In the history of American higher education, it is hard to top the luck and timing of the Stanford class of 1994, whose members arrived on campus barely aware of what an email was, and yet grew up to help teach the rest of the planet to shop, send money, find love and navigate an ever-expanding online universe.
They finished college precisely when and where the web was stirring to life, and it swept many of them up, transforming computer science and philosophy majors alike into dot-com founders, graduates with uncertain plans into early employees of Netscape, and their 20-year reunion weekend here in October into a miniature biography of the Internet.
A few steps from the opening party, the original Yahoo servers, marked “1994,” stood at the entrance to an engineering building, enshrined in glass cases like religious artifacts. Brunch the next morning was hosted by a venture capitalist who had made a key investment in Facebook. At a football game, the alumni brandished “Fear the Nerds” signs and gossiped about a classmate who had recently sold the messaging service WhatsApp for over $20 billion.
“I tell people I graduated from Stanford the day the web was born,” said another alumnus, Justin Kitch, whose senior thesis turned into a start-up that turned into an Intuit acquisition.
The reunion told a more particular strand of Internet history as well. The university, already the most powerful incubator in Silicon Valley, embarked back then on a bold diversity experiment, trying to dismantle old gender and racial barriers. While women had traditionally lagged in business and finance, these students were present for the creation of an entirely new field of human endeavor, one intended to topple old conventions, embrace novel ways of doing things and promote entrepreneurship.
In some fields, the women of the class went on to equal or outshine the men, including an Olympic gold medalist and the class’s best-known celebrity. Nearly half the 1,700-person class were women, and plenty were adventurous and inventive, tinkerers and computer camp veterans who competed fiercely in engineering contests; one won mention in the school paper for creating a taco-eating machine.
Yet instead of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created vast new ones, according to interviews with dozens of members of the class and a broad array of Silicon Valley and Stanford figures. “We were sitting on an oil boom, and the fact is that the women played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses,” said Kamy Wicoff, who founded a website for female writers.
It was largely the men of the class who became the true creators, founding companies that changed behavior around the world and using the proceeds to fund new projects that extended their influence. Some of the women did well in technology, working at Google or Apple or hopping from one start-up adventure to the next. Few of them described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley.
But even the most successful women could not match some of their male classmates’ achievements. Some female computer science majors had dropped out of the field, and few black or Hispanic women ever worked in technology at all. The only woman to ascend through the ranks of venture capital was shunted aside by her firm. Another appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine as a great hope for gender in Silicon Valley — just before unexpectedly leaving the company she had co-founded.
Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests. If the wealth among alumni traveled across gender lines, it was mostly because so many had wed one another. When Jessica DiLullo Herrin, a cheerleader turned economics whiz, arrived at the tailgate party, her classmates quietly stared: She had founded two successful start-ups, a living exception to the rule.
As the class of 1994 held its reunion weekend, its members were also coming to terms with the transformative industry some had had a hand in building. Amid the school colors and the proud families were the emblems of a world-beating class of entrepreneurs. CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times
Not everyone was troubled by the imbalance. “If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley,” David Sacks, an early figure at PayPal who went on to found other companies, emailed that weekend from San Francisco, where he was renovating one of the most expensive homes ever purchased in the city.
Without even setting foot back on campus for the reunion, he was stirring up old ghosts. Because Stanford was so intertwined with the businesses it fostered, the relationships and debates of the group’s undergraduate years had continued to ripple through Silicon Valley, imprinting a new industry in ways no one had anticipated. Mr. Sacks had fought the school’s diversity efforts bitterly; those battles had first made him an outcast among many of his classmates, and then sparked his technology career.
Every reunion is a reckoning about merit, choice and luck, but as the members of the class of ’94 told their stories, that weekend and in months of interviews before, they were also grappling with the nature of the industry some had helped create. Had the Internet failed to fulfill its promise to democratize business, or had the women missed the moment? Why did Silicon Valley celebrate some kinds of outsiders but not others?
