The Uncommon Founder #19

Writing has been a little sporadic of late. My wife and I are currently buried in boxes ahead of our move from London to the Southwest of France on October 19th. Add to that the news that we’re expecting a baby, the associated stream of appointments, and a generally busy work schedule, and I can be excused I think. This is mostly here as a note to self - to get back into the regular rhythms I’ve previously stuck to where possible.

I spoke to a friend last week whose currently living at the Network School - an attempt by Balaji Srinivasan (former Coinbase CTO) to start a new country, funded by crypto and startups, on an abandoned, man-made Chinese island.

It was a reminder that under the banners of ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’ we’ve normalised a lot of mad shit. Mindblowingly, headscratchingly, jaw-droppingly mad shit. The sorts of things that, were they written in a book, we’d slate for being unrealistic. Yet here my friend finds himself - 15 miles off the coast of Singapore.

Madness comes in many flavours, and I remember sampling it for the first time early in my career. I worked for a startup that raised a lot of money and promptly took all employees on a ski trip. A mad trip was punctuated by a senior member of the team taking lots of cocaine, trying to impress a French waitress by doing shirtless pushups, and then summoning a helicopter to take him to hospital when he convinced himself he was having a heart attack (I’m reliably informed he later ran the helicopter through as a company expense). As said team member was carted off for a hospitalised come down, I remember chuckling to myself that these people had been handed hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are many smart, diligent and normal people working in the world of tech. AND there is a wild west full of mad bastards. There is some more serious analysis for me to write at some stage, but for now I’ll just let you chuckle at the sheer bloody weirdness of it all.

Network state - all the hallmarks of a cult on an abandoned Chinese island

Network School - the brainchild of Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, crypto-billionaire, and influential Silicon Valley libertarian - is called a school for now but is actually Balaji’s attempt to start a new country, fuelled by startups, with crypto as the currency.

It’s based on an abandoned, man-made island, 15 miles off Singapore. The ‘ghost city’ was part of a $100bn Chinese ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, which was abandoned after $10bn had already been spent on development (you can see what it looks like below).

Those living at Network School are holed up in one of the many empty hotel rooms - living, eating and working out together as part of an overall health regime designed by longevity fruit-loop Bryan Johnson (more on him later).

Balaji himself is there, working hard at all hours of the day and night, but attendees are not allowed to talk to him outside of the 5 minute pitch slots they can book during his designated office hours.

What’s the general vibe like? I asked my friend. ‘20% of the guys are jacked optimisation bros, and the rest are…not. I stay away from politics because I’m probably the most left wing person here by far (even as a centrist). Oh…and they all love Elon. His approval ratings somewhere like London are probably 10%, but here it’s definitely north of 90.’

Who knows what the future holds for Network School but for now it’s definitely carrying a few of the hallmarks of a cult.

Project Blueprint - one man’s desperate attempt not to die

Cue longevity fruit loop Bryan Johnson for his own dedicated entry. The 47-year-old, who made his fortune by founding and selling the e-commerce company Braintree to PayPal, spends roughly six-and-a-half hours a day on his anti-ageing routines, which include a range of therapies, exercise and consuming 54 pills each morning.

But some of his techniques take things to further extremes. ‘*Multigenerational plasma exchanges’* i.e. swapping blood with his Son and his Dad was a previous part of the routine (although apparently not any more); and regular trips to undergo gene therapy on Próspera, a charter city on the Honduran island of Roatán with its own laws.

Bryan calls this Project Blueprint, but I for one am confused about what this is meant to be a blueprint for.

Elevating the world’s consciousness, by renting desk space

The next mad bastard in the running is Wework’s Adam Neumann. If you want to get a detailed account of his many mad antics then I’d recommend the series WeCrashed and the book Billion Dollar Loser.

Neumann is not the first hubristic egotist to build a company. But he is the first to convince a bunch of (mostly) smart investors that a real estate company renting desk space was a world-changing technological idea. The company raised $12.8bn, with a peak valuation of $47bn, all whilst renting desk space to people at a loss, and eventually going bankrupt.

