My Month in the Network School: Letter from Forest City

Our CEO Vasily Rudomanov spent March 2026 as a short-term resident of the Network School, an experimental startup campus on the Malaysian side of the Singapore border. 

In this four-part essay, he walks through the milestones, the people, the arguments, and answers whether the trip was worth it.

When states fail, networks take the slack

The Network School barely needs an introduction at this point. You have probably heard of it. 

For anyone who has not: it is a co-living and co-working campus in Forest City, Johor, on the Malaysian coast directly across the strait from Singapore. The School opened in September 2024, founded by Balaji Srinivasan – first CTO of Coinbase, former a16z general partner – and Donovan Sung, formerly Director of Product at Xiaomi.

In plain terms: a 13-storey five-star hotel that has been turned into a residence – rooms upstairs, event spaces and social life on the lower floors – paired with a two-storey co-working space a ten-minute walk away, with seating for a few hundred. Tech people of every stripe come to live there for a month or a year, work on their things, argue with each other, and generally try to live their best lives.

The site itself has a backstory. Forest City was originally projected as a city for 700,000. Post-COVID, most of it sat empty – a ghost development on reclaimed land. Then Balaji moved in and gave it a second life. There is something fitting about that: the kind of place a Network State experiment would naturally choose.

The whole initiative is a demo – a vitrine, a sandbox, call it what you want – of the Network State, the model of digital collective action Balaji laid out in his 2022 book of the same name. Put simply: network states are online communities that organise economically, socially, and politically before acquiring territory, rather than the other way around.

Read in summary form, it can sound like a cross between an Amsterdam leftist squat and your neighbourhood Whatsapp chat.

It is not.

First, the idea is becoming more viable as the alternatives become less so. Acemoglu and Robinson have spent two decades documenting what happens when extractive institutions hollow out – and a lot of nominally functional states are now visibly running on fumes, unable to house their citizens, fund their pensions, or talk to their neighbours like adults. Balaji's pitch to us, the March 2026 cohort, was that net-izens ought to be able to switch between physical "nodes" – pick the city, pick the jurisdiction, pick the climate — as a hedge against any single state's decline. In Taleb's sense, network states are antifragile by design. That is why the bet has a chance.

Second, the experiment is replicating itself. It outgrew the isolated-curiosity stage some time ago. From Zuzalu in Montenegro to Liberland on the Danube, from Montelibero in the Balkans to Soul City and the migrating Oroboro in Asia — these communities are popping up wherever a host jurisdiction will tolerate them. 

They are easy to criticise. The residents are mostly male, mostly aged 25 to 45, mostly G7 passport-holders earning in hard currency. Representative of humanity they are not.

The ambition is harder to dismiss. Balaji framed it for us this way: Network School is to the Network State what Chinatown is to China – a pre-image, a working sample of the thing the parent culture has in mind. The analogy held up better on the ground than it does on the page.

So – how did we actually spend the month?

A campus that teaches itself

The Network School operates under a four-word motto: Learn, Burn, Earn, Fun. 

The middle two refer to fitness and entrepreneurship, and they get plenty of attention elsewhere. I want to focus on the first and the last – because that is where the place actually distinguishes itself.

Roughly 15–20% of events on any given week are organised by the staff. The rest are set up by residents, for residents. Anyone can teach. Anyone can sign up. The format ranges from a one-hour workshop to a multi-week course to what amounts to a mini-MBA in someone's particular domain. 

The catalogue during March ran far beyond tech: mindfulness, cognitive frameworks, applied economics, social theory – alongside the expected stack of crypto, blockchain, AI, and engineering.

The strength of the format is that everything is available at every level. The AI track that month included both a fundamentals-of-ML class and a session on building AI tools for non-engineers. You could choose your altitude.

I ran four sessions myself.

The first, AI Agents Bootcamp: OpenClaw Edition, took 70 students from zero to a working agentic app in five days. 

The second, How We Achieved the Lowest Solana RPC Latency in the Industry, walked through how we pushed Solana RPC benchmarks to 20 ms — faster than any of the 200-plus competitors we measured against.  

