Balaji Srinivasan Concepts

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

by Gil Durán · 17 Aug 2026 · 317pp · 114,570 words

tech’s authoritarian turn had been years in the making, and it had accelerated sharply in the 2020s. And it wasn’t just about money. “Balaji Srinivasan and the network state—let’s talk about that,” Steve Bannon, right-wing mastermind and former Trump advisor, told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat

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cultish network of radical anti-democracy thinkers. Among them: Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer who developed an expansive new theory for dismantling democratic governance, and Balaji Srinivasan, a tech entrepreneur who designed a blueprint for replacing nations with corporate city-states. For many years, these ideas—that nations would crumble, that democracy

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an early fortune in the mid-1990s as cofounder of the once-dominant Netscape web browser, also struck up a friendship with Yarvin, as did Balaji Srinivasan, a Stanford PhD who had cofounded a Thiel-backed genomics company and who would soon join Andreessen’s venture capital firm. Yarvin had toiled in

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to move his ideas into mainstream politics would need to distance them from the blogger who joked about converting people into biodiesel. CHAPTER 3 EXIT Balaji Srinivasan and the Network State Yarvin’s over-the-top troll antics made him famous, but they also posed a serious liability. To most people,

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mainstream, the Dark Enlightenment needed a rebrand. This meant stripping out Yarvin’s florid gobbledygook concerning the virtues of monarchy, slavery, and mass murder. Fortunately, Balaji Srinivasan had been working on a more start-up-friendly presentation. “I’m going to talk about something fairly different today,” he said, smiling as he

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be small—city states, really—and that they should compete for citizens,” wrote TechCrunch’s Klint Finley. “That will probably sound familiar if you heard Balaji Srinivasan’s Y Combinator speech.” Finley then added a caveat: “I don’t know Srinivasan, but it sounds like he’d find neoreactionary views repulsive.” While

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Srinivasan hoped to make a killing with 21e6. “The company 21e6—shorthand for 21 million, the number of Bitcoins to be released—was created by Balaji Srinivasan, a Silicon Valley prodigy who had founded a successful genetics company from his Stanford dorm room,” wrote Nathaniel Popper in Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the

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all his tweets only drew more attention to them. This provided exactly the kind of minor scandal capable of derailing a nomination in those days. “Balaji Srinivasan, Who May Run the FDA for Trump, Hates the FDA. But Silicon Valley Likes Srinivasan,” declared Recode in a piece detailing his deleted tweet scandal

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committee and a new majority on the Board of Supervisors. They were just getting started. On July 4, 2022—one month after the Boudin recall—Balaji Srinivasan published The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The 474-page ebook, free to read online, was his most ambitious effort yet to

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with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask him if he’s alright,” wrote Karpf, concluding that “Balaji Srinivasan is a clown” and dismissing The Network State as “Galt’s Gulch plus blockchain.” “The Network State is the ranting of an unserious mind,

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off the search for a promised land at a conference in Amsterdam. On October 30, 2023, fifteen months after the publication of The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan hosted the first annual Network State Conference. A few hundred people—mostly men—gathered in an auditorium in Amsterdam, where Srinivasan declared that multiple efforts

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elites who reject democracy and seek to install a ‘CEO Monarch’ to rule by technological and financial dominance. This network includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Sacks, and Curtis Yarvin, among others. Once considered fringe, purveyors of this ideology have now been embedded into the core of government operations.” While

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is also an investor in something called the Balaji Fund, which invests in network state projects globally. Other investors in the Balaji Fund—named for Balaji Srinivasan—include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Coinbase board member Fred Ehrsam. Neither Johnson nor Ravikant mentioned the network state in their conversation, but it was

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; unsurprisingly, some of the usual suspects in Silicon Valley have also embraced the motto of multipolarity. “The multipolar world begins with a multipolar West,” wrote Balaji Srinivasan in 2021. In a screed against tech regulation, he said that multipolarity “legalizes technology” and laid out a three-step explainer: “1) The West no

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2026 when it bought its own media outlet, an online technology livestream called Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN). It’s all a chilling realization of Balaji Srinivasan’s call for Silicon Valley oligarchs to create a parallel media system that essentially replaces journalism with propaganda—a crucial element of any fascist movement

