![]() ![]() And last summer, he published a manifesto called The Network State: How to Start a New Country, calling for tech to build a successor to the nation-state. Balaji is the guy who evangelized Bitcoin and predicted the COVID pandemic well before they achieved mainstream recognition he taught a generation of young founders at Stanford how to build their startups he foresaw the tech backlash and its eventual geographic dispersion back in 2013, at a time when Silicon Valley was considered untouchable. ![]() But he’s more fondly known among his peers for his ability to generate an endless, enthusiastic stream of ideas. His CV is impressive: he co-founded Counsyl, a genetic-testing company he was a general partner at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz he was briefly the CTO of Coinbase he was once tapped for the role of FDA commissioner. Balaji’s influence on tech is difficult to describe through titles or accolades. If you pledge allegiance to its ideals, and endure a bit of hazing, you, too, can become American.Īnd yet not everyone in tech these days is bullish on America-among them the entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan. For would-be settlers and explorers, America is more like a fraternity than a country defined by geography or ethnicity. Several jobs later-all acquired the same way-I came to realize that this was just how things worked.įor me, working in tech perfectly embodied the distinct “America brain” that I first came to know through my parents and now often encounter among my peers: the entrepreneurialism and the drive and the shameless, bright-eyed wanting of something better than the life they were born into. At the time, I thought I had gotten incredibly lucky. ![]() ![]() A partner at a venture-capital firm read one of my posts, liked it, and invited me to coffee, which led to my first real tech job. Shortly after moving to San Francisco, I started a blog. If you wanted to talk to someone important, you could just send them a cold email. If you didn’t know how to code, someone would show you how. San Francisco in the 2010s was a place where permission was always assumed, rather than something that had to be earned. In my hometown, I felt too weird, obsessive and off-putting in San Francisco, every improbable permutation of the future was earnestly dissected, discussed and built at coffee shops and in the living rooms of sunny Victorian row houses. I knew nothing about technology, only that the people there seemed like me. Instead, I spent one weekend in San Francisco and decided that was where I wanted to be. My mom, who enjoyed a stable life but not enough excitement in Indonesia, gave up her career as a dentist to move halfway across the world, starting over again at 28, lugging packages in a liquor store in Washington, D.C.Īs a child growing up in Pennsylvania, I imagined that I, too, would have a moment where I’d pick up and leave my home country. My dad, enthralled by tales from his brother-in-law about life in America, turned down his acceptance to university in Germany and applied to Georgetown University instead. While my lazy answer is “through mutual friends,” the real answer is that they fell in love with the same country and ended up in the same place. I’m often asked how my parents, who are from two very different countries, met. ![]()
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