Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School — a pop-up educational initiative for tech founders and developers — is relocating to Kazakhstan after Malaysian authorities cracked down on the program over alleged licensing violations.
The Network School, which operates as a series of multi-week cohorts in different countries, had been running sessions in Malaysia when local regulators raised concerns about its operational status. Malaysian authorities reportedly determined the program required specific educational licensing that it had not obtained, prompting the abrupt relocation.
Kazakhstan’s Astana Hub, a government-backed technology park in the capital, has agreed to host the next cohort. The move aligns with Kazakhstan’s broader push to position itself as a Central Asian technology hub, offering special visa regimes and tax incentives for tech companies and digital nomads.
Srinivasan, a former Coinbase CTO and Andreessen Horowitz general partner, founded the Network School as an experimental education model combining startup acceleration, technical training, and network-building for globally mobile talent. Previous cohorts have run in locations including Singapore and various U.S. cities.
The Malaysia disruption highlights the regulatory uncertainty facing borderless education models that operate across jurisdictions without traditional institutional accreditation. Kazakhstan’s willingness to host the program signals a regulatory approach more accommodating to experimental educational formats.
The next Network School cohort is expected to launch in Astana later this year. Organizers say the curriculum — focused on AI, crypto, biotech, and network state theory — will remain unchanged despite the venue change.
Source: Cointelegraph