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’s White House Ballroom Include Coinbase, Ripple and Tether,” Block, October 24, 2025, https://www.theblock.co/post/376062/crypto-donors-trump-white-house-ballroom. “Balaji Srinivasan and the network state… They’re radicals”: Ross Douthat, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat (podcast), “Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism,” New York Times, January

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know it”: Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” New Yorker. CHAPTER 3 EXIT “If a company or a country… or to join a competitor”: Balaji Srinivasan, “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit” (talk, Y Combinator Startup School, Mountain View, CA, October 25, 2013), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A. “

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/10/03/marc-andreessen-the-world-is-going-to-see-an-explosion-of-countries-in-the-years-ahead/. “From Occupy Wall Street… in different ways”: Balaji Srinivasan, “Software Is Reorganizing the World,” Wired, November 22, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-

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rewards patience”: Anthony Lydgate, “Would You Ditch All This Chaos for a Country in the Cloud?,” Wired, September 6, 2022, https://www.wired.com/story/balaji-srinivasan-ditch-chaos-country-cloud/. “The first thirteen years… I stuck out”: Eric Jorgenson, The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the

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arrogance… stupid all the time”: Dana Kirschman, Facebook message to author, September 25, 2025. “He did act up sometimes… race/ethnicity/religion”: Former classmate of Balaji Srinivasan, Facebook message to author, September 21, 2025. “for more than 400 mutations”: Kim-Mai Cutler, “Through Dirt-Cheap Genetic Testing, Counsyl Is Pioneering a New

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: “About,” Andreessen Horowitz, accessed April 10, 2026, https://a16z.com/about/. he became the firm’s eighth general partner: Kim-Mai Cutler, “Counsyl Co-Founder Balaji Srinivasan Steps Up as Andreessen Horowitz’ Newest General Partner,” TechCrunch, December 9, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/09/counsyl-srinivasan-andreessen-horowitz/. Srinivasan had founded

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. Gox, Bitcoin’s $460 Million Disaster,” Wired, March 3, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/03/bitcoin-exchange/. “In May 2015… a year of runway”: Balaji Srinivasan, “The Turnaround,” Medium, April 16, 2018, https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814. “repurposing the datacenter’s mining chips”: Srinivasan, “The Turnaround.” “Our nuclear bases

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Top FDA Pick Delete All His Tweets?,” Gizmodo, January 15, 2017, https://gizmodo.com/why-did-trumps-top-fda-pick-delete-all-his-tweets-1791227569. “Balaji Srinivasan… Delete All His Tweets?”: Jones, “Trump’s Top FDA Pick,” Gizmodo. “Srinivasan Not Up for FDA Role”: Dan Diamond, “Dems Ramp Up Attack on

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politico-pulse/2017/01/dems-ramp-up-attack-on-tom-price-after-new-ethical-questions-218259. “Up until now… saying it out loud”: Peter Kafka, “Balaji Srinivasan, Who May Run the FDA for Trump, Hates the FDA. But Silicon Valley Likes Srinivasan,” Vox, January 15, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/1

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/14/14276530/balaji-srinivasan-trump-fda-twitter-andreessen-horowitz. “a service that rewards users”: Jon Russell, “Coinbase Buys Earn.com and Makes CEO Balaji Srinivasan Its First CTO,” TechCrunch, April 16, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/coinbase-buys

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Turmoil: Conflicting Visions,” Information, July 22, 2019, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-coinbases-executive-turmoil-conflicting-visions. “a woke white who can’t code”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “Hey @nathanielpopper, I’ll personally contribute to increased diversity at the New York Times Company,” Twitter (now X), December 29, 2020, https://x.com

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/balajis/status/1344136575580397569. “Guy who has built nothing”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “guy who has built nothing thinks he can critique guy who invented the web browser,” Twitter (now X), April 20, 2020, https://x.com

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/balajis/status/1252276198983385090. “I cofounded a clinical genomics company”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “I cofounded a clinical genomics company that sold for $375M. You work at Buzzfeed,” Twitter (now X), April 20, 2020, https://x.com/balajis

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/status/1252409386451922946. “Tech will align behind Bitcoin… MMT v BTC”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “Tech will align behind Bitcoin as part of the political realignment of the 2020s,” Twitter (now X), October 29, 2019, https://x.com/balajis

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/status/1189274759000985601. “It would accelerate many pre-existing trends”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “Going viral. What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years?,” Twitter (now X), January 30

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, 2020, https://x.com/balajis/status/1222921758375927808. “For a virus like this… minimizing the issue”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “For a virus like this, the time to ‘overreact’ is now, before it becomes pandemic,” Twitter (now X), January 30, 2020, https://x.

