Network Effect
#022 · Palo Alto, California · founded by Reid Hoffman
“Your network is your net worth.”
Citizens have a public graph. Weekly intros are mandatory. The polity scales by who you know who you know. Connection compounds.
VCs, ops people, anyone who runs a Substack with a chat tab.
📍Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto is the obvious anchor: Stanford, Greylock, the OG LinkedIn HQ. Anchor a citizen campus near University Ave with a public graph display, a weekly mixer, and a citizen-only office for serendipitous intros.
The moral case.
AI is collapsing the cost of weak ties. Network Effect is the first polity built around the new graph dynamics.
From idea to polity.
- 01Anchor the Palo Alto campus
- 02Open citizenship to anyone with a verified five-degree network graph
- 03Charter a citizen rule: weekly intro to a stranger
- 04Charter the polity to fund 100 connections per month, tracked publicly
- 05Apply for member-state status with Interneta after 1,000 citizens
Why I sent you this link.
I have lived at Network School for over a year. I have watched the network state thesis go from a book to a real, lived experiment. I have seen Balaji put it to work, and I have seen what is missing.
The missing piece is a federation. A meta-layer that gives every distinct community a constitutional home, a shared census, an interoperable passport, an anthem, and a way to recognize each other as legitimate.
That is what Interneta is. The United States of Interneta. The optimistic meta-layer for network states.
Network Effect is what I think you would build, if you decided to build one. The One Commandment is what I have inferred from your public work. The site scout, the next steps, the citizenry: all educated guesses. They are wrong wherever you say so.
If any of this lands, I would love a fifteen-minute conversation. If none of it lands, I would still love your reply telling me where I missed.