E1026 - Ben Horowitz and Balaji Srinivasan on Netscape and Network States

Can a country be built from the internet up? Not as a metaphor or an online community, but as a system that replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed, money, law, and governance.

In this conversation taken from The Network State Podcast, a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz joins Balaji Srinivasan to explore how internet native institutions are beginning to mirror and challenge traditional state structures. Drawing parallels to China’s early special economic zones, they discuss how constrained experiments like Shenzhen tested new rules without rewriting the entire system, and why similar experimentation is now happening on...