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com/balajis/status/1222929746432053249. “The Man Who Called COVID”: Marc Hochstein, “Balaji Srinivasan: The Man Who Called COVID,” CoinDesk, December 8, 2020, https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/12/08/balaji-srinivasan-the-man-who-called-covid. “The scene brought out… for a sudden exit”: Jacob Siegel, “The Red

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Organization, “COVID-19 Deaths,” WHO COVID-19 Dashboard, accessed April 10, 2026, https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths. “I don’t think people realize”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “I don’t think people realize that there is no normal to go back to anymore,” Twitter (now X), April 3, 2020, https://x

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no pragmatic housing, you’ll have to read San Fransicko,” Twitter (now X), November 11, 2021, https://x.com/garrytan/status/1458940887245811737. “anarchy and tyranny”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “America is becoming San Francisco, which combines anarchy and tyranny,” Twitter (now X), August 14, 2021, https://x.com/balajis/status/1426713139505078272. that was

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worse off than Rwanda: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “More seriously, the terminology of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ is obsolete. It’s now ascending vs descending world,” Twitter (now X), November 13, 2021, https

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://x.com/balajis/status/1459561479204524034. “[I]t may be easier to start”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “That doesn’t mean all is hopeless. Tech just needs to do what we’re good at,” Twitter (now X), February 3, 2022, https

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, February 12, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/12/san-francisco-tech-billionaires-political-influence. “A network state is a highly aligned”: Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State: How to Start a New Country (pub. by author, 2022), ebook. “A key point… the new SaaS”: Srinivasan, The Network State. “

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has the highest rate”: Marc Andreessen, blurb for The Network State: How to Start a New Country, by Balaji Srinivasan (pub. by author, 2022). “Balaji is a visionary… The Network State”: Brian Armstrong, blurb for Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State: How to Start a New Country (pub. by author, 2022). “We’ve started new

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currencies”: Vitalik Buterin, blurb for Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State: How to Start a New Country (pub. by author, 2022). “I legit believe YC is a prototype model”: Garry Tan (@garrytan), “Also

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a Right-Wing San Francisco,” New Republic, February 12, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/article/178675/garry-tan-tech-san-francisco. “If Red is the past”: Balaji Srinivasan, interview by Erik Torenberg and Dan Romero, “Balaji on the Tribal Lens, America’s Blunder, and His Plan to Save San Francisco,” Moment of Zen

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. “on bare land”: Gil Durán, “The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of ‘Blues,’ ” New Republic, April 26, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat. “The New Reality is here”: “REBOOT 2024,” REBOOT 2024, accessed April 1, 2026, https://rebootconference.org/index.html. “While there were a

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”: Caroline Haskins, “A Mysterious School for the Network State Crowd Is Now in Session,” Wired, September 23, 2024, https://www.wired.com/story/network-school-balaji-srinivasan/. the same designer linked to Próspera: Ryan Scavnicky, “Patrik Schumacher’s Liberland Metaverse Is Pure Cringe,” Architect’s Newspaper, April 25, 2022, https://www.archpaper

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the network state: Gil Durán, “The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of ‘Blues,’ ” New Republic, April 30, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat. “There is an entire ideology… a set of common aims and beliefs”: Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and

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org/project-russia-reveals-putins-playbook/. “All who share negative analysis… over the present decadence”: Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, 203. “The multipolar world begins”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “The multipolar world begins with a multipolar West,” Twitter (now X), September 18, 2021, https://x.com/balajis/status/1439348921252282370. multipolarity “legalizes technology

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”: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), “How multipolarity legalizes technology, in three steps: 1) The West no longer controls the world 2) So it no longer regulates the world 3)

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian · 4 Apr 2023 · 360pp · 107,124 words

ownership. 2. Among the most articulate radical capitalist exponents of the new political geography of the virtual world was another fan of The Sovereign Individual, Balaji Srinivasan. Born on Long Island in 1980 to Indian immigrant parents, Srinivasan earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford before launching a biotech start-up

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white-shelled android. The people were simulated and the sky was blank. At the same time, it was more than a video game. As in Balaji Srinivasan’s vision, it was a cloud city with coordinates that matched a real patch of territory: a muddy slip of land of just over two

