Network School 2025

Network School reopens March 1 with double the capacity. Apply now at ns.com.

The first Network School went amazingly well, as you can see from the video above! More than 4,000 applications came in from 80+ countries for 128 slots, showing global demand for our vision of a startup society. So after the quarter ended, we took a beat to scale up our capacity.

And now we’re back.

Network School v2 reopens on March 1, 2025 on an island near Singapore with double the capacity for a year-long term. Our goal is nothing less than bootstrapping a startup society capable of bootstrapping other startup societies.

That means we’re seeking frontiersmen. We’re seeking dark talent. We’re seeking people who want to create win-and-help-win societies, focused on both individual and collective self-improvement. We’re seeking remote workers, digital nomads, online creators, personal trainers, event planners, self-improvers and technologists of all stripes. And we’re specifically seeking those who want to help our nascent community learn technology, earn cryptocurrency, burn calories, and have fun.

You should come if you want to build up yourself while also building a cloud community, formed from scratch from the global Internet. If that sounds awesome to you, go apply at ns.com.

Then read more below.

Stages of Network School

We’re building the Network School in stages.

• Startup society (v1). First, we ran an experimental Network School cohort for 128 people in Q4 2024. For most attendees, it was a smashing success, but we did learn some lessons that we’re addressing in our v2 curriculum.

• Society-as-a-service (v2). Now, we’re beginning a year-long Network School for 256 members starting on March 1. The most important difference from v1 is that we now know we have enough demand to build a permanent cloud community. So our #1 criteria for admission is finding pioneers¹ who want to build with us over the long run.

• Society from scratch (v3). In parallel with running v2, we are building a permanent Network School campus nearby to house thousands of technologists from all around the world to learn technologies, burn calories, earn currencies, and have fun.

• Scale the school (v4). As we build the permanent campus, we’re using prefab construction to create a portable template that we can open source and recreate anywhere in the world. Think of it like clone-stamping a Hilton or Starbucks, all around the world, except with the blueprints in the public domain.

So, by the end of stage 4, if all goes well, we’ll have a distributed network of Network School (NS) nodes around the world:

Start your own society (v5). But that’s not the final stage. Many Network Schoolers will attend with the intent of eventually starting their own societies, using the social, digital, and physical templates we develop at Network School. We intend to fund the best. And when those networks are overlaid on the same map, we’ll get a community of friendly startup societies that looks like this:

So, that’s how we’ll bootstrap a startup society that helps bootstrap other startup societies. Now let’s review Network School v1, and what we plan for v2 and v3.

The Startup Society (v1)

More than a decade ago, I created a visualization of cloud formations, shown below. The lower right corner refers to the theoretical concept of a cloud community: a startup society, materialized from the cloud, without the baggage of the old world.

The idea was to build an Internet First community, which every member joins of their own free will. A city in the cloud, the 21st century version of the city on a hill.

The first Network School was an experiment towards making that vision a reality. I knew we could bring thousands together for the Network State Conferences in 2023 and 2024, but that was only one day. Could we bring together 100+ people for almost 100 days?

Answer: yes! We could, and we did.

As the video at the top of this post shows, we pulled together accommodation, gym, coworking, auditorium, cafe, laundry, wifi, office pods, and hangout spaces for a 128+ person community, along with spaces for self-organized events. Some of it we built, some of it we rented, and some of it we refurbished to create a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts. Our overall retention was very high, with the vast majority of members staying through their booked period.

What specifically went well in v1, and what could we improve? Well, we set out to make it easy to learn technology, burn calories, earn cryptocurrency, and have fun, while also building our cloud community. And the parts we really nailed were burning calories, having fun, and building community. Here’s a video with members working out together:

Given that Network Schoolers didn’t know each other before the cohort, and came in entirely through the Internet, I do think it’s awesome that we were able to build a cloud community and thereby establish the fundamental question we set out to test in v1. Here’s a little gif of everyone having fun, including the Christmas Party towards the end of the cohort:

That said, we didn’t get everything right in v1, and in v2 we want to improve the learning and earning experience. Basically, in v1 we’d set out to do daily tutorials and bounties. But we’d also set out to build a real community, with men and women from different stages of life, with different skills, and different time commitments. These two goals conflicted. If we made the tutorials/bounties too easy, then it turned off the hardcore engineers. Yet if we made them too hard, it turned off the casuals who just wanted to drop in and have fun.

