Bespoke Balajisms book

Exploring the thinking of Balaji Srinivasan through 100 ideas

I collected my writing on Balaji’s ideas into a book I called Bespoke Balajisms - Exploring the thinking of Balaji Srinivasan through 100 ideas. I provide links to download, read or buy the book below.

The book presents important mental models of Balaji Srinivasan, a tech founder and an investor, who is now a well-known public intellectual beyond Silicon Valley, in an era, when the tech tribe became a global phenomenon.

Most of the book, 90 balajisms, comes from a series of blog posts called Daily Balajisms I wrote here on my substack and published on X. The rest is the “bespoke” part – 10 ideas I crafted based on Balaji’s thinking. I divided Balaji’s mental models into Bold Balajisms, Based Balajisms, and added my two cents with Bespoke Balajisms. Bold Balajisms have a technical vibe and Based Balajisms are more political.

You can purchase my book on Amazon, as a Kindle ebook. The final price depends on your location, but I set it at $2. My two cents x 100 Bespoke Balajisms. You can download my book as a pdf here. You can also read it online on Slideshare or Academia.

It’s time to build. And this book aims to provide a “Lego philosophy,” full of composable mental models, to help builders see further into the definite future. To get into the mode of definite optimism, as Peter Thiel calls it. What today we call techno-optimism. Let’s bootstrap the desired future together.

Most of the Daily Balajisms were recorded also as discussions with my old friend Duke Mtambo at his podcast Mtambo Desk. Enjoy the ride through mental models of Balaji, and if you like it, get in touch via X or here on substack.

I highly recommend, you first read The Network State book by Balaji, and The Anthology of Balaji by Eric Jorgenson. As they represent the original Balaji sources, whereas I try to add some value here and there, by cataloguing individual mental models of Balaji, and then customizing and recombining them.

This is a v1 and a volume 1 of hopefully a balajisms series that might expand to 365 unique mental models, or end up at a special Ramanujan number 1729. Marc Andreesen describes Balaji as a person with the biggest output of new and good ideas he knows, so getting to 1729 Balajisms is just a matter of time.

I am grateful to all people at 1729 Writers group, especially Matt Harder and Camellia Yang, and friends I met at TNS meetups in Slovakia, Czechia and Austria. I am grateful to my friends: Alexander Bard, Duke Mtambo, Juraj Bednar and Kevin Adidas, for their advice and inspiration. I am grateful also for generative AI, like Playground.ai that I used to create illustrations. In the v2 of the book, I want to have less AI art and add graphs.

With Bespoke Balajisms I wanted to add my 2 cents to a growing scene and scenius around network states, optimalism and internet values – a new frontier where decentralized AI, Crypto and Social tech meet to create new cultures and ultimately countries.

Please enjoy the first batch of my bespoke balajisms.