Network School is one of the most talked about startup experiments in tech right now.
Most people who want to fix education write a blog post about it. Balaji Srinivasan went and built the thing.
In September 2024, Srinivasan launched Network School inside Forest City, a massive multi-billion dollar development built on artificial islands just twenty minutes across the water from Singapore. Not a conference. Not a weekend retreat. A functioning, 24/7, live-in community where founders, builders, developers, and creators wake up together, train together, build together, and get paid in crypto for real work they complete on the grounds.
The first cohort received over 4,000 applications from more than 80 countries. 128 people got in.
Balaji Srinivasan is not a first-time founder with a wild idea. He co-founded Counsyl, a genomics company later acquired by Myriad Genetics for $375 million. He served as CTO at Coinbase during one of the most turbulent periods in crypto history. He was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, arguably the most influential venture firm Silicon Valley has ever produced. And in 2022 he wrote a book called The Network State, laying out a vision for how online communities built around shared values could eventually become sovereign nations with diplomatic recognition.
Network School is the first physical proof of that idea.
The philosophy behind Network School is compressed into four words: Learn. Burn. Earn. Fun.
Learn means weekly talks and workshops from founders inside the community, hackathons, book clubs, and deep dives into AI, crypto, and Solana development. Past speakers have included Vitalik Buterin, Bryan Johnson, and Jesse Pollak.
Burn means a 24/7 gym, personal trainers, group workouts, and three nutritious meals a day.
Earn means a task-based platform where residents complete real work and get paid in cryptocurrency. Actual paid work, not a stipend.
Fun means doing all of this surrounded by 256 people who share the exact same ambitions.
Balaji did not build this alone. His co-founder is Donovan Sung, someone who rarely gets the credit this story deserves. Sung was early at Spotify, YouTube, and Xiaomi, where he worked directly alongside Xiaomi's founder, now China's richest man. He turned down the chance to lead Apple China to co-found Network School instead. That is the kind of person Balaji convinced to step away from a conventional dream career and go build an island society with him.
What comes next is what makes this story genuinely significant. Network School is not the destination. It is version one of a much larger build.
Version two is the current year-long programme for 256 members that kicked off in March 2025. Version three is a permanent campus being constructed nearby to eventually house thousands of technologists from around the world. Version four is open-sourcing the construction template so any community anywhere can replicate it from scratch.
After that: Dubai. Tokyo. Miami.
Whether Network School ever earns diplomatic recognition as a nation-state is a question for another decade. What is happening right now, inside those buildings twenty minutes from Singapore, is already something the world has not seen before.
Most people with ideas this big write another blog post.
Balaji built the thing.
Sources: Wikipedia · balajis.com · thebrewnews.com · americanbazaaronline.com · tannergesek.substack.com