To be clear: we did have guest lectures where members learned from world-class founders and investors like Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Bryan Johnson (Don’t Die), Ryan Petersen (Flexport), Olaf Carson-Wee (Polychain), Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly), Eli-Ben Sasson (Zcash/Starkware), Jesse Pollak (Coinbase Base), and Peak XV / Sequoia India (Shailesh Lakhani). And as expected, many members earned remotely, worked on their companies, or even built startups together.

But we encountered the Karpathy bimodality: either you’re learning just for fun by watching guest lectures, or you’re heads down with pen and paper studying a specific subject.² So, we’re fixing this in the next version by staging our curriculum for different skill levels and focusing it on building a new society.

And that brings us to v2.

Society-as-a-Service (v2)

As mentioned, the second version of the Network School opens on March 1, 2025 with capacity for 256 members and a year-long duration. This group will be the seed for a permanent campus we’re building nearby, which will house 1024+ members.

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.³ And the land grant colleges were built to teach frontiersmen how to run farms, dig mines, and erect buildings.⁴

Similarly, our v2 curriculum is oriented around the idea that the Network School is a mix of town and gown, both a startup society in its own right and a school that trains others to build startup societies. With that in mind, here’s what we’re planning for curriculum progression:

• Lectures and reading. First, we’ll have guest lectures on startup societies with no prerequisites that the whole community can attend. These will be both in-person and remote speakers of the quality we’ve invited to Network State Conference 2023 and 2024. In addition, we’ll have a reading list and regular book club for discussion. You can see our draft curriculum here.

• Workshops and hackathons. Next, we’ll organize workshops for two tracks of Network Schoolers: power users and programmers. Power users will learn how to use (and combine) the constantly shifting list of online tools, particularly in AI and crypto. And programmers will get hackathons on specific APIs and tools like Solana, Ollama, and Midjourney, with the goal of building something for their GitHub or Replit portfolios.

• Courses and credentials. Over time, we’ll roll out AI-generated custom exams and cryptocredentials for particular courses that help build our society. The AI exams will come from turning public tech job postings into lists of skills and then exams, while the cryptocredentials will be NFT certificates awarded by proctors who conduct offline pencil-and-paper tests of these skills. But it’ll take us time to develop these.

• Departments and placements. Eventually we want to organize STEM and humanities departments on an “Internet First” basis, with continuous education integrated with job placement. That means taking a software-centric approach to every discipline. For example, civil engineering would be centered around simulations, art would begin with AI generation and NFT monetization, and history would be combined with data science.

With all that said, I want to make four points that you should keep in mind before you apply.

First: Harvard wasn’t built in a day. Indeed, it was a single classroom entity at first with less than a dozen students! It took years of effort, many intermediate steps, and thousands of people to build it into a global university. Similarly, it will take time to go from guest lectures and reading lists to full-blown departments. So you should come only if you want to build the next Harvard, not simply attend it.

Second: the Network School itself is just a facilitator for bringing together great people. After all, you attend a conference for the talks, but mainly the community. You attend a college for the courses, but mainly the community. And similarly, you should come to the Network School for the content, but mainly the community, as you can see in this video:

Third: we want to pursue minimum necessary innovation in terms of new content creation, because there’s a tremendous amount of free online courseware that simply hasn’t been indexed and organized. A non-obvious point is that this rebundling⁵ of online courses is valuable in its own right, given the sea of information online. To navigate this ocean, we’ll focus on content that helps build startup societies. This criterion allows us to filter⁶ the vast Internet to determine what we want to teach and learn, and in what order.

Fourth: the Network School core team will organize as much as we can on a “centralized” basis, but the community will always be larger than the core team. So, you should come if you also want to teach and learn from other community members on a “decentralized” basis. These types of community-organized events were quite popular in v1.⁷

In short, you should apply to Network School v2 if you want to join a tech community. Think of it like moving to early Massachusetts with a bunch of positive-sum people while the construction of Harvard is in process.

How the Cloud Bootstraps the Land

Oh, one more thing about Network School v2. I’ve talked about the practical details of how we’re building the campus, and what to expect. But do we have something we want to prove in v2, like we did in v1?

Yes. At an individual level, v2 is similar to v1 in that it’s about allowing members to learn, burn, earn, and have fun. But at a collective level, if the purpose of v1 was to prove we could instantiate a cloud community, the focus of v2 is to build a paid waitlist that establishes the demand to build ever-more-ambitious cloud communities.

That requires a bit of explanation.

