Infiltrating Network School
Slipping into an unabashedly utopian tech bro paradise
I first came across Network School while scrolling through Twitter and encountering this tweet by Balaji with a raised eyebrow that I think most normies - myself very much included - might have to a post on the internet beginning with “We got an Island” followed by “Through the power of Bitcoin.”
Adding to the hilariously utopian (dystopian?) premise, the island in question was Forest City, a supposed ghost town designed for close to a million people and victim of the Chinese property downturn of the last several years.
Regardless, there were a few things in the massive 11724 character tweet that piqued my interest:
Namely:
“...The purpose of the Network School is to articulate a vision of peace, trade, internationalism, and technology…even as the rest of the world talks about war, trade war, nationalism, and statism.”
“...Our initial material focuses on founding tech communities, as distinct from tech companies. As such it touches on everything from crypto, AI, and social media to history, politics, and filmmaking. It should be useful even if you’re just growing a traditional company or building a following. Over time, of course, every branch of the sciences and humanities becomes relevant when building a community.”
“So: the Network School is for Indian engineers and African founders, for makers from the Midwest and the Middle East, for Chinese liberals and Latin American libertarians, for Southeast Asia’s rising technologists and Europe’s remaining capitalists. It’s for everyone who doesn’t feel part of the establishment. But it’s definitely not only for tech, because a community does not run on tech alone.”
As someone who had been doing ecosystem and startup community work while trying to make something of himself while being based in the relative startup podunk of Tokyo, this was all very intriguing.
Nevertheless, I was occupied with a new job - and besides - this seemed a little bit too unhinged. I pressed the like button on the post and filed it away into the trivia corner of the memory closet.
This wasn’t the end of it, of course - six months later, I happened across this follow up post on Substack.
Is that Tokyo I spy?
“So, you should apply if you want to bootstrap a startup society that itself bootstraps startup societies. And the next version of the Network School is more explicitly oriented around this goal of society building.
Because that’s actually how many great universities were first founded. For example, Harvard was started with just a single building and a single instructor, to train future leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And the land grant colleges were built to teach frontiersmen how to run farms, dig mines, and erect buildings.
Now we’re establishing what an early stage startup society looks like, and the milestones it hits before becoming something bigger. Because the Internet now allows us to build societies from scratch, to go not just founder mode but founding father mode.”
As an sincere fan of Hamilton (which I honestly think that anyone working in startups should watch, even in 2025), this was too much for me to pass up.
I also happened to be in the process of reconsidering some life choices - I had just decided to leave the still-new job and wanted to spend some time exploring and getting out of my self-constructed bubble.
So I went ahead and clicked the apply button, filled out the form, and hammered out a 150 word essay about looking for inspiration for ecosystem/community building efforts where I lived.
Two days later, I got the following email:
After an online orientation, a flurry of emails, and a Discord invitation - I was on my way to a ghost town.
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Arriving at Network School
To cut to the chase: no, I haven’t been disappeared into the belly of a crazy doomsday cult filled with wild eyed tech broskies chanting incantations through the dark of night to summon a machine god to upload our collective consciousnesses into the cloud.
After getting picked up at Singapore’s Changi Airport and whisked to the campus across the border in a charter bus, we were greeted by a series of well-organized welcome desks placed in the hotel lobby that summarily provided us with:
-A hotel room key for the duration of our stay
-A local SIM card with 500GB of data
-The obligatory swag bag with a branded t-shirt
Meanwhile, community members were piloting a robot dog and demoing a VR experience to entertain the newcomers waiting in line.
After checking in our rooms and getting through an orientation session in the afternoon, we were free to do whatever we wanted with our time - true to the libertarian ethos of the place, it was emphasized that nothing was mandatory and people should feel free to do what they thought was best.
Contrary to my personal expectations, it’s actually been surprisingly wholesome. Burning Man, this is not.
The best way I can describe the actual lived experience at Network School in its current incarnation is a cross between a summer camp and a community college for digital nomads and startup founders, with a fledgling startup accelerator/incubator tacked onto the side.
