internet riches. But some former students value are above commerce.
"This generation has made its money so young that it is almost unnatural," said Alan Wolfe, a sociologist who heads the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "Whether you are repelled by these young millionaires or attracted by them, they cannot be ignored. In that sense they are icons for their peers."
Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has turned out a disproportionately large number of Web superstars. With top-rated programs in science and engineering -- and almost 9 out of 10 undergraduates taking at least one computer course -- the palm-lined, mission-style campus in Palo Alto has been ground zero for the high-technology boom.
The members of the class of '93, like Srinivasan and Barrum, have seen their fates spun wildly apart by the Internet -- not so much because of any particular differences in cleverness or ambition, but because some of them happened to be very well placed as the transformation began.
Jim Hennessey, the school's provost and former dean of the engineering school, noted that 1993 was "right on the cusp of the Internet explosion." Like others on the Stanford faculty, he is acutely aware that the success of the Internet has ushered in a new era of student life.
On its statistical face, the Stanford class of 1993 was almost indistinguishable from its predecessors. It was split roughly 50-50 between men and women; about 7 percent of the class were African-American; 17 percent were Asian-American. Students' majors were not particularly skewed toward technology. Of the 1,730 degrees conferred, 6.6 percent were in engineering, 10 percent were in economics and 16.7 percent in biology or human biology.
But the more forward-looking graduates were ideally positioned for the Internet economy. Not only had they been exposed to many new technologies -- e-mail was nearly universal among Stanford undergraduates by 1992, as were experimental high-speed telecommunications lines -- but they also were entering the working world well before the Internet sector was swamped with start-ups.
Rich alumni are nothing new for the university that graduated William Hewlett and David Packard (class of '34), the founders of one of Silicon Valley's first high-technology businesses. But not so long ago, Stanford graduates expected success to take time.
Herrant Katchadourian, a sociologist, is tracking an earlier Stanford class, from 1981. In his book, "The Cream of the Crop," graduates at their 10-year reunion reported widespread contentment with their salaries, which averaged $54,000, roughly $18,000 above the average then for college graduates. Many said proudly they expected to earn as much as $1 million a year -- 10 to 15 years down the road. Perhaps when he revisits them next year at their 20-year anniversary for a new book, he will not find them so sanguine.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Srinija Srinivasan, now an executive at Yahoo, says her sudden riches caught her by surprise. But not all Stanford graduates migrated toward cyberspace.
But the Internet has given the class of '93 and its successors a far different timetable -- and even greater ambitions. Consider Krista Rollins, 27, a 1993 graduate who is now vice president for communications at Trilogy Software, based in Austin, Texas. She once thought that her biggest career concerns would be salary, title and the number of people she managed, but her idea of success has changed. "It used to be much more about the long term," she said. "Now it is about how to become very successful in the next three or four years." By her mid-30s, or 40 at the latest, Rollins hopes to be "very financially independent" -- that is, rich enough to quit.
The Stanford faculty has noted the changing culture with mixed emotions. James Montoya, vice provost for student affairs, has sensed the acceleration in the student life cycle since the early '90s, as undergraduates have moved to "Internet time."
"It used to be 'I'll get out of school and travel and see the world before I settle down,"' he said. "But what I hear now is 'This is the time to join a start-up, before I get old and have responsibilities, like a family."'
Needless to say, not every member of the class of '93 shares this computer-industry intensity about striking it rich. According to a class survey for the five-year reunion, some 12 percent called high technology (separate from engineering) their field of endeavor -- a big proportion, compared with most universities. But plenty of other graduates were still in medical training or had begun other careers, while some were taking time off to raise children. Still, the existence of such sharply divergent paths has made young graduates feel like players in some sort of modern lottery.
THE PROGRAMMER: A Physics Major Makes Good
Graham F. Spencer came to Stanford in 1989 with the intention of becoming a physics major, but he was drawn more to computers. After finishing school, he formed a company with five college friends to build a software navigator for the newly emerging Web. Spencer, whose major was computer science, is now acknowledged as the programming genius behind the portal known as Excite.
In the lean first years, he worked 80-hour weeks, getting by on beans and rice. But before the company's initial public offering in 1997, Spencer netted 600,000 shares of Excite stock; his stake would be worth $64 million at the time that the company merged with At Home in January 1999.
"Do I deserve the money I have? I struggle with that a lot," the soft-spoken Spencer said. "On some level, I'd like to believe I have certain skills that have made me successful. But how can being a little more competent at computer science make you so much richer?"
