Curated playlist
Stanford University alumni
- John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck once stole bacon from a local produce market to survive. During the Great Depression, he and his first wife lived on fish and crabs he gathered from the sea, vegetables from his garden, and welfare when those sources failed.…
- Mike KriegerMichel Krieger was born on the 4th of March, 1986, in São Paulo, Brazil, and by the time he turned 32, he had helped build one of the most-used platforms on earth. In 2010, still fresh from Stanford University, Krieger co-founded Instagram…
- Margaret L. KingMargaret L. King became an assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton in 1969, three years before finishing her doctorate at Stanford. Born in 1947, she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1967 and earned a master's…
- Carl WiemanCarl Wieman grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, in a family with an unusual range of intellectual passions. His paternal grandfather, Henry Nelson Wieman, was a religious philosopher of German descent. His mother came from a white Anglo-Saxon…
- Eric Allin CornellEric Allin Cornell was born on the 19th of December, 1961, in Palo Alto, California, to parents who were finishing graduate degrees at Stanford University. Within two years, the family had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his…
- Sally RideSally Kristen Ride was born on the 26th of May, 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and died on the 23rd of July, 2012, having spent more than 343 hours in space and nearly three decades of her private life hidden from the world. She was…
- Do KwonDo Kwon named his newborn daughter Luna in April 2022, writing publicly: "My dearest creation named after my greatest invention." Within weeks, the cryptocurrency bearing that name had collapsed to virtually nothing. Almost $45 billion in…
- Dario AmodeiIn November 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI called Dario Amodei with an extraordinary offer. They wanted him to replace Sam Altman as the company's chief executive. Then they raised a second proposal: a potential merger between…
- Jensen HuangJensen Huang founded Nvidia at age 30 in a Denny's restaurant booth in East San Jose, California, and has led the company every single day since the 5th of April 1993. That diner was not a random choice. Huang had worked the graveyard…
- Hans MoravecHans Peter Moravec was born on the 30th of November 1948, and he grew up to ask a question that most scientists would not dare put on paper: what happens when machines become smarter than we are? Moravec is an Austrian-born Canadian…
- Sam AltmanSam Altman got his first computer at age eight: an Apple Macintosh. Within a few years he was disassembling it to examine the hardware inside. That childhood instinct to open things up and understand how they work has since made Altman one…
- Richard D. WolffRichard D. Wolff grew up in New Rochelle, New York, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany. His father had been a lawyer in Cologne, Germany. In America, that credential was worthless; the man found work in a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio.…
- Victor Davis HansonVictor Davis Hanson grew up on a farm outside Selma, California, in the San Joaquin Valley, on land his family had worked since the 1870s. That is not a minor biographical footnote. It is the thread that runs through almost everything he…
- Sharmeen Obaid-ChinoySharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was seventeen years old and already filing investigative reports for a local English-language newspaper in Karachi. That was not a plan she had mapped out. Her mother, a social worker named Saba Obaid, had simply told…