There was one more unique orientation highlight: a serious fitness combine that we could sign up for to test our general fitness levels and measure improvement throughout our stay.
This was composed of a body composition measurement, the beep test, pushups, pullups, one-legged balancing, a vertical jump test, and a grip strength test.
To the credit of the (very fit) team conducting the tests, I found the overall atmosphere and attitude of the organizers to be pretty positive and encouraging.
So with the orientation day done, most people seemed to generally settle into the following schedule aligned with the offerings of the program:
6-7 AM - Wake up
7, 9, or 11 AM - Participate in Burn - 40-50 minute group workout class (think Barry’s Bootcamp)
Before 10 AM - Eat at the hotel breakfast buffet
10 AM-12 PM - Work
12-1 PM - Grab a Bryan Johnson-inspired lunch box with both vegan and meat options (Nutty Pudding included) on the 13th floor
1 PM-5 PM - Work and/or participate in community classes or listen to a visiting speaker
5-7 PM - Eat a (healthy) buffet-style dinner on the 13th floor and hang out with friends
6 PM-9 PM - Participate in evening programming, keep working, or just chill out and play table tennis
The community courses and student clubs (?) at Network School are by-and-large organized and taught for free by members of the community, with a pretty wide range of topics - during my time here - including:
-Diffusion Models
-Content Creation
-MBA-in-a-Box
-Financial Modeling
-Linear Algebra
-Healthy Habits
-Communication
-AR/VR
-”Man Camp” - teaching physical outdoor skills like suturing wounds and tying ropes
These were in addition to other regularly planned community activities like volleyball, soccer, meditation, basketball, bouldering, - not to mention talks by visiting guest speakers - with everything conveniently laid out on the official Luma page.
All-in-all Network School provided a full schedule for anyone who wanted one, albeit tagged with a warning that it might not get all your actual work done if you dabbled too much.
Having been in the workforce for a couple of years now, the setup reminded me of some of the best things about the university experience - a walkable, compact community paired with a group of people from around the world primed to be friendly and make new connections.
In addition, the self-selection (and selection process) generally seemed to do a good job at ensuring that participants had a lot in common.
To put in concrete terms: I haven’t had this many heated and slightly autistic discussions cum thought experiments with people passionately opining on the details of Peruvian politics and semiconductor supply chains since college.
While a majority of participants (myself included?) did fall under the category of “tech bro”, there was also a fair smattering of folks from a variety of backgrounds, which was hugely appreciated.
The general sense I had was that most participants were exploring and trying to figure things out, and genuinely idealistic and thoughtful.
So some random highlights:
- Waking up at 7 AM to work with a bunch of other folks on a community garden/farm project to a) make organic fertilizer, and b) haul and spread soil around for future planting. Probably the hippiest commune-y thing actually available to do right now at Network School, other than the regular Vipassana Meditation sessions.
- Getting caught up in a sprawling 2 hour+ conversation over dinner covering geopolitics and history and drudging up all the right parts of my international relations education on the first week
- Discovering that you can buy hardcover books at a local mega bookstore for a fraction of the list price and going on a shopping spree
- Learning that you can quite literally shop for promising IP from MIT and NASA to power startup spinoff ideas in a class taught by an ex-Mckinsey consultant/bee keeping enthusiast
- Running into friends of friends from San Francisco and then becoming friends with them
- Vibecoding my half-functioning mobile apps with Replit and v0 (it’s still magic!)
The Takeaways
At the risk of sounding like a puff piece, all-in-all I’ve been pretty impressed with what the team’s been able to pull together in a relatively short amount of time.
To my quite possibly eternal disappointment, this article is not shaping up to be a blockbuster takedown of billionaire hubris and Fyre Festival 3.
The startup/tech DNA is apparent with a lot of iteration and the team soliciting community members for feedback. Staff and community members have spun up web apps (not to mention the increasingly robust things you can do on ns.com with an account) on short notice to augment the experience or provide useful services like coordinating ridesharing to and from Singapore.