He describes himself as "anti-ostentatious," saying he does not go in for "three cars a year and champagne." He and his fiancee own a cozy new home in Palo Alto. In this money-flooded valley, of course, plain-vanilla dwellings can run $1 million, but this is no gizmo-filled palace; it is cramped enough that the dining table occupies part of the living room.
His great indulgence has been travel -- weekend trips to Vail, Colo., to snowboard, or to Hawaii to surf. Recently, he and his fiancee took a two-week trip to Italy, often staying in $500-a-night rooms on the Amalfi coast. He also works at home whenever he feels like it, padding around the house in his stocking feet and keeping his Siamese cat company.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Elaine Romanelli, a singer who prides herself on her spontaneity, misses being part of a generation that followed its heart.
Despite his low-key lifestyle, Spencer acknowledges that money has altered his relationships with peers. He met his fiancee at Excite and said it made a difference to both of them that she had her own substantial stock holdings and had "earned" her right to partake of the lush life.
By contrast, after his hometown newspaper in Columbia, S.C., splashed his net worth across the front page last year, high school friends, he said, started treating him "like some sort of billionaire, which I am definitely not."
Spencer plans to retire by the age of 40; in the meantime, he wants to get a better sense of how to live without organizing all his time around work. "I hope I get more comfortable with spending money," he said wistfully. "The problem is that the only people I know well who have this kind of money are like me -- they just got it. None of us knows what we want to do with it yet."
It is almost as if Spencer is waiting around for legitimacy. He has sold less than 5 percent of his stock and still puts in long hours at Excite as a kind of superprogrammer. While he says he is "basically a volunteer" -- meaning that he does not have to work if he does not want to -- he says he feels inextricably tied to the long-term success of the company.
"I deliberately try not to keep score on my own net worth, because that is gross at some level," he said. "I want to feel that we've built something sustainable, something great."
THE E-RETAILER: Lots of Money But No Dates
At 27, Robert Chea, founder of FogDog, does not look a day over 19 but has the poise of a 50-year-old chief executive. As the son of Cambodian immigrants who struggled to put him through school, Chea felt he had to be rich. "I'd be disappointed in myself," he said, "if I did not make a lot of money." But even as a sophomore in college, Chea wanted more than a fat bank account. He wanted autonomy.
Then, he remembers, his concept of success came from an AT&T commercial. The advertisement, which aimed to showcase the liberating power of the company's digital technologies, showed futuristic scenes of people receiving faxes in huts on tropical islands. "That was my measure of success," he said, "to be at a level where I had enough free time to sit on the beach, but was still connected to the rest of the world."
The path to controlling his destiny almost eluded him. He arrived at Stanford in 1989, interested in philosophy and archaeology. But his mother nudged him toward electrical engineering. Upon graduating, he applied to law school, thinking that he would pursue a career as a patent lawyer. But through a classmate's father, Chea got caught up in showing sporting-goods makers how to use the Internet and eventually formed the company that would become FogDog.
Chea, by his own accounting, has worked terrifically long hours seven days a week for five years. But the results are clear. Last fall, FogDog moved its headquarters from a nondescript, cramped office park outside San Jose, , to a glorious, light-filled loft near Redwood City, complete with stainless-steel fixtures and blond wood desks. It is the sort of office that Heather Locklear, the "Melrose Place" diva, would inhabit if she ever signed up to do a sitcom about being chief executive of an Internet start-up. Chea owns 1.15 million shares of FogDog, which went public in December. The shares are now worth $10.25 apiece, making his stake worth $11.8 million.
There have been personal costs. In his five-year class reunion book, for example, Chea said only half-jokingly that he had not had a date in five years. "It's by choice dammit," he wrote. At a recent birthday party, his friend Andy Chen, FogDog's co-founder, felt so bad for Chea that he invited all 70 employees to write down names of date possibilities in the form of a classified ad, letting Chea choose three.
Chea no longer has any desire to live on a tropical island and talk to his officemates -- essentially his whole social universe -- by phone. And he has less desire to absent himself from the technology culture that so enthralls him. "I can't imagine what it would be like," he said, "to be a lawyer and hear about the Internet all the time and not get to participate in it."
THE NONCONFORMIST: Looking Beyond The Internet Life
While the potential of the Internet economy has dazzled many graduates, it has left a distinct minority of the 1993 class feeling nonplused -- and left out.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
For Robert Chea long hours and seven-day workweeks at FogDog have led to millions, but a limited social life.
