Make it Somewhere People Want to Live
Make it Somewhere People Want to Live
or: observations on the "Product Market Fit" of Balaji Srinivasan's Network School (and what Zuzalu-style "pop-up cities" can learn).
This is my third time visiting the Network School. I joined on Opening Day in September 2024, returned 1 year later for two weeks in September 2025, and am finally staying for an entire month (at least) now in January 2026.
Leading up to the opening of Network School, the founders & team spent time visiting and researching Zuzalu and the subsequent pop-up crypto city experiments (I'm sometimes partial to calling them "children" of the first Zuzalu experiment).
At the first Vitalia, now Infinita, pop-up city in Prospera, Balaji, Bryan Johnson, founding members of the team, and even James, the founder of NS's first "L2" called Arc, all participated and discussed the theory & practice of startup societies on the ground. (Arguably Infinita has a "single moral commandment" from Balaji's definition of a Network State, with "make death optional;" Zuzalu notably did not have a single moral commandment.) The Network School was even announced during the day Balaji called into our ZuVillage Georgia experiment for a governance Q&A with our residents.
While Balaji's Network State was a strong theoretical ancestor of Zuzalu (as was clear per discussions in Montenegro & as Vitalik wrote explicitly in his article Why I Built Zuzalu), Zuzalu was a strong practical ancestor for the start of the Network School, and its first iteration adopted. However, there were several patterns such as a weekly town hall and an open schedule for residents to create their own sessions. The one provided meal a day from Zuzalu experiments was scaled up to include breakfast, lunch, and dinner, designed in cooperation with Bryan Johnson to provide the Blueprint-aligned meals that Zuzalu and its pop-up city children kept promising but frankly had difficulty providing in practice (sometimes simply due to lack of resource availability, sometimes due to the overhead costs or lack of desire among residents).
However, there were several clear distinctions from the start. They intentionally attracted / admitted non web3-native residents, and I met architects, educators, artists who were unfamiliar with Zuzalu on opening day. They also intentionally attracted content creators, differentiating from more privacy-focused projects (like our own ZuVillage Georgia) that were more camera-shy (to put it lightly) but with a similar distrust of journalists from legacy media publications.
There was a clear structure that was not opt-in for the first iteration: learn, burn, and earn, including mandatory early morning workouts and learning sessions. The schedule was (and still is) housed on Luma, which at least due to infrastructure limitations cannot be fully permissionless like the Zuzalu experiments usually offer; potentially a small distinction, but notable as in practice it requires administrator approval over every event a resident proposes.
Finally, the first iteration lasted three months, compared to the two months of Zuzalu, and subsequent pop-up cities lasting anywhere from 3-6 weeks. After the first iteration, they took some months off, then restarted in March with a 1 year iteration, that is still running. People come in and out as part of monthly cohorts, with strict requirements to arrive at the start of the month (eg you cannot book for mid-month to mid-month). They also started a longtermer program, where people commit for an entire year.
When I visited one year later in September 2025, improvements on all fronts were undeniable. Learn, burn, earn, remained but were opt-in, not mandatory. Yet the culture of self-improvement permeated despite the contrasting freedom for residents to choose how to spend their time. As it was a time of several conferences in Singapore including the Network State Conference, it was hard to fully gauge Network School's progress as far as a "new society" goes without external pull factors.
From a product-level, however, or what residents / customers received in exchange for the cost, NS became incomparable to the many pop-up city experiments I had participated in or helped to organize. Every single meal is included covering a variety of health and dietary needs. Plus a for-purchase cafe with long hours with my favorite, protein-packed and delicious smoothies that can be customized to the biohacker's heart's content (I could get my creatine fill during a gap in my own supply.) Walking distance to affordable 24/7 grocery stores right around the corner. 1 hour to not just a major city, but Singapore. Plenty of areas for coworking, deep work, social activities. A well-stocked gym and 3x daily group-led fitness classes. Daily knowledge exchange sessions. Residents from all over the world, from all sorts of backgrounds, working on interesting things and bringing interesting ideas, the building blocks for the "serendipitous moments" we were promised and have loved in the Zuzalu experiments.
For these reasons alone, NS stood out as one of the best options for spending a month, let alone when combined with my desire (and I've finally come to admit, undeniable pattern) of living full-time between "nodes of the network state" / Zuzalu spaces.
Another observation reminded me of the first Zuzalu experiment in a way no subsequent pop-up has been able to replicate: there was massive energy and execution of building for the community. Residents are creating businesses and projects left and right for Network School, from vending machines to car/scooter-share, to orientation and kids programs. I think this is correlated with a belief that this project is long-term period, and long-term likely to succeed.
In Montenegro we had a sense that this was the start of a new society, with a 2 month pop-up experiment simply a means to the end. Afterwards, the means started to become the end as pop-up cities - or extended retreats - started to fit themselves into the pre-existing "crypto conference circuit" as people traveled around. There are hackathons, but they match regular hackathons with specific bounty sponsors rather incentivizing building. Sometimes people build "for the community" but without immediate continuity many of the projects fall off. I've heard this does happen for monthly cohort projects that start and stop as their builders leave NS, but survival of the fittest is clearly at play for projects that continue due to demand (such as the vending machines) and there simply is a continuous project and growing population.
