Balaji Srinivasan: The Network School | The Further, Faster Podcast

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

I just want to start a new country. Network State is essentially about the, it's about many things, but it's fundamentally about the fact that institutions, Western institutions that were designed before the internet won't survive the internet.

SPEAKER_2 (0:19)

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Magnus Grimeland (0:38)

Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Further, Faster Podcast. I'm Magnus Grimeland, the CEO and founder of Antler. Very excited to have with me here with my good friend Balaji.

Very excited to have this conversation with you. We're here at The Network School in Malaysia. It's part of Singapore Special Economic Zone. It's a great place where you have founders from all over the world coming from more than 100 nations. You can build here, you can live here, you can have your family here. It's just an incredible place. We're going to talk a bit about that and the theory behind it. Balaji will be known very well to a lot of you.

Obviously, an incredibly successful founder, educator at Stanford, then built a biotech company, which is very successfully exited, was the CTO of Coinbase, general partner in Dresden Horowitz, written incredible books and thought leader across the globe. Really recommend you reading The Network State. And yeah, excited to have this conversation. Welcome on the podcast.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:36)

Well, good to be here and good to have you here. And this is actually, I think, your first time in Neversul.

Magnus Grimeland (1:41)

This is the first time here, yeah. But we have a lot of portfolio companies come here and they have a tremendous time. They spent a few months there working out of here, building their company.

And one of the things they really highlight is the incredible community of other founders that are here, which is obviously a great draw in terms of mentorship and sharing ideas and driving things forward. So great to finally be here and will come very often from now onwards. Brought one of my great friends coming here, is a tremendous founder who I think is considering coming here in a few weeks. That's great.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:13)

Absolutely. And this is a great location. It's really built for tech, but it's a tech community, not simply for tech.

If you take a collection of tech companies that builds a tech community. So it's not an individual tech company, it's a collection of them. But it's also more than that because everybody has a life outside of work. So it's for families, couples, children. It's for work and play. It's basically if the platform is actually built internet first. That's how we think about it.

Magnus Grimeland (2:40)

Yeah, it's great.

And obviously, a lot of people will know about you already and all the great things you've done through your life. But perhaps we could start there. We'd love to hear a little bit about your journey, right? Obviously, you're an educated engineer at Stanford. You build an incredible business early on. You've been part of building out the whole blockchain industry, also the CTO blockchain of Coinbase, and wrote an incredible book. So could you just share a little bit about your journey and what brought you here?

Balaji Srinivasan (3:12)

Insofar as I've accomplished anything, I guess, you know, parents are from India, you know, and I grew up in Long Island and got my BSMS PhD at Stanford in electrical engineering, MS in chemical engineering. So I have a hard science background. My first company was like a genome sequencing, clinical genomics company that was sold for 375 mil. Then I became a general partner at Anderson Horowitz and invested in a bunch of unicorns, Omada, OpenGov, Benchling, DigitalOcean, and also helped build out both our bio and crypto arms. And then, as you mentioned, became CTO of Coinbase, sold the company to them called Earn, and that actually became quite a successful product for Coinbase. You can look at some of their public SEC filings and so on. It got shut down afterwards. We're going to maybe reboot it here.

And we also, at Coinbase, I launched a bunch of assets like USDC, which you may have heard of.

Magnus Grimeland (4:13)

Yes, of course.

Balaji Srinivasan (4:14)

So number six global asset. So October 23rd, 2018, USDC was $0.

And now basically, seven, eight years later, it's at $70, $80 billion. That's how fast things can move, right?

Magnus Grimeland (4:24)

We're just talking with the team there. It's growing like crazy.