Remember how Elon memed the Model 3 into existence? He created a paid waitlist where 400k Tesla fans put up $1000 and waited literally years for the product. They did this because they wanted an electric car, because they believed in Elon, and because they knew how ridiculously hard it was to build something in the physical world. They took a calculated risk with Elon, and many of them also bought TSLA stock, and boy did he deliver for them.

That’s how we plan to build the Network School:

The numbers on the left are an underestimate, but you get the idea.

Elon’s waitlist established provable demand, and allowed him to negotiate with vendors to make the Model 3 a reality. Similarly, the Network School waitlist establishes provable demand that allows us⁸ to fund the land to make the Network School campus — and all future startup societies — a reality.

Society From Scratch (v3)

That brings us to our plans for Network School v3-v5. As noted above, we seek to build a campus from scratch (v3), open source the blueprints to scale it around the world (v4), and along the way encourage our attendees to start their own societies (v5).

Returning to that original visual, you can see how Network School v1-v5 form a progression, with gradually increasing scale and duration:

We’re already underway with the v3 campus, and we expect people who come to v2 to be ready to move there once residential units open up. Please note that this is a major construction project, and it may take a year or more to build v3, so like the patient Tesla waitlisters you should come with a flexible mindset.

One way to think about it: with normal real estate, you just rent an apartment and move in. But with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the pioneers built their cabins from scratch by chopping wood. The Network School is of course much closer to moving in than chopping wood, but there is some expectation that you help⁹ build the community — by holding events, recruiting new members, engaging existing members, and scouting future sites — while the physical campus is being built.

The Internet Frontier

Finally: I really like the facilities we’ve built, and use them quite a lot myself, but before you apply you should realize what we’re doing is frontier, not fancy. We are optimizing for editability, not luxury. So, while the Network School core team will attempt to handle as many issues as possible, you shouldn’t treat your stay as a luxury resort where the staff is at your beck and call, but as a startup society which we’re building together.

Another way of putting it: there are tech companies, tech currencies, and now tech communities. You know what an early stage startup looks like, and the milestones it hits before it becomes Google. You know what an early stage cryptocurrency looks like, and the milestones it hits before it becomes Bitcoin. 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. And the closer you are to being a high-agency, low-maintenance technologist who just wants to work, work out, and build awesome things all day — while also hanging out with others with the same growth mindset — the more you’ll like founding Network School with us.

If that describes you, please do apply at ns.com.

1. We are particularly interested in tutors, recruiters, trainers, entertainers, coders, and builders.

2. You could actually make this more than a metaphor. Treat any aspect of starting a new society as an input to AI search, and then find courses online that relate to it. It could be at a high level (like the peopling of America) or at a low level (like the plumbing of a house).

3. Yes, Harvard was once a startup! It was opened in 1636 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded “New College” in Cambridge to train clergy. At first, there was just one building and a single instructor overseeing fewer than a dozen students. It was renamed “Harvard College” in 1639 after its first benefactor, John Harvard. The entire operation had very humble beginnings: just a handful of students, a very small faculty, and minimal facilities compared to the global university it would later become.

4. From Britannica: “The intent [of the land grant colleges] was clearly to meet a rapidly industrializing nation’s need for scientifically trained technicians and agriculturalists.“

5. As the saying goes, the only way to create value is bundling and unbundling. You unbundle CDs into mp3s, and rebundle into Spotify playlists. You unbundle newspapers into online articles, then rebundle into feeds. Similarly, we can unbundle traditional universities into online courses, and then rebundle them under individual tutors at the Network School, each focused on different aspects of building startup societies.

6. A curriculum focused on building new societies is simultaneously broad and specific, and also carries with it an implicit staging, because the knowledge that’s useful for a 100 person society is different from a 100,000 person society.

7. You can see a partial list of Network School community-organized events in this sheet.

8. Building real estate is like building automobiles, a capital-intensive and time-consuming endeavor. The paid waitlist model allows us to meme the Network School into reality, with concrete midpoints every step of the way.

9. We do want to figure out more “attachment points” over time where community members can help. At some point we’d like members to be able to contribute towards building the v3 campus, such that they aren’t simply electrical engineers but electricians, and not simply mechanical engineers but also carpenters. However, we need to figure out the logistics of that, because (a) construction is a specialized and regulated skill and (b) the NS core team can’t directly employ every (or even many) members of the community. What we can do in the meantime is give digital points of engagement: NS members can pitch in as tutors, recruiters, trainers, and entertainers, to help us learn, earn, burn, and have fun respectively.