In another time, San Francisco might have seemed like a slice of paradise to Elaine Romanelli, a music major who prides herself on spontaneity and artistic aspirations.
But the Bay Area landscape has changed greatly since the 1970s, when Stanford was a center of radical student protest and San Francisco a mecca of counterculture.
Romanelli misses being part of a generation that followed its heart, regardless of money. She has tried hard to hold on and recreate a bit of that spirit. Her work life since college has included being a co-founder of a business that provided "haikus on demand" (two for a dollar) and quitting a respectable job in marketing to try her hand at professional singing. She lives in a dilapidated Victorian house in the grittier South End of San Francisco and frequents a local cafe that is a sympathetic home to creative types.
Still, as a Stanford graduate living in San Francisco, she has not been able to avoid the Web rat race. "The Internet is a pervasive presence here," she said. "Many, many jobs are Web-based, and e-commerce just sort of permeates everything."
Romanelli is a petite woman with delicate features, and her eyes flash when she is asked about the Stanford stars of the moment. She is far from worshipful. "The thing that gets to me," she said, "is that the people getting wealthy are young, single boys." In previous generations, she said, real wealth could take decades to accumulate, but her peers "don't have coping tools" for the vast sums they are now able to spend.
"They are getting rich and spending their money on 'supersoakers"' -- as exceedingly expensive toys like Jaguars and automated houses are known in the parlance of Silicon Valley. "They don't have a sense of philanthropy or giving back to the community -- or any community outside of work."
The expansion of the Web leaves Romanelli cold, even a little indignant. "A society of people who write to each other solely by computer is not my idea of utopia," she said. She has watched friends and classmates devote themselves to Internet start-ups, and she believes their lives are too narrow.
"There is an insane amount of money, but also an insane amount of work. It is like slave labor." The computer, she said, "was supposed to facilitate life; out here, it has worked the other way around."
THE WEB EDITOR: Feeling Fulfilled In Love of Work
Despite the financial gulf that separates Srinivasan, who joined Yahoo, and Barrum, who did not, they remain comfortable friends. There is no animosity or visible jealousy, just a tacit acceptance of changed circumstances. For a dinner of take-out Indian, Srinivasan pays and Barrum picks it up.
It helps that, like many other young Stanford millionaires, Srinivasan, who had an interdisciplinary major called symbolic systems, eschews aggressive displays of wealth. She lives in a loft-style duplex in one of the least fancy areas of Palo Alto, among graduate students and Internet worker bees. She dresses in print skirts with matching pastel T-shirts, a low-cost uniform of working women everywhere.
When she and Barrum, who majored in human biology, spread out on the tan sofas in her living room to chat, they talk about family (both are close to their parents), about friends from college and about eventually juggling careers with children (both are single). When it comes to money, both acknowledge they are more than a little stunned at the turns of fate. "Don't get me wrong -- Srinija has worked very hard and I always knew she would be successful at something," Barrum said. "But I never thought she'd be a big deal at a company at age 28, and she did not either."
Srinivasan, who as the fifth employee at Yahoo is probably worth tens of millions (she will not say), concedes that her sudden wealth has taken her by surprise.
"I've worked hard and I don't think I am dumb and I am deeply passionate about my work," she said. "But in no way has my effort been proportionately rewarded. Emotionally, that is something you have to come to terms with."
She considers herself successful, not because of what she is worth, she said, but because she loves what she does. As vice president and editor in chief of Yahoo, she leads a team that sorts the ever-expanding constellation of Web sites into categories that will make sense to subscribers. When tough calls arise at work -- like whether messianic Jews should be listed under Judaism or Christianity -- she has stomachaches that keep her awake at night.
"I honestly spend my days in ways that I feel are engaging, compelling and fulfilling and rewarding," she said.
Barrum nods at her friend's words. "When I was living away from Palo Alto, I felt there was all this excitement going on here and all these young people having a real effect on so many companies," she said. "I felt I was missing out. I came back not for the money, but for the excitement."
Still, she adds that living life in the Internet center, it is difficult to be 28 and not yet a success without occasionally feeling uneasy. "You can't deny that knowing people who have gotten wealthy changes your perspective on some things," Barrum said. "I feel like I am falling behind in the race to buy a house, a race to achieve monetary goals."
Will she have another shot at Internet riches? "Yahoo is not going to slip into the ocean," she said, "but it is not going to make a lot of millionaires anymore."
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