After my first visit, I had spoken with a number of participants in the very first cohort, that had not chosen to stay. The opposite of survivorship bias, if you will. I was glad to update my sample. Some residents remained from the very first iteration, many were those that stayed from March, and most were participants in the monthly cohort, some considering staying longer or signing up for the longterm program. There was a particular momentum of residents signing on to the longterm program at this time, likely due to the Network State conference; "which number are you?" was a beloved question, and I witnessed the pride of the person who shared they were # 100 to sign on.
September 2025 was also the time of Arc's "pop-up city" as the first "official L2" of the Network School; they had already run ephemeral pop-up experiments in other parts of the world (Lisbon, Austin) but were now setting up shop as a permanent community at Network School while continuing their search for a permanent jurisdiction to build a charter city. Theoretically akin to a private social club at a university and practically a membership-based coworking space within the larger Network School environment that regularly holds open-house discussions, Arc continues to be a strong social attractor and retainer for Network School.
The L2 system is one I'm still getting to know and is still quite early, but I think is correlated with the ability for the core team to optimize the core offering - again the "product" they promise customers who choose to spend their money and time here for at least a month. L2s can handle the subcultures, the community-layers, pieces people desire but are trickier to execute from top-down. The core team focuses on ensuring core infrastructure works, or in their own words, "Society as a Service." That people can come and eat, sleep, exercise, and work without friction. I was already sold on the product in September, and have not been disappointed now starting my year here.
While I've been "slow-mading" quite a bit since I fell down the Zuzalu rabbit hole, it always takes a couple of weeks to get into routine. I knew what to expect when I arrived, and my eat-sleep-workout routines have already solidified to the point that my work productivity is now skyrocketing.
Like on opening day, it is again noticeable how different the demographics are in comparison to the Zuzalu-style pop-up city experiments. There are filmmakers, founders, athletes, philosophers, writers. People who have never heard of Zuzalu pop-up cities. People who had never even heard of Balaji before arriving. That is one of the strongest signals for "Product Market Fit" for this niche and new space.
Of course, a vast majority of people attended the first Zuzalu experiment due to familiarity with and trust of the initiator. Many continue to participate in subsequent pop-up city experiments also with his explicit connection or participation. This may have been similar for Network School at the start, and is true for some participants that choose to join for a month, or commit to a year, due to their trust of the initiator, his theoretical ideas and the opportunity to participate in the practical instantiation done by himself.
But increasing numbers of participants that are attracted to the resource offering alone is empirical evidence that they are optimizing the product offering. People want what they offer, are willing to pay for it, and then choose to return or stay because they are satisfied.
It is still early, and Network School certainly has much larger ambitions than an optimal eat-sleep-workout-work offering for paying residents. But this is a necessary step in the process that any Network State, Zuzalu, or intentional community can and should learn from.
Are you building a crypto city, a startup society, a pop-up village, an intentional community? Make it somewhere people want to live.
If you default to jumping on the treadmill of endlessly seeking funding, without making it somewhere people want to live, you are doomed to fail. If you oscillate between being an events company, a tokenized real estate project, a technology accelerator or fund, without making it somewhere people want to live, you are doomed to fail.
If you are building a place for people to live, make it somewhere people want to live.
Your funding should not depend on bear and bull cycles. Your revenue should not depend on whether you convince the biggest names to advertsie for you. Make it somewhere people want to live.
3 years after Montenegro, the novelty or "hype" of a pop-up crypto city experiment can no longer motivate people to pay and participate. In 2025, we fortunately saw messaging and missions in Zuzalu change to focus on "permanence" and building long-term transformational projects, rather than settling with extended retreats under a new name. I say fortunately not because there aren't people who desire extended retreats with strong connections, but because the potential for this space to transform society is just so much greater than a proliferation of extended retreat companies.
We have the potential to create more options for individuals to spend their time and resources in exchange for what they receive and in collectives that fit their preferences. We have the potential to not just build technologies that empower individuals and collectives because blockchain enables us to, but to do so alongside and with those with the greatest necessity. We have the potential for all jurisdictions to feel the need to improve the realities for their citizens, because there is suddenly competition in a previously monopolistic situation.
If we succeed at making our projects somewhere people want to live, we could stop there. Some projects likely will. Enough revenue and the model can be copied and pasted around the world. New cities can and likely will provide better offerings than existing cities, with enough time. Existing cities will either step up or potentially get pushed out. The systems will reshuffle, but could largely look the same.
I'm looking forward to participating in the projects that don't stop here. That walk the walk of experimenting with and incorporating new systems that blockchain and other emergent technologies enable. I think it's important that long-term visions and roadmaps continue to champion such ideals. I also think it's necessary that projects stop playing decentralization theater in the short-term, and are transparent about their internal workings and decision-making processes.
Network School is transparent about running as a startup corporation, and participants therefore know what they are getting themselves into. It's still early, there's plenty that can improve, and I certainly see differences in methodologies from what I would personally choose. But they have already succeeded in making Network School somewhere people want to live, and if their growth in the past 1.5 years is any indication for the future - which I think it is - it's going to continue to improve from here.