For a project built on the premise that a community of engineers and founders could function like a “cloud-first country,” Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School just got a very physical lesson in geopolitics. This week, the Iskandar Puteri City Council in Johor revoked the business licence of NS0 Malaysia Sdn Bhd, the entity running Network School out of Forest City, and ordered it to shut down by July 22. By then, Srinivasan had already signed a memorandum of understanding to set up shop in Kazakhstan instead.
It’s a dramatic end to an almost two-year experiment in Malaysia — one that began with grand ambitions of building a “startup society” for the internet’s most online founders, and ended with immigration raids, viral accusations, a foiled meeting with the Prime Minister, and a very public scramble for a new home.
Who Is Balaji Srinivasan
Balaji Srinivasan is not a stranger to big, contrarian ideas. A Stanford PhD with a background spanning genomics startups, venture capital and crypto, Srinivasan served as CTO of Coinbase and was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz before becoming one of the tech industry’s most prolific commentators on decentralization, biotech and what he calls “network states” — communities that build political and economic power online before eventually seeking physical territory and sovereignty. His 2022 book, “The Network State: How to Start a New Country,” laid out the theoretical scaffolding for exactly the kind of project he’d go on to build.
That project was Network School.
What The Network School Was
Launched in September 2024, Network School was pitched as a live-in community for entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers and investors — a mix of co-living, co-working, fitness and curated programming, with members typically staying anywhere from a month to a year. Srinivasan described it as “society-as-a-service,” charging membership starting at roughly $1,500 a month for housing, meals and gym access, and framing the whole endeavour as a prototype for the kind of self-selected, globally mobile communities he’d written about in his book. Enrollment reportedly grew from around 150 members at launch to several hundred within a year.
The physical home for all this was Forest City, a sprawling, largely Chinese-built special economic zone on the southern tip of Johor, Malaysia, just across the water from Singapore. Yet in Srinivasan’s own marketing and in much of the coverage that followed, Network School was consistently described as being located “on an island near Singapore” — a framing that leaned into the exotic, offshore, faintly extraterritorial image the project cultivated, even though Forest City sits within Malaysian jurisdiction and is subject to Malaysian law like anywhere else in the country. That gap between the marketed image and the legal reality would matter a great deal in the weeks to come.
The Rumour That Set It Off
Trouble began when anonymous accounts on social media started circulating claims that Network School was quietly harbouring Israeli nationals — likely holding dual passports — among its resident members. The allegation was combustible in Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country with no diplomatic relations with Israel, where Israeli passport holders are generally barred from entry under Malaysian immigration law. The claims spread quickly online, feeding into broader conspiracy theories that painted Network School as a “Zionist” project using a tech-community front to embed Israeli citizens in Johor.
Malaysian authorities did not brush the allegations aside. Immigration officials conducted a series of inspections at the Forest City site, checking the documentation of the community’s foreign residents. Officials who reviewed the travel documents said that everyone on site had valid paperwork, and no evidence emerged publicly confirming the presence of Israeli nationals. But the inspections themselves, and the fact that police had effectively raided a private residential community over the allegations, kept the story in the news and put Srinivasan on the back foot.
Balaji Goes Public
Srinivasan didn’t stay quiet. He took to X to deny the claims outright, describing them as a coordinated campaign by anonymous accounts, and warned that the episode risked damaging Malaysia’s standing with international tech investors. He also went public with an attempt to get in front of the Malaysian government directly, seeking a meeting with Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s office to address the controversy and, presumably, to make the case for Network School’s continued operation in the country.
He also made a point of detailing what Network School had put into Malaysia. According to Srinivasan, the community had already invested more than RM100 million (roughly $21 million) into its Forest City campus without any government funding, employed dozens of Malaysians across executive and staff roles, and had a further RM500 million expansion on the table — an expansion he said the company was now shelving given the regulatory uncertainty. He also credited Network School with “revitalising” the broader, long-underperforming Forest City project and driving real estate appreciation in the area.
Notably, as the Malaysia situation deteriorated, Srinivasan also shared a photo of himself meeting Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta in New Delhi — a post that, without explicitly saying so, was widely read as a signal that India could be in the running as an alternative base for Network School, or at least that Srinivasan was keeping his options, and his relationships with governments elsewhere, warm.
Malaysia Pulls The Plug
None of it was enough to stop the process already in motion. On July 21, the Iskandar Puteri City Council (MBIP) formally revoked NS0 Malaysia’s business licence, citing violations that went beyond the immigration questions altogether — officials pointed to licensing and premises issues, including one site allegedly operating without the required business licence, and activities being carried out beyond what was approved under the existing licence. Johor’s chief minister, Onn Hafiz Ghazi, confirmed the decision in a Facebook post, stating that all Network School activities in Forest City were to cease effective July 22, while reiterating that the state remained open to “high-quality investments” that benefit the economy.
By some accounts, as many as 19 foreigners linked to Network School remained unaccounted for as the shutdown took effect, a detail that only added to the sense that Malaysian authorities were treating this as more than just a paperwork dispute.
Onward To Kazakhstan
Srinivasan didn’t wait around. On July 21, even as the Malaysian council was finalising its decision, he announced on X that Network School had signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Kazakhstan to establish its next campus there. “Our new campus will become a haven for global techno-optimism, with expedited visas, streamlined redomiciliation, and active recruitment of talent,” he wrote, framing the Central Asian nation — which has been actively courting blockchain and tech investment in recent years — as a more welcoming base for the community’s next chapter.
The speed of the pivot was itself telling. Rather than fighting the closure or waiting out an appeals process, Srinivasan effectively treated Malaysia’s decision as confirmation of a plan already in motion, pairing the announcement of Network School’s Kazakhstan future with the news of its Malaysian ending almost in the same breath.
The Bigger Picture
For Malaysia, the episode is an awkward footnote to its broader push to position Johor — and Forest City in particular — as a hub for global tech investment, backed by data-centre buildouts and one of the world’s more liberal visa-free entry policies. Network School’s exit, whatever the underlying mix of immigration politics and licensing technicalities, is unlikely to be read by other founders and investors eyeing Southeast Asia as a reassuring signal.
For Srinivasan, it’s a real-time stress test of the “network state” thesis he’s been evangelising for years: that mobile, digitally-organised communities can and should be able to relocate between jurisdictions when one government turns hostile, treating sovereignty almost like a service-level agreement rather than a fixed commitment. Whether Kazakhstan proves a more durable home than Malaysia did remains to be seen — but for now, Network School’s founder has shown he’s willing to pack up an entire “society” and move it across a continent rather than wait for a bureaucracy to make up its mind.