Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Balaji Srinivasan has four degrees from Stanford. He published over seventy papers in genomics, co-founded a genetic testing company called Counsyl in 2010, co-founded the Bitcoin mining startup 21 Inc in 2013, served as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, became Coinbase's first CTO, and in 2022 published The Network State, arguing that the most important startup of the next century won't be a company. It will be a country. 

Balaji Srinivasan investments span 274 disclosed deals across blockchain infrastructure, AI, healthcare, and what he calls "startup societies," building on a single thesis that most investors find either visionary or alarming: the nation-state is becoming obsolete, and the most important capital allocation decision of the coming decades is backing the new institutions that will replace its functions.

The Early Track Record

Srinivasan's returns before the Network State thesis became his public identity are exceptional by any standard. Counsyl, the genetic testing company he co-founded in 2010, was acquired by Myriad Genetics in 2018 for $375 million. Earn.com, the platform he co-founded to allow people to earn cryptocurrency for responding to emails, was acquired by Coinbase in April 2018 for $120 million. As Coinbase's CTO, he led the launch of USDC, now the second-largest stablecoin in the world by market cap, and oversaw the addition of Zcash and stablecoins to Coinbase's platform.

His angel investment portfolio includes companies that became defining businesses across multiple categories: Alchemy (blockchain infrastructure), Anduril (defense tech, valued over $30 billion), Perplexity (AI search), Polymarket (prediction markets), Replit (collaborative coding), Starkware (zero-knowledge proofs), Superhuman (email client), Benchling (biotech R&D platform), Digital Ocean (cloud infrastructure), Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), and Deel (global payroll). He also made early-protocol bets on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Chainlink, NEAR, and Polygon.

Eric Bahn, Hustle Fund GP, has talked about how the investors who generate the most consistent returns across cycles are the ones who develop a genuine thesis about where infrastructure value accumulates in new technology platforms and deploy capital there before the mainstream. Srinivasan's portfolio is the most comprehensive available demonstration of this principle applied to the crypto and AI infrastructure stack.

The Network State Thesis

In July 2022, Srinivasan published The Network State: How To Start a New Country as an e-book. It ranked second on the Wall Street Journal's bestselling e-books list. The core argument is that digital communities that accumulate shared values, shared norms, and eventually shared physical spaces can eventually seek diplomatic recognition as sovereign entities. 

The model is inspired by the history of how diasporas and stateless peoples maintained cultural coherence across geography, and by the observation that internet-native communities already coordinate more effectively than many nation-states.

He has been building toward this thesis operationally. In September 2024, he launched the Network School, an educational institution focused on health, technology, and startup societies, located on an island near Singapore in Forest City, Malaysia.

It launched with 150 students and grew to 550 by mid-2025. In October 2024, Praxis, a company attempting to build an actual network state with backing from Peter Thiel, Srinivasan, and others, received $525 million in milestone-based financing.

Shiyan Koh, Hustle Fund managing partner, has talked about how the most interesting investment theses are the ones that identify a structural transformation in how institutions work rather than incremental improvements in existing categories. Srinivasan's Network State thesis is extreme but coherent: if communication and coordination costs approach zero, the geographic and legal structures that justified the current nation-state model become less necessary, and the entrepreneurs who build the replacements will generate extraordinary returns.

The Bitcoin $1 Million Bet

In March 2023, Srinivasan made a public bet that Bitcoin would reach $1 million within ninety days, posting $1 million of his own money against the bet. Bitcoin was trading at approximately $26,000 at the time. He closed the bet at a personal loss of $1 million in June 2023, with Bitcoin trading nowhere near $1 million. His rationale was that the predicted dollar hyperinflation that would have driven that scenario had not materialized on the timeline he expected. He paid, acknowledged the loss publicly, and moved on.

The bet is instructive for what it reveals about how he approaches conviction: he is willing to make very large, very public, very specific bets on his theses, and he does not appear to manage his public image around the possibility of being wrong. Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund GP, has talked about how investors who manage their public image more carefully than they manage their analytical process tend to make worse decisions over time. Srinivasan's approach, for better and for worse, goes in the other direction.

Angel Squad and the Infrastructure-First Thesis

Balaji Srinivasan investments demonstrate a consistent pattern across twenty years: identify the infrastructure layer of a new technology platform before the applications built on top of it become obvious, and back that infrastructure at the earliest possible stage. Alchemy, Starkware, Chainlink, and Solana were all infrastructure bets made when the applications they would enable were still speculative.

Angel Squad trains investors to develop exactly this kind of infrastructure-first analytical lens for early-stage deals. With 2,500 members across 50 countries, the community includes investors across AI, crypto, biotech, and climate who are applying this framework to find the enabling layers before the application companies get all the attention. Visit hustlefund.vc/squad.

The Takeaway

Balaji Srinivasan has built one of the most distinctive investment track records in technology by developing a single thesis, backing the infrastructure layers that new platforms depend on, and extending that thesis from biotech to crypto to AI to governance itself. 

The Network State idea may be right or wrong on its most ambitious claims. The investment philosophy underneath it, identify structural transformation early, back infrastructure before applications, and hold conviction through the period when the market still thinks the thesis is crazy, has worked across every category he has applied it to.