Amongst Neumann’s many mad antics was the insistence on a company mission statement to Elevate the World’s Consciousness - did I mention they rent desk space for a living? An IPO filing that mentioned himself 169 times (see the image above for how that benchmarks). And trademarking the word ‘we’ and then charging his own company millions of dollars for the rights to use it.

The funniest part of all of this - despite being forced out of WeWork as the company filed for bankruptcy, Neumann has now gone on to raise over $350m from top investors like A16z, to…drumroll please…start another real estate business.

Elon…’pedo guy’

There are whole books dedicated to the King of the Mad Bastards, Elon Musk - a man whose children are called Griffin, Vivian, Kai, Saxon, Damian, X Æ A-Xii, Azure, Strider, Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus, Seldon Lycurgus, Arcadia and Romulus.

But of all of Elon’s mad antics, perhaps the funniest was his bizarre online dispute with a British cave diver. The incredible story of a Thai football team trapped in a cave was a story that captured the global attention. Not one to be left on the sidelines, Elon decided he would save the day by getting his teams to build a mini-submarine to rescue the boys. When his offer was dismissed by Vern Unsworth, the British cave diver leading the rescue efforts, as a ‘PR stunt’ - Musk immediately went on a bizarre line of attack, calling him a ‘pedo’ and then continuing to double down on the baseless accusations.

Yes this is the richest man in the world we’re talking about.

Peter Thiel doesn’t care if humanity lives or dies

Perhaps less known than Musk, but no less influential, is his one-time co-founder - libertarian loon Peter Thiel.

Besides founding companies like Paypal and Palantir, investing via his Founders Fund, and mentoring the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Thiel plays an increasingly influential role in politics as the apparent ring leader of the right wing libertarian wing of Silicon Valley.

But it’s not his political beliefs that land him on this list. Thiel has some pretty disdainful views of his fellow humans, as evidenced by a recent interview:

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And he’s finally reached the conclusion that any good Christian libertarian should, that AI regulation will hasten the anti-christ.

Jeff Bezos fires Katy Perry into space

Jeff Bezos has done a lot to make our lives better, but perhaps his greatest service to humanity was firing Katy Perry into space.

Here’s the fascinating word salad she chose to serve up once back here among us Earth dwellers:

Sam Bankman-Fried convinces everyone he’s a genius…and then goes to prison for fraud

Before going to prison for fraud for 25 years, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto exchange FTX, made money faster than anyone else in human history.

What was the secret to his success?

In a clever (but unintentional) strategy, he seemed to convince the world he was a genius by dressing like a slob and playing video games during TV interviews. The worse he behaved, the more they wanted him. Investors love a bad boy.

Zuck does his best impression of being human

Professional odd duck Mark Zuckerberg has a long history of trying to be human, making even routine tasks like drinking water look uncomfortable:

So when the Metaverse came into existence, this gave Zuck a whole new medium for roleplaying as a real boy. Everything about the Metaverse and the desperate attempts to make it seem cool are hilarious to me.

Pointless invention raises $120m before people realise its pointless

If ever you think your idea isn’t good enough to get funding, then just remember that a machine to squeeze juice out of a packet raised $120m before people realised that packets could be squeezed by hand.

Thank you Juicero for instilling belief in all of us.

Soham Parekh - the hardest working man in tech

This guy is Soham Parekh. He’s had 19 jobs in the last three years sometimes working for as many as four companies at a time. Only one problem - none of the companies know about each other.

In an attempt to rein in this prodigious hard worker mad bastard, some people have created this Soham Tracker to stop him scamming any future employers.

Sam Altman hyped GPT-5’s ‘PhD’ level intelligence…and then people started using it

Sam Altman told the world that GPT5 would represent PhD level intelligence in everything.

On the basis of the image below, it feels to me like PhD standards might be slipping.

Russian tech billionaire whose fathered 100 children (so far)

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has become one of the World’s most prolific sperm donors - fathering 6 children with partners, but a further (estimated) 94 through sperm donation.

Unusually, Durov opts to pay for the entire IVF process for any woman who opts to use his sperm, and has even written his sperm-donor children into his will, giving them an equal share alongside his six other kids.

I could go on, but should probably crack on with some serious work now.