One company, which the Wall Street Journal called “The Epitome of a Stanford-Fueled Startup,” encapsulated in every respect the sham of the Silicon Valley meritocracy, from its charmed beginnings to its ignominious downfall. This company, called Clinkle, secured investors before settling on a product. Clinkle was, in the words of its founder, Lucas Duplan, “a movement to push the human race forward,” but beyond that no one seemed quite sure what the company was all about. Duplan was a nineteen-year-old Stanford computer science major and an insufferable showboat. No need to dwell on Duplan’s shortcomings, however—the important thing is that his academic adviser was Stanford president and Google board member John Hennessy. Along with Hennessy, several professors backed Duplan’s charge into the private sector, endorsing what the Wall Street Journal called “one of the largest exoduses” in departmental history. More than a dozen students abandoned their studies to work for Duplan, who rented a house to serve as Clinkle’s headquarters-cum-dormitory with money invested by his parents and a VC firm, Highland Capital. One company, which the Wall Street Journal called “The Epitome of a Stanford-Fueled Startup,” encapsulated in every respect the sham of the Silicon Valley meritocracy, from its charmed beginnings to its ignominious downfall. This company, called Clinkle, secured investors before settling on a product. Clinkle was, in the words of its founder, Lucas Duplan, “a movement to push the human race forward,” but beyond that no one seemed quite sure what the company was all about. Duplan was a nineteen-year-old Stanford computer science major and an insufferable showboat. No need to dwell on Duplan’s shortcomings, however—the important thing is that his academic adviser was Stanford president and Google board member John Hennessy. Along with Hennessy, several professors backed Duplan’s charge into the private sector, endorsing what the Wall Street Journal called “one of the largest exoduses” in departmental history. More than a dozen students abandoned their studies to work for Duplan, who rented a house to serve as Clinkle’s headquarters-cum-dormitory with money invested by his parents and a VC firm, Highland Capital.

With the prestige and power of Stanford’s leadership behind it, and still without a solid business plan, Clinkle raised $25 million in seed money to develop some sort of app that would exist somewhere in the “mobile-payments space.” The predictable squandering of that impressive sum was chronicled with due skepticism and schadenfreude on Gawker’s Valleywag blog and elsewhere, though many a suck-up rose to Clinkle’s defense. Employees were resigning in frustration even before pictures emerged of Duplan posing like P. Diddy with handfuls of cash. Layoffs followed. Panicked investors called in a series of experienced managers as “adult supervision,” one of whom quit within twenty-four hours. Long overdue and well over budget, Clinkle eventually launched a digital payments service, and later pivoted to a digital twist on an old-fashioned lottery. Clinkle became a punch line and Duplan a pariah. But the real blame belonged to some members of the Stanford administration and the sheeplike VCs of the Valley. It seemed to me that they were the ones who were seeking to exploit the bountiful energy of relatively naïve tuition-paying kids to make a fast buck on pointless, unworkable, and otherwise dubious investment schemes. The dropout entrepreneurs were just eager saps who, when handed shovels, dug holes for themselves.