Introduction
-by Balaji Srinivasan
I was a little reticent about the very idea of a biography of a living person, namely myself!
But in today’s world you have four choices when it comes to coverage of yourself.
Pseudonymous. First, you can remain pseudonymous*, like Satoshi. I recommend this.
Go Direct. Second, you can go direct and publish your own content. I recommend this too.
Reactive. Third, you can cooperate with hostile corporate journalists, like when Peter Thiel’s associates made the mistake of talking to a professional hater like Max Chafkin for his book-length attack.
Positive. Finally, you can block all corporate journalists and instead just help positive people who get what you’re doing, like when Peter Thiel’s associates spoke with an intelligent writer like Jimmy Soni for his book-length exegesis.
When enumerated this way, it seems obvious that you want some combination of 1, 2, and 4.
But conflict is attention, and it’s very easy to just default into responding to negativity. This is partly because negativity is louder on the internet than positivity. Those who like what you’re doing will just hit the like button, but those who dislike it will send angry missives. To not get trapped in being reactive, you have to intentionally focus on the positive. And Eric Jorgenson is very positive, so I said—all right, write the book, and I’ll write the foreword.
But this then led to my second quandary.
See, to write a foreword you need to know who a book is for. I wasn’t sure whether this book would exactly fit into what we might call the tech-self-help section, the (useful) kind of business books and self-improvement books that fans of Tim Ferriss and Andrew Huberman read.
Because while I’ve had reasonable success as a founder and investor, there are certainly people who are better company founders (like my friend Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase) and people who are much more focused on being great investors (like my friend Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList). I can give advice on how to build and invest in billion dollar companies, and you’ll find some of that in this book…but there are people who are even better.
Similarly, I’m a good engineer (but Vitalik Buterin is better), a respectable scientist (but Vijay Pande is better), a decent turnaround CEO (but Ben Horowitz is better), a bestselling author (but Tim Ferriss is better), and so on. I sit at the intersection of many existing categories—founder, investor, engineer, scientist, CEO, tech executive, content creator, author, etc.—without really considering myself defined by any of them.
I suppose what I really am is the id of technology.
The one who says what tech thinks.
And what do I say?
- That the Internet is to the USA what the Americas once were to the UK—a frontier territory, where all the action is.
- That just as the Western frontier once gave rise to an American pioneer class, the internet frontier has given rise to a global technology class.
- That this class is not defined by inherited wealth (many are born poor in places like India and China), nor by legacy institutions (many are born anti-institutionalists), but by the ability to create wealth and the desire to found new institutions.
- And that these new institutions will eventually include not just new companies and new currencies, but new cities—and even new countries.
This is the concept elaborated on in my book, The Network State. It’s also now the view of many in tech, who realize that just as it was easier to start Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, it will actually be easier to start a new city than to reform San Francisco, and easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.
Perhaps it will be your view too.
* See my talk on the pseudonymous economy. This is already emerging: it’s an internet where you separate your speaking name from your official name as a matter of course, such that any attacks are attacks on your arguments rather than your character.
