Source startups from Network School without a directory

Finding startups connected to the Network School orbit is harder than finding YC alumni, because NS produces people and experiments before it produces companies. Most scouts look for a directory and find almost nothing. The ones who get somewhere start from a different question.

Quick answer: Sourcing Network School startups means filtering by fellowship depth, public shipping activity, and sector fit, not searching a company registry. NS produces jurisdiction-comfortable operators in govtech, identity, crypto infrastructure, and AI tools. The scout's job is to work the person graph, apply the filters below, and evaluate host-jurisdiction risk before adding anyone to a corporate short list.

What the Network School node actually produces

Network School is not an accelerator. It does not produce 250 funded companies per batch. It produces a residential cohort of approximately 128 to 270 members per cycle, depending on the program period, who live and work together for one to twelve months. What comes out of that has to be mapped at a finer grain than "startups."

A useful taxonomy, based on what is publicly verifiable:

Companies started at or during NS. These are the rarest category. A small fraction of residents use the density and free time to build something new during their stay. These companies often have no Crunchbase entry and no press coverage. The first trace is a GitHub repo, a product hunt launch, or a Warpcast post.

Companies that used NS as a base. Ethereum's builder community and Solana's Superteam both had documented overlaps with the Forest City cohort. These are not NS companies per se. They are companies whose founders used NS as a low-cost, high-density operating environment for a period. The distinction matters: "used NS as a base" means a company may have existed before, during, and after, with NS as one chapter.

Governance, zone, and startup-society projects. Prospera on Roatán, other ZEDEs, and a range of pop-up village experiments recruit from overlapping networks. NS alumni appear in these projects as early contributors, operators, and sometimes co-founders. If your mandate is govtech or alternative-jurisdiction infrastructure, this is a non-trivial pipeline. Our earlier Prospera sourcing note covers how that particular node converts.

Individual operators who later appear in corporate-relevant sectors. This category gets the least attention. An NS resident who spent six months there in 2023, shipped an identity product, and now runs a twelve-person team in Astana or Tallinn is not in any startup database. They are in the person graph. AI infrastructure, digital identity, payments rails, longevity research, and energy software are the sectors where NS-adjacent operators show up with enough frequency to be worth a structured search.

Even within a twelve-month period, a scout working the filters below should be able to name and evaluate fifteen to twenty companies or teams connected to the NS orbit. That beats a vague claim about founder density every time.

How NS compares to nodes scouts already use

The sourcing question is not whether NS is prestigious. It is whether NS produces output useful for a specific mandate.

The table below uses the same evaluation frame we apply to other residential and program-based nodes. You can compare it directly to the Waterloo Region analysis and the Osaka–Kansai note.

The honest read: NS loses on company count and wins on jurisdiction-comfortable operators. Founders who have lived under an experimental legal framework, worked across a multinational cohort, and shipped outside conventional regulatory environments are not easy to find anywhere else. That is only useful for mandates that need exactly that profile. If you are sourcing conventional SaaS targets, NS is the wrong node to center.

Kazakhstan: the second experiment, not a sequel

In July 2026, Network School signed an MOU with Kazakhstan's Astana Hub and claimed the node would be operational by mid-August 2026. The campus is associated with Astana Hub's fifth floor. The promised infrastructure includes expedited visas, redomiciliation support, and talent recruitment pathways.

Astana Hub is not a brochure organization. It has documented scale: thousands of registered startups, active education programs, and a recurring conference (Digital Bridge) that draws serious regional attention. The question for a scout is not whether Astana Hub is real. It is whether NS can reconstitute its community density in a new jurisdiction, or whether the Malaysia cohort dispersed and Kazakhstan is starting from scratch.

We do not know the current headcount. The relocation is announced and claimed operational. It is not mature. Do not treat it as a proven node yet.

What you can evaluate: whether specific people you identified from the Forest City period are now operating from Astana, whether new product activity has appeared in the past six months with Astana addresses, and whether Astana Hub's own network produces corroborating companies that are NS-adjacent. Those three checks take two hours of desk research and they tell you more than any press release.