The third, GetBlock Office Hours, was an open Q&A on the infrastructure layer we have been building for years: RPC nodes, validators, blockchain data, low-latency trading rails, AI agents.

The fourth, Agentic Economy, Coordination and Orchestration Protocols, was a co-hosted session with Shuenrui, Yudhishthra Sugumaran, and Konrad Gnat — a survey of the protocols layer forming under the agentic internet, across Ethereum, Solana, and agent-native ecosystems, followed by a working argument over what primitives are still missing.  

The speakers used their slots to showcase their own work, and they should have. The sessions that stayed with me included Longevity Network on healthtech, the Zcash-centric wallet Zodl, and Quantus, a post-quantum Layer 1. There were many more.

What you take away from a week of this is a particular conviction: that the bottleneck on technical progress, at least in this corner of the industry, is no longer information, but the social infrastructure that lets the right people share a table.

Living the thesis

What makes the experience particular is that you are doing it alongside 200 other people, around the clock, for the duration. A shared room runs $1,500 a month; a single is $3,000; long-term residents take separate apartments.  

Day-to-day life is well-served. The gym is serious, the karaoke room is loud, the meditation spaces are quiet, and most of the time you are using them with people you have just spent the morning arguing with. The campus runs on a particular kind of adult self-organisation: nobody is programming your evenings, but enough is happening that you have to actively choose to stay in your room.

The provision for families surprised me. There is something approximating a daycare for the youngest, but the real investment is in pre-teens and teenagers – masterclasses, workshops, field trips, social games, the kind of programming most of us in our forties would have benefited from and did not get. Lucky kids.

The live discussions were the heart of it. 

The range was wide: how to raise a seed round on one end, the long-term prospects of horizontal governance – futarchy, technocracy, direct democracy, and the various flavours in between — on the other. Most of the conversations were better than the equivalent panels at industry conferences, for a simple reason: nobody was performing for an audience that wasn't in the room.

The March 2026 cohort was both the best part of the experience and my biggest reservation about it.

The best part: the people were genuine. Real founders, dirty hands, from the trenches. No theorists, no people selling decks. The signal-to-noise ratio was well above what you find at most industry gatherings, and well above what I had expected.

The reservation: roughly two-thirds of the cohort were from the United States, the EU, and the UK. The Global North still dominates, even in network states. Other regions were underrepresented, and the critics who raise this point are not wrong to raise it. 

Repeat visitors tell me the mix is shifting, and it had better. The whole premise of network states is that they route around the gatekeeping of the old order. Carrying that gatekeeping into the new order would be the most expensive kind of failure.

In place of an epilogue: who should go, and why

Was it worth it? Yes. Without qualification.

Two groups in particular should consider the short-term program: digital nomads, and first-time founders. The nomads will recognise it instantly – the rhythm of the place, the assumption that everyone in the room is building something. The first-time founders will get something rarer: a month of close-quarters exposure to people two or three steps ahead of them on the same path. That compresses a year of trial-and-error into thirty days.

A word on what the Network School is not. 

It is not a vibes retreat. It is not a motivation seminar. It is not the sort of "founder camp" that the online-course industry has been packaging for the past decade. Anyone showing up looking for a boost will be quietly disappointed, and rightly so. We are in a market where motivation is worth nothing and discipline is worth everything. The School is built for the second kind of person.

Balaji, half-joking, described what they are building as a new kind of SaaS – Society-as-a-Service. The phrase is sharper than the joke. A subscription to the company of people who are bold, smart, and serious about their work is a real product, and one that has never been priced before. The School is the first credible attempt I have seen at offering it.

Big ideas, merciless execution. 

That is what we look for at GetBlock, and that is what I found in Forest City.

P.S. I have decided to stay in Forest City for the next year, with my family. The location works on two counts: it puts us close to Singapore, where GetBlock is based, and it puts me a short walk from every monthly cohort of people thinking about the same problems we are. The boring-but-reliable layer of blockchain infrastructure, the frontier-but-not-fancy layer of AI infrastructure, and the part where the two meet.

If you want to see the Network School for yourself, or if you are building in either of those layers and want to find me there – here is my personal invitation, with a real perk attached: https://ns.com/cyberwider/invite

Yours, Vasily