A Tech Founder Wanted to Start a New Country. An Actual Country Got in the Way.

ISKANDAR PUTERI, Malaysia—Tech founder Balaji Srinivasan says he believes America is descending into anarchy. His solution was to build a new country from scratch.

He left Silicon Valley and, as a first step, tried to create a rival tech community in Asia. He set up a campus with co-working spaces, a high-end gym and meals designed by longevity guru Bryan Johnson. He surveyed potential residents on their views on politics and pronatalism, the high-birthrate philosophy Srinivasan promotes.

“Bryan Johnson wants to live forever. Sam Altman wants to build a machine of superintelligence. Elon wants to get to Mars,” Srinivasan said on a recent podcast. “I just want to start a new country.”

The setting for this experiment was as surreal as it was grand: a hotel in a $100 billion, Chinese-built luxury development in Malaysia that became a mostly empty ghost city.

Now two years in, his vision—called the Network School—is colliding with the real world.

Participants complained about moldy rooms, dead nightlife and not enough women—a downside familiar to Silicon Valley.

Then came an even bigger hurdle: the actual country they were living in.

Malaysian authorities launched an investigation into the school’s residents after an Instagram post said the project housed citizens from Israel. Muslim-majority Malaysia doesn’t officially recognize that state and requires Israelis to get special permission to enter the country. Authorities said they haven’t found wrongdoing.

But last week the local government ordered the project to shut down over unrelated licensing issues. Within hours, Srinivasan said on social media that he had signed an agreement to open a campus in Kazakhstan.

In a response to questions for this article, Srinivasan wrote on X that the Instagram post was a hoax, and that “we respect Malaysia’s sovereignty and are abiding by all Malaysian law.”

He said mildew is a common regional issue his team fixes as necessary. People came to the Network School for self-improvement rather than partying, and there were plenty of women, he added. “We are absolutely not simply for the ‘tech bro,’ but for the tech dad, tech mom, tech family, and tech children,” Srinivasan said.

Other tech leaders are trying to carve out independent enclaves. Patri Friedman, a software engineer and grandson of economist Milton Friedman, first tried building floating city-states, and then launched a fund to seed “startup cities.” He said investors and advisers include Srinivasan, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

One of its investments is Próspera, launched on a Honduran island in 2017, offering residents low taxes and light regulation. But Honduras’s legislature soured on such special economic zones and moved to end them. Próspera sued the state. A project spokesman said Próspera operates under Honduran sovereignty, and it created jobs and brought investments to the country.

Srinivasan said that in the distant future, the Network School may get its own special economic zone, or “we may build an artificial island from reclaimed land off the shore of a willing country, or we may even accompany Elon to Mars.”

Srinivasan, 46, grew up on Long Island the son of Indian immigrant physicians. He once said he was bullied at school as “the only brown kid among hundreds of people”—and then unfairly punished for physically defending himself. “I learned early on that you’ve got to stand up for yourself, that the fix is in.…The state is against you.”

After earning Stanford engineering degrees, he co-founded a genetic screening company, worked at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and was briefly chief technology officer at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

“Balaji is a brilliant guy,” Coinbase head Brian Armstrong said in a podcast last year, adding that he brought “an enormous amount of value.”

Srinivasan was also “kind of unmanageable,” he said. “About once a week, someone would come into my office as CEO and say, ‘I can’t work with Balaji, and he’s causing so much collateral damage.’”

Srinivasan said on X that he doesn’t start conflict for the sake of it. “In general I am mostly good cop and a reluctant bad cop,” he said.

Srinivasan is an advocate of boosting Earth’s birthrate, in part to settle new frontiers.

“You’re going to need a lot of people,” he said at a 2023 conference for the movement known as pronatalism, “because a lot of people are going to die in space exploration, and there’s a lot of planets out there.”

Srinivasan also believes few countries that predate the internet will survive, and that the U.S. in particular is on the decline, driven by political polarization.

“In like one generation, it becomes at a minimum like Protestant-Catholic or Sunni-Shiite or something like that,” he said in a 2022 podcast. Combined with factors including inflation and a heavily armed population, he said “American anarchy, unfortunately, is sort of where we’re heading.”

In his 2022 book, “The Network State,” Srinivasan offered a peaceful alternative, saying it is better to build new societies from scratch.

His playbook: First, people with shared beliefs form an online community. Next, members help each other earn money, pool funds to acquire land and, once big enough, seek recognition as a state.

To test the concept, Srinivasan headed to a nearly deserted artificial island about 100 miles from the equator.

On the southern tip of Malaysia, seaside high rises built for tens of thousands of people sit mostly empty. The development, Forest City, is a symbol of China’s real estate bust, defined by overborrowing and overbuilding at home and abroad.

The area sits across the bridge from the wealthy city-state of Singapore, where Srinivasan said he is now a citizen. Federal records indicate he and his wife renounced American citizenship in 2023.

In 2024, Srinivasan rented space in a hotel and opened the Network School. Part tech incubator, part self-improvement retreat, it started at $1,500 a month for room and board, classes and beachside digs. People could live there or stay for as short as a month. Families could hire nannies.

Srinivasan said the first cohort drew 128 people, while the second, in 2025, offered 256 spaces. Recent attendees estimated a few hundred participants at a time.

The idea was for people to come and learn, work on their business, and hit the gym and eat right to gain the strength to build their own utopias elsewhere. “You should apply if you want to build yourself up while also building a startup society that bootstraps other startup societies,” its website said.

On a recent weekday, about two dozen foreign attendees worked on laptops in the Network School’s cafe, which sold health supplements including creatine and collagen peptides. Some chatted about coding while, elsewhere in the hotel, a dozen children ran around.

Current and former residents raved about the sheer convenience and camaraderie with fellow adventurers. Srinivasan’s ideology was a draw for Pranit Garg, a 29-year-old digital nomad who moved here in March, but his favorite part was the gym and all-you-can-eat protein.

“Come for the vision,” he said. “Stay because you’re getting jacked.”

Early applicants were quizzed on their views on topics including capitalism and pronatalism. But by the time Priyansha Dhoot attended this April, she had to only write an essay about why she wanted to attend. The 26-year-old college program manager from India wanted to jump-start her career after a breakup.

Dhoot loved the community, but not the ghost-town nightlife. “I ended up exploring the duty-free alcohol shops,” she said. “That only lasts you a day.”

Before his clash with Malaysian authorities, Srinivasan had said the Network School didn’t seek sovereignty and would abide by local laws. The project was just the early steps of a seven-stage process to start new societies, he said.

Then came the passport dispute.

Earlier this month, an Instagram post by a pro-Palestine group said the school admitted Israeli citizens, including…