Host-jurisdiction risk scorecard

The Malaysia situation is the most instructive data point NS has produced. It is worth using as a template rather than a cautionary tale.

Forest City's legal basis was a local business license and premises use, not a government MOU. The state posture toward NS was informal tolerance, which reversed quickly when political pressure mounted. Time from problem to exit: days, not weeks. What a corporate partner inherited from a company that built its whole identity around the Forest City node was licensing controversy and political exposure.

Kazakhstan is not stable by default. It is an explicit invitation, which is structurally better than informal tolerance. But an MOU signed in July 2026 with an "operational" claim by August has not been tested under stress. Treat it as a lower-risk entry point than Forest City, not as a proven jurisdiction.

For any target you find in this orbit, the diligence question is: where is the company actually incorporated, where does it operate, and what happens to those facts if the NS host changes again? Our startup due diligence checklist covers the operational-presence checks that matter most here.

How to actually work this node as a scout

The person graph is the database. There is no directory substitute.

Start with fellowship depth. Residents who completed a full fellowship year are more likely to have built something durable than one-month members. A one-month visitor attended. A fellowship recipient invested. Filter for depth before sector.

Apply a public shipping test. Product launches, active GitHub repos, grants received, and named customers in the past twelve months are the signals. An NS connection from 2022 with no visible output since is not a pipeline entry. The active startup checklist applies here without modification.

Check for operational presence in the current host. A Forest City photo from 2023 is not evidence of anything in 2026. If the company or founder cannot be placed in Astana, a verifiable digital address, or a jurisdiction where they are clearly operating, they are not on the short list.

Sector match matters more than usual here, because NS skews narrow. The realistic sectors for corporate-relevant output are govtech, digital identity, crypto infrastructure, AI tooling, and longevity. "Climate tech" and "manufacturing" are not well-represented in this cohort. If that is your mandate, other nodes will return a better yield.

Do not cold-email the community Slack. This is a tight network and treating it like Capital Factory or a LinkedIn scrape will close doors faster than open them. If you are serious about the orbit, find a warm introduction path before any outreach.

Chibit's sourcing filters apply here the same way they do for more conventional nodes: matched to mandate, active in the past year, verifiable operational presence. If you want to test what comes back for a specific sector and region combination, Innovation Scout is the right starting point before you commit research hours to the person graph.

FAQ

How many startups has Network School produced?

Network School has not published a company registry, and no third-party database tracks it reliably. A scout working the filters described above can identify fifteen to twenty verifiable companies or teams from the NS orbit, but this number is a research output, not a program claim.

Is the Kazakhstan campus a reliable sourcing location?

The Astana Hub MOU was signed in approximately July 2026, with operations claimed by mid-August. The legal basis is stronger than Forest City was, but the node has no track record in this jurisdiction yet. Treat it as a lower-risk setup than Malaysia, not as a proven sourcing environment.

What sectors are most productive to target in the NS ecosystem?

Govtech, digital identity, payments infrastructure, AI tools, and longevity research reflect where NS-adjacent founders actually ship. Climate tech and industrial manufacturing are poorly represented. Scouts with mandates in those areas should weight other ecosystems more heavily.

How do I find NS-connected founders without a directory?

Start with public fellowship recipients, then look for product launches, repos, and grants with timestamps in the past twelve months. The person graph connects through Warpcast, GitHub, and specific Substack communities, not LinkedIn. Fellowship depth is the first filter; public shipping is the second.

What jurisdiction risk should a corporate partner worry about?

The Forest City episode showed that informal host-jurisdiction tolerance can end in days. For any NS-connected acquisition or partnership target, verify where the company is incorporated, where it actually operates, and whether that is independent of NS's current host. A target incorporated in Estonia or Delaware that happened to operate from Forest City is a different risk profile than one whose legal identity was entangled with the node itself.