# The Stanford Review *The Stanford Review* is a student-run conservative and libertarian newspaper at Stanford University. [[Peter Thiel]] founded it in 1987 with his high-school friend Norman Book, and served as its first editor-in-chief. It is still published today. The paper matters well beyond campus. Its masthead is the earliest place where most of the people later known as the [[PayPal Mafia]] worked together. Its staff and alumni went on to form a hiring and investing network that runs through PayPal, [[Palantir]] and [[Founders Fund]]. And its early-1990s pages are the first written record of the worldview behind [[The Diversity Myth]] and, later, much of the [[Thiel Network]]'s politics. ## Founding (1987) Thiel and Book launched the *Review* at the end of Thiel's sophomore year. The first issue is dated June 9, 1987, and opened with Thiel's editor's note, "Stanford Review Is Here to Stay." It began as a monthly tabloid. The campus was fighting over the Western Culture course requirement and over a list of student demands known as the Rainbow Agenda. The *Review* cast itself as the voice of a quiet majority against what its first issue called a "vocal few." The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which runs the Collegiate Network of conservative campus papers, says the *Review* joined that network. It quotes Thiel calling the paper "my first entrepreneurial venture." Thiel ran the paper through 1989, the year he finished his undergraduate degree. He then stayed at Stanford for law school, which he finished in 1992. The name was not new. An earlier, unrelated *Stanford Review* had shut down in 1984, and the current paper has no connection to it, according to the *Review*'s own account of its history. ## What it published From the start the paper went after campus liberalism: university-distributed condoms, general-education requirements and "political correctness." Thiel biographer Max Chafkin, as summarized in *The New Yorker*, describes a paper fixated on sex. Its first issue ran a satirical column about a straight student who chose celibacy, and during the AIDS crisis it printed pieces against "unnatural forms of sex." Two episodes from early 1992 define the paper's reputation: - **The Rabois defense.** On Jan. 19, 1992, first-year law student [[Keith Rabois]], a Review contributor, shouted anti-gay slurs and wished death from AIDS on a lecturer outside his campus cottage. Stanford called the outburst protected speech and did not discipline him. The *Review* defended Rabois on free-speech grounds, and he soon transferred to Harvard. - **[[The Rape Issue]].** Days later the *Review* published a special issue on campus sexual assault. Its centerpiece was an article by [[David Sacks]] defending a senior who had admitted to statutory rape of a 17-year-old freshman. Sacks and Thiel then turned these campus fights into [[The Diversity Myth]] (1995), which revisited both episodes. The *Review* remains a contrarian voice on campus. In recent years it has written about Western Civ curricula, divestment campaigns and sexual-assault policy. ## The pipeline In 2017 a Stanford student, Andrew Granato, spent most of a year mapping the *Review*'s alumni for the student magazine *Stanford Politics*. He found almost 300 employment and investing relationships between *Review* affiliates and 60 institutions, nearly all in Silicon Valley. At least 25 of the paper's 58 editors-in-chief had worked or interned at a company founded by Thiel or by [[Joe Lonsdale]], and 24 affiliates had held jobs at Palantir. In 2023 *Fortune* called the paper one of the surest paths to a Silicon Valley career. Thiel never really left. He has chaired the paper's alumni board, and both *Stanford Politics* and *Fortune* report that he hosts dinners for current editors. *Stanford Politics* found the *Review* runs as a nonprofit funded almost entirely by donations. ## Notable alumni - [[Peter Thiel]]: co-founder, founding editor-in-chief (1987–1989); co-founder of PayPal, Palantir and Founders Fund - Norman Book: co-founder and managing editor; early PayPal employee, later a co-founder of a conservative publishing house - [[Keith Rabois]]: opinion editor; PayPal executive, later Square COO and a partner at Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund - [[David Sacks]]: writer and later editor-in-chief; PayPal's first COO and co-author of *The Diversity Myth* - [[Ken Howery]]: managing editor; PayPal and Founders Fund co-founder, later ambassador to Sweden and to Denmark - [[Jeff Giesea]]: editor-in-chief (class of 1997); Thiel Capital, later a promoter of "memetic warfare" and pro-Trump online organizing - [[Stephen Cohen]]: editor-in-chief (class of 2005); Palantir co-founder - Eric Jackson: editor and early PayPal employee; author of *The PayPal Wars* - [[Kevin Warsh]]: undergraduate writer (class of 1992); chair of the Federal Reserve since May 2026 ## Why it's on the map The *Review* is the root node of the Thiel network: the first institution Thiel built, and the place where he first recruited people. Its early pages show the network's style decades before it reached Washington. That style is provocation framed as free speech, hostility to campus diversity programs and dismissal of sexual-assault claims. And through its alumni, it remains an active recruiting channel. ## Connections - [[Thiel Network]] · [[PayPal Mafia]] — the networks the paper's alumni went on to build - [[The Rape Issue]] — the 1992 special issue on campus sexual assault - [[The Diversity Myth]] — the 1995 book by Sacks and Thiel that grew out of the paper's campus fights - [[The Contrarian]] — Max Chafkin's Thiel biography, the fullest account of the paper's early years - [[Elite Education Paradox]] — the anti-university stance of people elite universities produced - [[Intercollegiate Studies Institute]] — the conservative campus organization whose newspaper network the *Review* joined - [[Silicon Valley]] — where the paper's alumni network ended up