The Network School

Dispatch from the Malaysian ghost-city startup society (that bootstraps startup societies)

This is part five in a series about societies—rather than businesses or governments—that have made a meaningful impact on the world. Read the series intro here, part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.

Imagine if two wealthy, well-connected, influential celebrities—Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, say—decided they’re leasing a nice hotel in a semi-deserted city in Malaysia. They want to create a global community that can copy-paste Kardashian/Hilton’s into the world. The more celebrities on earth the better, it would only be $1500/month to attend, and if you’re one of the 2% of applicants who get offers, you can stay as long as you want.

Say you applied. And you got in. And all you really knew about the actual on-the-ground experience was that it was trying to “recreate Los Angeles, without the weird local problems.” And that you’d have the chance to learn regularly from Kim and Paris about how to become an influencer. You didn’t know who else would be there, nor really what each day would consist of, nor much about the guest speakers that were promised to visit. You just basically knew you’d spend some time each day exercising (to get hot), some time learning to become a celebrity (it’s a skillset in itself!), and some time working your remote job to pay bills (say, a remote marketing job).

Oh, and you have to let them know in the next two days whether you can be there in 3 weeks, or else your spot’s given to the next in line.

If you’re an ambitious person, wouldn’t you at least think about it? Sure it could be the next Fyre Festival—but also maybe it could help elevate your life, connect you to your tribe, find your calling.

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So now imagine it’s not two Hollywood celebrities but rather two tech celebrities. It’s re-creating SF, not LA. And the community isn’t about becoming influencers, instead it’s to become founders of new societies. And it isn’t just to build new societies, it’s for societies that eventually become countries on the Internet (but diplomatically recognized nonetheless).

Then you would be talking about The Network School: an actual place, founded late 2024, located twenty minutes from Singapore in a Malaysian ghost town, where roughly ~350 tech and crypto people have congregated across two cohorts over the past 6 months.

And you would still just have a small glimpse at the sweeping vision of what co-founder Balaji Srinivasan has in mind for what this “school” could become.

Quick Context

Balaji (as he’s known online) is a prominent angel investor and author of The Network State (as well as a former a16z partner & Coinbase CTO). His co-founder, Donovan Sung, was early at Spotify, YouTube, and Xiaomi (where he worked directly with its founder, now China’s richest man)—and turned down leading Apple China to instead launch The Network School with Balaji. Together they’re a formidable pair, with unique ideas about where things are going and what’s worth working on in light of those predictions.

I’m writing as a current attendee of NS v2, aka the second cohort of Network School that began March 1 2025—so what follows is essentially a dispatch from The Network School, with observations from my three weeks here thus far.

Immediate Impressions

I came to Malaysia as a seeker, as someone looking for a place in a technological and political revolution. If “the contemporary nation-state has already been terminally melted by the heat of technological acceleration,” I came to Malaysia to bet on what’s next. And what I found was super interesting, if not quite what I expected.

Forest City is a tropical paradise, green and humid and manicured. The city is vibrantly alive with trees and eerily dead of people. When it rains it smells like Disneyland’s water flume ride. Which struck me as fairly apropos, given Forest City is, like Disneyland, a self-consciously artificial-feeling city that basically no one actually lives in.

The city’s a relic of China’s Belt & Road Initiative, offering emerging countries infrastructure in exchange for raw materials, yet covid meant the Chinese construction company in charge of building out this tropical wondercity sort of evaporated (or rather, their budget evaporated). The story’s more complicated than that, but that element alone hints there’s more afoot in this pocket of Malaysia—now a Special Economic Zone between Singapore and Malaysia—than meets the eye.

Occasionally you’ll have rainstorms that last three days. Which means sometimes you can sit on the covered balcony of your ninth floor room, overlooking the azure Johor Strait, watching a torrential downpour blur the visibility at the edge of the world. You can sit on the balcony and read and contemplate a bit what you’re doing across the globe, what you’re looking for, what’s not enough in your day-to-day that you’d be motivated (along with hundreds others) to follow Balaji here.

This curiosity was connected to the one question appreciating in importance as the weeks drew on. That question was, “Why haven’t we talked about new societies hardly at all?”

Unpacking That Question

The Network School is ostensibly a startup society that bootstraps startup societies. Its “One Commandment,” in Balaji’s parlance, is that “startup societies are good.” And a startup society is the first step toward becoming a Network State (where Network State = the “billion-dollar company” version of a startup society).

I wasn’t aware of this before getting here but sleuthing around Pronomos Capital’s website led me to discover that the “new society” space seems to suffer from a contest of definitions: here, for example, defines startup societies across three categories—physical startup societies, legal startup societies, and digital startup societies. Whereas Balaji’s definition has a much more specific meaning—basically a new society is as simple as One Commandment (not a whole basket of causes, just one) based on a counterfactual historical interpretation that grounds that one commandment as valid and reasonable.

Why bootstrap startup societies in the first place? There’s some speculation on-the-ground about this. And there’s some speculation (not unwarranted) that perhaps the mission of the Network School will evolve from its present version—beyond bootstrapping startup societies. But Balaji has painted a general picture of the society-bootstrapping-societies’ general glide path on Substack:

Here in v2 we’re in the “founding fathers / founding mothers” phase according to Balaji during onboarding—where the earliest thinking and work gets clarified, the society’s earliest tools are built, the earliest ideas are nurtured. But eventually, (ostensibly), everything will be rolled up into a template, which can then become useful to others seeking to build a society around their own idiosyncratic One Commandments.

