Contrary to the post-COVID trend of tech decentralization, the intense talent and capital requirements of AI have caused a rapid re-centralization. Silicon Valley has 'snapped back' into a hyper-concentrated hub, with nearly all significant Western AI companies originating within a small geographic radius.

Stanford's business school uses an improv game where students rapidly list items in a category, prioritizing speed over accuracy. This exercise demonstrates that generating a high volume of ideas, even imperfect ones, is the most effective path to finding the best idea, as the best concepts often emerge late in the process.

Elite universities with massive endowments and shrinking acceptance rates are betraying their public service mission. By failing to expand enrollment, they function more like exclusive 'hedge funds offering classes' that manufacture scarcity to protect their brand prestige, rather than educational institutions aiming to maximize societal impact.

Professor Susan Athey highlights that the school's most significant academic breakthroughs, like Nobel Prize-winning work in market design, originated not from abstract theorizing but from engaging directly with industry challenges. This connection to real-world problems created a feedback loop that led to cutting-edge, field-defining theoretical research.

Quora's initial engineering team was a legendary concentration of talent that later dispersed to found or lead major AI players, including Perplexity and Scale AI. This highlights how talent clusters from one generation of startups can become the founding diaspora for the next.

Palantir is challenging elite academia with its Fall Fellowship, which pays 18-year-olds instead of charging tuition. The program recruits top students who would otherwise attend Harvard or Yale, offering performance reviews instead of grades and real-world national security projects instead of classes, representing a direct corporate alternative to university education.

The GSB enhances the traditional case study method by first having students analyze a case, like DoorDash. Then, the actual protagonist—the founder and key investors—are brought into the classroom. This allows students to directly challenge their assumptions and engage with the real-world complexities behind the decisions.

The GSB's enduring value lies in its resistance to offering 'one size fits all war stories.' Instead, it focuses on teaching analytical instrumentation and fundamental social science. This approach equips leaders to solve novel future problems, like harnessing AI, rather than just applying solutions from the past.

In 1969, Dean R.J. Miller mandated that 10% of GSB students be in a 'public management program.' The goal was to equip future government leaders with the same rigorous business education as their private sector counterparts, aiming to improve the operational effectiveness and expertise within the public sector.