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,” Antipode 52, no. 2 (March 2020): 562–80. 19. “Innovators Under 35,” MIT Technology Review (2013), https://www.technologyreview.com/innovators-under-35/2013/. 20. Balaji Srinivasan, “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,” Y Combinator Startup School, October 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A. 21. Drew Olanoff, “Google CEO Larry

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, see Harrison Smith and Roger Burrows, “Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit,” Theory, Culture & Society 38, no. 6 (2021): 153–57. 23. Balaji Srinivasan, “Software Is Reorganizing the World,” Wired, November 22, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead

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-to-physical-nations/. 24. Srinivasan, “Software Is Reorganizing the World.” 25. Marshall Kosloff and Balaji Srinivasan, “#3 Network State with Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and Founder of 1729,” The Deep End, podcast, May 26, 2021. 26. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in

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. For an influential pioneering example see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Hundreds of similar books followed. 28. Balaji Srinivasan, “How to Start a New Country,” 1729.com, April 9, 2021, https://1729.com/how-to-start-a-new-country/. 29. Srinivasan, “How to Start

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a New Country.” 30. Balaji Srinivasan, “The Network State,” 1729.com (n.d.), 12. 31. Srinivasan, “The Network State,” 6. 32. Srinivasan, “How to Start a New Country.” 33

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. Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter post, December 28, 2020, http://twitter.com/balajis. 34. Kosloff and Srinivasan, “#3 Network State with Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and Founder of 1729.” 35. See Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into

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the End of the World. 38. “The Rise of Cloud Cities & Citizen Journalism with Balaji Srinivasan,” The Paradox Podcast, July 29, 2020, https://podcastnotes.org/paradox-podcast/balaji-srinivasan-on-the-paradox-podcast/. 39. Kosloff and Srinivasan, “#3 Network State with Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and Founder of 1729.” 40. Srinivasan, “The Network State

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,” 9. 41. Balaji Srinivasan, “Bitcoin, China, the ‘Woke’ Mob, and the Future of the Internet,” Joe Lonsdale

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: American Optimist, August 11, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMuIyspn7s0. 42. “The Rise of Cloud Cities & Citizen Journalism with Balaji Srinivasan.” 43. Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter post, August 28, 2020, http://twitter.com/balajis. See Anna Verena Eireiner, “Promises of Urbanism: New Songdo City and the Power of Infrastructure,” Space

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., Stefan Eich, “Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective,” in Regulating Blockchain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 85–98. 47. Balaji Srinivasan, “The Network State: How Every Country Becomes a Software Country,” Startup Societies Summit, September 15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiLUPvUsdXg&t=3s

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-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 51. “The Rise of Cloud Cities & Citizen Journalism with Balaji Srinivasan.” 52. Tarnoff, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, 36. 53. Quinn Slobodian, “Cryptocurrencies’ Dream of Escaping the Global Financial System Is

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: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2019). 56. “The Rise of Cloud Cities & Citizen Journalism with Balaji Srinivasan.” 57. On the place they ended up see Justin Gaudet, “Paddle Prairie Metis Settlement,” Canadian Encyclopedia, August 3, 2021, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article

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. (New York: Verso, 2017). 59. Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (New York: Twelve, 2009). 60. Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter post, May 13, 2021, http://twitter.com/balajis. 61. Quoted in Henley & Partners, “Record-Breaking Global Mobility Grounded by COVID-19 Pandemic,” PR Newswire

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Summit: Startup Societies in a Post-Covid World, May 1–2, 2020. Streamed online. 64. Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter post, January 13, 2020, http://twitter.com/balajis. 65. Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter post, January 13, 2020, http://twitter.com/balajis. 66. Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter post, January 13, 2020, http://twitter.com/balajis. 67. Joel Stein, “Bienvenidos a Miami

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-ceo-compound-photos-2020–10. 69. Stein, “Bienvenidos a Miami”; and Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, 34. 70. Balaji Srinivasan, “The Start of Startup Cities,” 1729.com, May 3, 2021, https://1729.com/miami. 71. Dick Simpson, Marco Rosaire Rossi, and Thomas J. Gradel, “Corruption

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-13-final2.-1.pdf. 72. Thomas Burton, “Donald Trump Looking Beyond Traditional Medical Experts for FDA Commissioner,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2017, ProQuest. 73. Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter post, March 16, 2021, http:/twitter.com/balajis, called the project 1729, a reference to the lowest number that can be created by adding

