Malaysia has shut down Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School. The startup-centric community was supposed to be the blueprint of Srinivasan’s vision of building a new country. Instead, it was plagued with complaints of moldy rooms and a skewed gender ratio with no women, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Who is Balaji Srinivasan?
Balaji Srinivasan is an Indian-origin entrepreneur, scientist, and investor. He is the author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country and the founder of the Network School, a retreat for entrepreneurs.
Previously, he co-founded the genomics company Counsyl and served as the CTO of Coinbase. Srinivasan gave up his American citizenship and is now a citizen of Singapore.
What is The Network School?
The Network School is a community founded by Balaji Srinivasan that aims to bring together entrepreneurs, engineers, investors and other professionals who want to live and work together while building technology startups.
Srinivasan describes it as a stepping stone toward his broader vision of creating a new kind of country built around internet communities rather than traditional nation-states.
The Network School combines elements of a startup accelerator, a residential campus and a social experiment. Participants live together, work from dedicated co-working spaces and take part in workshops and events featuring founders, investors and industry experts.
{{/usCountry}}The Network School combines elements of a startup accelerator, a residential campus and a social experiment. Participants live together, work from dedicated co-working spaces and take part in workshops and events featuring founders, investors and industry experts.
{{/usCountry}}The campus also places a strong emphasis on health and fitness, offering amenities such as a high-end gym and meals inspired by longevity advocate Bryan Johnson.
Where was it located?
The Network School's first campus was established in Forest City, a $100 billion Chinese-developed township in the Malaysian state of Johor, near the Singapore border.
The development gained international attention because large parts of it remained sparsely populated, earning it the nickname of a "ghost city."
(Also read: Indian-American investor obtains island to start new country for founders and techies)
However, the school's presence in Forest City has come to an end. In late July 2026, local authorities ordered the project to cease operations over licensing issues.
Shortly afterwards, founder Balaji Srinivasan announced that he had signed an agreement to open a new Network School campus in Kazakhstan. As a result, the project is in the process of relocating from Malaysia to Kazakhstan.
What were the complaints?
According to the Wall Street Journal, two years after it was established, the Network School faced complaints of “moldy rooms, dead nightlife and not enough women—a downside familiar to Silicon Valley.”
Srinivasan, who reportedly renounced his US citizenship in 2023, responded to the allegations on X. He criticised the WSJ article as a “hit piece” and dismissed allegations of inadequate upkeep.
“Mildew is common across Southeast Asia, we fix such routine facilities issues as they arise, the explicit point of Network School is self-improvement rather than partying, and we had hundreds of women, families, and children at Network School,” said the tech founder.
Separately, Malaysia also investigated whether the campus had Israeli nationals. No evidence was found of Israelis living there.
On allegations of ‘no nightlife’
Srinivasan also addressed allegations of no nightlife at the Network School, saying nobody came to campus to party.
“No one was coming to Network School for the nightlife,” he wrote on X. “The entire thing is about self-improvement: learning technology, burning calories, and earning money with remote work jobs. Members do have fun on their own time, of course, but this is a community for producers rather than consumers. More like Stanford Engineering in the 2000s than Bali.”