Most notably a lot of the staff members leading the charge to build out the program - and community members - actually seem to care. It’s not necessarily polished, but having hosted my fair share of startup and community events in the past, you can tell how much work has gone into making the logistics of the entire thing work.
This isn’t to say that the thing is perfect or above critical feedback: there are definitely parts of it that seem slightly disjointed and where you can tell that Network School is still figuring out its identity and what it’s building out for who.
The gender balance is still out of whack. There isn’t a set curriculum. I’m not quite sure about the investment terms of the NS Fellowship. The local laundromat is inconvenient. Breakfast ends too early at 10 AM.
What gives me confidence in the project is that a) people are actively providing feedback, b) the feedback loops are *far* faster than the vast majority of legacy institutions. Rooms are too humid? Team buys 250 dehumidifiers and sticks them in every room. Hotel gym doesn’t cut it? Assemble a state-of-the-art one from scratch.
More so than that, you can tell that there’s a very real optimism and a willingness to speak up amongst many members of the community - there’s a critical mass of people who actively try to make things happen and get people involved.
The tech industry gets a lot of criticism for trying to reinvent the wheel with a thin coat of VC-backed marketing slapped on as paint, and sometimes it’s well deserved. I think most people working in startups for a while - myself included - combat varying degrees of jadedness and burnout after a few years.
There is a lot of bullshit and grift out there. We do blow a lot of capital on companies that go to zero. Returns are sketchy, especially right now.
With that said, I was chatting with a friend from Uzbekistan (who was starting a company) over breakfast this past week when he explained that he appreciated Network School for helping him be “10 times more productive” than he was at home, which surprised me.
We talked about this at length and landed on the point that - while the value of coming here might not be quite as evident for techies in the lush pastures of Hayes Valley with its $300K salaries and $100M seed rounds - the environment that Network School provides represents a huge improvement for a certain type of person in much of the world.
Having spent the last few years in Tokyo, I’ve come to really, really, really appreciate the scarcity of people who actually try to build things in good faith.
And even more rare and valuable than that - despite billions thrown at this across the world - are a well-resourced communities that genuinely understands and maintains the optimism and courage and belief to cultivate this rare combination of high-agency nerdy idealists. I know how much we desperately need something like this in Tokyo.
Being surrounded by a bunch of optimistic people with a little bit of a plan, some gumption, and a lot of desire to actually build something - actually free from hidebound organizations - is something that I ultimately find incredibly refreshing. I’ll be leaving this place with quite a few genuine friendships and a broader international network of like-minded people that I genuinely look forward to keeping.
So what are the biggest takeaways from an actionable standpoint?
Startup programs should try to actually operate a little bit more like startups - lead with an autistically big vision of what this could become and hire a bunch of people who care, sweat the details, and iteratively execute with a bit of intensity. Actually build some software.
Community density and physical proximity still really matter - the difference between coming downstairs to breakfast with other likeminded people and needing to schedule a coffee chat and take an Uber 25 minutes away is huge
The experiential and aesthetic differences between something like this and the typical offspring sprung out of an establishment/corporate/government machine is painfully obvious.
Credibility + distribution in VC/early-stage startups is derived from individuals as much or more than institutions - a large percentage of people learned about this through Balaji’s Twitter/X account. There’s almost zero traditional PR for this - yet it has a several-thousand-person waitlist. The speakers and team members are here for him.
Get the right, serious people involved to win.
Fuck propriety. I don’t mean be mean - I mean create an environment where people can actually be authentic and comfortable and real to share war stories and feedback and debate big controversial topics and the future without being censured. Drop the suits.
True story - a visiting (prominent) speaker felt comfortable enough and among friends enough that he spontaneously took off his shoes and started doing one-legged squats in the middle of a presentation. The point isn’t whether that was appropriate or not, the point is that the environment was conducive to people dropping their guard and sharing real - and useful - opinions.
Ugh. I might be regurgitating Balaji’s talking points after all.