“The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer,” said Gina Bianchini, the woman who had appeared on the cover of Fortune. “So why hasn’t our generation of women moved the needle?”
They finished college precisely when and where the web was stirring to life, and it swept many of them up, transforming computer science and philosophy majors alike into dot-com founders, graduates with uncertain plans into early employees of Netscape, and their 20-year reunion weekend here in October into a miniature biography of the Internet.A few steps from the opening party, the original Yahoo servers, marked “1994,” stood at the entrance to an engineering building, enshrined in glass cases like religious artifacts. Brunch the next morning was hosted by a venture capitalist who had made a key investment in Facebook. At a football game, the alumni brandished “Fear the Nerds” signs and gossiped about a classmate who had recently sold the messaging service WhatsApp for over $20 billion.
“I tell people I graduated from Stanford the day the web was born,” said another alumnus, Justin Kitch, whose senior thesis turned into a start-up that turned into an Intuit acquisition.
The reunion told a more particular strand of Internet history as well. The university, already the most powerful incubator in Silicon Valley, embarked back then on a bold diversity experiment, trying to dismantle old gender and racial barriers. While women had traditionally lagged in business and finance, these students were present for the creation of an entirely new field of human endeavor, one intended to topple old conventions, embrace novel ways of doing things and promote entrepreneurship.
In some fields, the women of the class went on to equal or outshine the men, including an Olympic gold medalist and the class’s best-known celebrity. Nearly half the 1,700-person class were women, and plenty were adventurous and inventive, tinkerers and computer camp veterans who competed fiercely in engineering contests; one won mention in the school paper for creating a taco-eating machine.
Yet instead of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created vast new ones, according to interviews with dozens of members of the class and a broad array of Silicon Valley and Stanford figures. “We were sitting on an oil boom, and the fact is that the women played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses,” said Kamy Wicoff, who founded a website for female writers.
It was largely the men of the class who became the true creators, founding companies that changed behavior around the world and using the proceeds to fund new projects that extended their influence. Some of the women did well in technology, working at Google or Apple or hopping from one start-up adventure to the next. Few of them described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley.But even the most successful women could not match some of their male classmates’ achievements. Some female computer science majors had dropped out of the field, and few black or Hispanic women ever worked in technology at all. The only woman to ascend through the ranks of venture capital was shunted aside by her firm. Another appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine as a great hope for gender in Silicon Valley — just before unexpectedly leaving the company she had co-founded.
Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests. If the wealth among alumni traveled across gender lines, it was mostly because so many had wed one another. When Jessica DiLullo Herrin, a cheerleader turned economics whiz, arrived at the tailgate party, her classmates quietly stared: She had founded two successful start-ups, a living exception to the rule.
As the class of 1994 held its reunion weekend, its members were also coming to terms with the transformative industry some had had a hand in building. Amid the school colors and the proud families were the emblems of a world-beating class of entrepreneurs. CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times
Not everyone was troubled by the imbalance. “If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley,” David Sacks, an early figure at PayPal who went on to found other companies, emailed that weekend from San Francisco, where he was renovating one of the most expensive homes ever purchased in the city.
Without even setting foot back on campus for the reunion, he was stirring up old ghosts. Because Stanford was so intertwined with the businesses it fostered, the relationships and debates of the group’s undergraduate years had continued to ripple through Silicon Valley, imprinting a new industry in ways no one had anticipated. Mr. Sacks had fought the school’s diversity efforts bitterly; those battles had first made him an outcast among many of his classmates, and then sparked his technology career.
Every reunion is a reckoning about merit, choice and luck, but as the members of the class of ’94 told their stories, that weekend and in months of interviews before, they were also grappling with the nature of the industry some had helped create. Had the Internet failed to fulfill its promise to democratize business, or had the women missed the moment? Why did Silicon Valley celebrate some kinds of outsiders but not others?
“The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer,” said Gina Bianchini, the woman who had appeared on the cover of Fortune. “So why hasn’t our generation of women moved the needle?”
by Jodi Kandor, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stanford Yearbook and Max Whittaker