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, he said mobile phones would help find what he called “dark talent.” Kosloff and Srinivasan, “#3 Network State with Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and Founder of 1729.” 74. Parag Khanna and Balaji Srinivasan, “Great Protocol Politics,” Foreign Policy, December 11, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-web3-great

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street

by Jeff John Roberts · 15 Dec 2020 · 226pp · 65,516 words

a large legal settlement from Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and plowed it into a bitcoin fortune. A visionary and crypto zealot named Balaji Srinivasan turned up. Craig and others thought he looked like a cross between a drug dealer and a street person with his torn Nikes and stained

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of Silicon Valley would soon be competing with a global base of token buyers to invest in new companies. The essay’s author was Balaji Srinivasan—the same Balaji Srinivasan who had turned up at Coinbase three years before looking like a hobo/drug dealer with Ivy League ideas, and who was now a

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the company. Someone, Brian thought, who could command like a general. What they got was more like a rogue special forces soldier. 15 Power Struggle Balaji Srinivasan crumbled a Tate’s chocolate chip cookie into a bowl, reached for another from the package and crumbled that up, too. Then a third. He

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used not just as a currency but as a system of tracking ownership and for tamper-proof record keeping. One obvious use for tokens, says Balaji Srinivasan, is for cap tables—the documents that show who owns how many shares in a company, a fixture of the startup and venture capital worlds

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and beyond. But he was hardly the first from the crypto world to warn about what was coming as coronavirus emerged—that designation belonged to Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former CTO who had almost burned the company to the ground in order to save it. Months before the virus hit the United

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

by Nathaniel Popper · 18 May 2015 · 387pp · 112,868 words

secret and open to only a small elite. The company 21e6—shorthand for 21 million, the number of Bitcoins to be released—was created by Balaji Srinivasan, a Silicon Valley prodigy who had founded a successful genetics testing company from his Stanford dorm room. In the spring of 2013, Balaji was quietly

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put some of his own money into the Series A fund-raising round of the secretive Bitcoin mining company, 21e6, created by the Stanford wunderkind Balaji Srinivasan. Since then, in addition to the $25 million that Andreessen Horowitz had put into Coinbase, the firm had also made a secret $25 million investment

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their laptops, was indeed well on the road to becoming an industrial enterprise. One of the big players was 21e6, the secretive project founded by Balaji Srinivasan and funded, in part, by Andreessen Horowitz. Balaji had been among the first to see that as the chips became more high powered, the factor

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; Andy Dresner; Paul Walker; Marty Chavez; Alexander Kuzmin; Nicole Navas; Lyn Ulbricht; Josh Dratel; John Collins; Jennifer Shasky Calvery; Sebastian Serrano; Chris Larsen; Chris Dixon; Balaji Srinivasan; Marc Andreessen; Kim Milosevic; Brian Armstrong; Fred Ehrsam; John O’Brien; Belle Casares; Patrick Strateman; Yifu Guo; Marcie Braden; Alex Waters; Brian Klein; Nejc Kodric

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open the door: A transcript of Balaji’s talk at Startup School 2013 is available at https://nydwracu.word press.com/2013/10/28/transcript-balaji-srinivasan-on-silicon-valleys-ultimate-exit/. 299The prosecutors had e-mails in which: Sealed complaint against Charlie Shrem filed by IRS Special Agent Gary Alford, January

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words

to take very seriously the right-wing political ambitions of San Francisco tech moguls. Duran had published articles on Tan and his wealthy colleagues, like Balaji Srinivasan, a tech investor who was promoting an esoteric but stubbornly influential concept called the Network State. Drawing on the anti-state and corporate charter city

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was on the island of Roatan. It was called Próspera and it had accrued $120 million in venture capital support from Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, and other prominent investors.10 They also obtained funding from Pronomos, a financial firm headed by Patri Friedman, the grandson of conservative economist

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up real estate, forming new political alignments, and taking over existing political institutions at the local level. With his Network State concept, the tech investor Balaji Srinivasan espoused such a program, giving it an almost proudly neocolonialist gloss. His proposed “tech Zionism” project would divide San Francisco between luddite “blues” and pro

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the Trump Tower meeting with tech CEOs in December 2016. He proposed candidates for administration appointments, though some of his choices, like Network State-propagandist Balaji Srinivasan as head of the FDA, didn’t pan out. While Thiel was supposedly out of politics—at least as a donor—by the 2024 cycle