Which brings us back to that gnawing question I mentioned, which is: why has leadership barely talked about startup societies? We’ve heard NS Core Team-sponsored lectures on Chinese VC (by TikTok’s first investor), whole-genome testing (by a Thiel Fellow who founded Nucleus Genomics), geopolitical dynamics (by Parag Khanna), and more—but hardly anything yet on new societies. Why?

One (obvious) hypothesis is that it doesn’t matter yet vis-à-vis cohort stage. It’s not the intent for this cohort to create new societies—its intent is to build this society, the bootstrapping-other-societies society. New societies come later.

Another hypothesis is that it doesn’t matter yet vis-à-vis timing within this cohort. There’s some evidence for this: if you look at Balaji’s lecture roadmap, it does eventually get to a talk on techno-democracy (one imagines for intra-society governance) then examples of parallel societies across verticals (education, healthcare, etc.). So maybe more gets clarified about new societies by Balaji unpacking parallel societies.

If I can give a frank report, the apparent lack of leadership interest on the subject of startup societies right now I think flows into lack of attendee interest on the subject too—with interest flowing instead into a newly-formed Bootcamp for founders, working on one’s own projects, and creating tools for this society (rather than creating new societies themselves). Time will tell if this is terminal (representing an actual shift in leadership priority) or just a temporary attribute representing a snapshot in time.

In Flux

In Justin Murphy’s review of The Network State in The Mars Review of Books, he writes this:

Though the creativity, originality, and generative quality of Srinivasan’s imaginarium is world-class, it is altogether a different question how these traits translate into a book, especially a book which purports to be both a technical social theory and an empirically plausible playbook. One may wonder if having “more good ideas per minute than anyone else in the Bay Area” is more of a curse than a blessing for an author of books.

But perhaps the book does not intend to cohere as a traditional treatise? What if the traditional social-scientific treatise is a dead form? If we understand The Network State as a new kind of book—written not by a practitioner of dead forms but by a master of two new, contemporary forms [podcasts, Twitter]—then it is possible to see the book as an early masterpiece in a genre that doesn’t yet exist.

Srinivasan brings to book authorship the mentality and workflow of the software engineer, referring to the present version of the book as version 1 and promising to “push updates to the book continuously.” If Srinivasan believes that the destiny of public discourse is to go “on chain”—indexed by the immutable, public ledger of a blockchain—then the formal quality of The Network State v1 matters much less than owning its on-chain signature and achieving enough impact to sustain improvements to the book over time. If v10 is a world-class theoretical treatise, and v1 (though imperfect) makes v10 possible—perhaps because v1 was strategically constructed, published early, and spread like wildfire—then v1 becomes, retroactively, an epoch-defining work rather than a clumsy instance of a previous genre.

I had a recent opportunity for a 1:1 meeting with Balaji. I came with six questions and we got through four. One of the questions was this: “Do you still see startup societies passing through union and archipelago to network state? Or how do you see that evolution path now, if not?” Balaji immediately heard the question behind the question, which was, “How much has your thinking changed since you wrote the book?” And his answer was straightforward: lots will change when he re-writes the book (which he intends to do), but he wanted to do practice before going back to theory again. The Network School (and the Network State brand writ large—conference, podcast, fund, etc.) is the practice—The Network State book is the theory.

So for those looking to the book for guidance, it’s a better bet to find your way to Network School—since this is where the latest ideas are being tested and refined, and where some of the theory will ultimately be drawn from.

Conclusion

My realpolitik take on all this is that it’s probably a slightly-risky game to live inside an experimental project led by wealthy, erudite, imaginative theorist-founders—because Willy Wonka is probably the closest literary analogue to Balaji right now. Things change, idea-ground you thought was solid seems to melt into air, and adaptation becomes key. But if that’s your thing—if you’re comfortable with possibly shifting sands—then exploring Balaji’s vision IRL could be a terrific fit for you. The NS Core Team are awesome people, things are run exceptionally well, and it’s hard to beat building and living within a tropical paradise among interesting new friends from across the world. 10/10 would recommend.

But as Murphy writes in the same review:

So if The Network State v1 heralds a new era of autonomous statecraft, should we now brace for the exponential proliferation of secessionary movements, shrouded by privacy tech and programmatic black markets? Probably not, according to Srinivasan, whose picture of the future is ultimately more centrist than cypherpunk. Indeed, if mild-mannered professionals are likely to find The Network State overly anarchic, crypto-radicals will find it overly genteel.

I came seeking a revolution. What I found in Malaysia was not that—at least not yet. But it’s still great. It’s certainly still interesting. And things can change on a dime—so maybe, as growth unlocks new possibilities, it turns a corner into the part of the idea maze most interesting to me: the creation of new societies. And despite the aforementioned risk, I’m here, aren’t I? aka, I’m historically not super risk-averse, and I’m excited to stay attached and engaged with Network School as it flourishes into what it’ll become.