A tropical island close to Singapore is turning into the launchpad for one in all Silicon Valley’s boldest concepts. Balaji Srinivasan, the Indian-origin tech entrepreneur and former Coinbase CTO, has bought the island to construct a “Community State” — a decentralised, digital-first society geared toward techies, creators, and founders.
What as soon as appeared like a sci-fi thought experiment is now taking form in the true world, TechCrunch reported.
Srinivasan’s imaginative and prescient, detailed in his 2022 e book The Community State, is to create borderless, crowd-funded communities that exist on-line, declare bodily territory, and search international recognition.
“We acquired an island. That’s proper. By the ability of Bitcoin, we now have an attractive island close to Singapore the place we’re constructing the Community Faculty,” Srinivasan posted on X (previously Twitter).
On the island’s middle is The Community Faculty, a three-month residential program mixing entrepreneurship, rising tech, and private improvement. Members, chosen for his or her ambition and unconventional pondering, begin days with gymnasium classes and attend workshops on AI, blockchain, and startup innovation.
The varsity, Srinivasan says, is designed to foster “win-and-help-win” societies targeted on fact, well being, and wealth, and displays his bigger mission to rethink governance within the digital age.
“I ought to point out that the Community Faculty is a ‘product’ that I constructed for the younger model of myself—the aspiring younger engineer. That is the group I need to stay in: a technocapitalist faculty city, a Stanford 2.0 that’s globally inexpensive and genuinely meritocratic. So, I’ll be on campus full time. Bryan Johnson and I are supervising the setup of all the pieces from bench press to French press. And we’ll finally be recruiting school within the type of content material creators, health influencers, and angel buyers for the be taught, burn, and earn parts of our program respectively. However all that in due time,” he wrote.
Born in New York to Tamil-origin doctor mother and father, Srinivasan holds a number of engineering levels from Stanford. Over 20 years, he has based and invested in ventures like Counsyl, Earn.com, Teleport, and was an early backer of Bitcoin, Ethereum, OpenSea, and Alchemy.
“As talked about, our focus is the darkish expertise. The extra respect you’ve for legacy establishments, and the extra respect they’ve for you, the much less appropriate you’ll be as an applicant,” he added, describing the college as a haven for outsiders from various backgrounds.
Regardless of critics labeling his imaginative and prescient techno-utopian and even colonial, Srinivasan stays undeterred. After launching the primary Community Faculty in 2024, he’s eyeing new campuses in Dubai, Tokyo, and Miami.
“We’re searching for distant employees, digital creators, private trainers, builders — individuals who need to earn crypto, construct issues, burn energy, and have enjoyable,” he stated.