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.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-brownsville-texas.html 19 https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat 20 Author interview with Gil Duran. 21 https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHlcAx-I0oY chapter 11: the great solano

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words

strong financial and social ties to Thiel—have decided that even the act of reporting critically on Thiel and his friends is no longer acceptable. Balaji Srinivasan, an investor who was one of Thiel’s picks to lead the FDA under Trump—has argued that the media deserves to be destroyed and

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Burnham—was supposed to be desirable. But when Burnham refused to leave, Yarvin’s investors, a group that included Thiel and another libertarian venture capitalist, Balaji Srinivasan, sided with Yarvin. Burnham was removed from the Tlon office in October. A month later, Yarvin shared plans with Thiel and other investors to rectify

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citizenship and free themselves from the undue burdens of nationhood. The work’s influence had also shown up in a talk by Thiel’s friend Balaji Srinivasan, a libertarian venture capitalist who’d invested alongside him in Curtis Yarvin’s company. At a Y Combinator event for young entrepreneurs in 2013, Srinivasan

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progress, he’s willing to take that trade.” One of Thiel’s allies in this crusade, and his top pick to lead the FDA, was Balaji Srinivasan, the Stanford computer science lecturer and cryptocurrency entrepreneur who’d invested alongside Thiel in Curtis Yarvin’s company and shared Thiel’s views on the

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predicted it would. Even Thiel’s fruitless efforts to send the Trump administration in a far-right direction suddenly looked a little bit more reasonable. Balaji Srinivasan, his FDA candidate, whom even Trump’s wildest adviser, Steve Bannon, had considered “crazy,” raised the alarm about the dangers of a pandemic in January

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein · 23 Apr 2018 · 282pp · 81,873 words

world. Others who shared a vision on devolved government tended to gloss over what might be the messy parts. Andreessen-Horowitz partner and Counsyl cofounder Balaji Srinivasan has proposed “cloud cities” and “cloud countries” of like-minded renunciates to be organized online. With $2.5 million in backing from his own VC

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Streitfeld and Jacqueline Williams, “Peter Thiel, Trump Adviser, Has a Backup Country: New Zealand,” January 25, 2017, nytimes.com. Srinivasan laid out the grand design Balaji Srinivasan, “Software Is Reorganizing the World,” November 22, 2013, wired.com. His comrade in resentment Michelle Cortez and Anna Edney, “Trump Is Considering Another Thiel Associate

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words

these architectures of proto-sovereignty; they evangelize them, sometimes ingeniously, sometimes anxiously, and sometimes idiotically. Demonstrating all three of these in various measure, venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan summarized the rationale of secession in his Internet-famous speech “Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit.”32 His address is worth examining for what it clarifies

After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order

by Rana Dasgupta · 27 Apr 2026 · 686pp · 188,424 words

. Perhaps this is less obviously impracticable: some wealthy individuals have already done something of the sort. Their exit is turned into a political ideal by Balaji Srinivasan, visionary of the ‘network state’ – which he defines as ‘a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the

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: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 2. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 Conclusion: After Nations Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State: How to Start a New Country (Amazon Kindle, 2022). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Divya Siddarth, Anne-Marie Slaughter and E. Glen

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott · 9 May 2016 · 515pp · 126,820 words

Santori, Counsel, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP Frank Schuil, CEO, Safello Barry Silbert, Founder and CEO, Digital Currency Group Thomas Spaas, Director, Belgium Bitcoin Association Balaji Srinivasan, CEO, 21; Partner, Andreessen Horowitz Lynn St. Amour, Former President, The Internet Society Brett Stapper, Founder and CEO, Falcon Global Capital LLC Elizabeth Stark, Visiting

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an economy are tools like a mobile phone and some kind of Internet access, the portal through which people interact with different value systems. Dr. Balaji Srinivasan, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a lecturer at Stanford University, said, “If you can access the Internet on a mobile phone, suddenly you’re

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Soto, November 27, 2015. 29. Interview with Haluk Kulin, June 9, 2015. 30. E-mail correspondence with Joe Lubin, August 6, 2015. 31. Interview with Balaji Srinivasan, May 29, 2014. 32. www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/starting-a-business. 33. Interview with Haluk Kulin, June 9, 2015. 34. Analie Domingo agreed to