Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #67 - 3D Home Printing for the Developing World - Alexandria Lafci and Brett Hagler of New Story Charity

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

Alexandria Lafci and Brett Hagler are cofounders of New Story Charity.New Story Charity builds homes and communities in the developing world. They were part of the Summer 2015 YC batch.They just 3d printed their first home in Austin, Texas. You can check it out at 3DHome.org.The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Alexandria Lafsey and Brett Hagler. They're co-founders of New Story Charity. New Story Charity builds homes and communities in the developing world, and they were part of the summer 2015 batch. So they just 3D printed their first home in Austin, Texas, and you can check it out at 3Dhome.org. We'll also post the video and links on the blog. All right, here we go. how about we start with you guys explaining what you do and then we'll go back in time and talk about like how you ended up doing YC and all the rest of it awesome sure so we're non-profit one of the

first ones to go through white combinator and we build houses and communities throughout the developing world so right now throughout Haiti and Latin America and you can kind of envision a plot of land and then about 200 to 300 homes being designed like kind of like an urban designer would do for some of the poorest people in the world is the really high level of that. And Allie can add on to that. Yeah. So we'll essentially work with local governments. We'll get large pieces of land typically granted, bring in utilities, subdivide the land.

And then families who were previously living in, let's say, tent slums in Haiti post-earthquake or in active landslide zones in El Salvador will bring those families into the communities. They actually help design the homes and the communities. And then the families not only own the houses, but they own the land that the home sits on. And land ownership is so crucial as a path out of poverty. And were you guys working on nonprofits before? Or did you just get excited about this idea? Right.

Yeah. Alexandria was, I definitely was not. Yeah. Probably the last thing in the world I thought I'd be doing. And like literally. But I kind of had a big 180 in my life. And then when I was in my early 20s, had a four. profit started up before this. So loved entrepreneurship, love technology, love innovation, all the

things, then took a trip to Haiti a couple years after the 2010 earthquake. So like not right after, but there's like a couple years after. But it looked like it was a few months after, you know, and it was just blown away by the tens of thousands of people that were living in tents because the earthquake destroyed, probably close to like a million households. something like that. And everybody was given temporary aid, right? Which is necessary at the time. But it was only supposed to last for like maybe 90 days.

And as of today, it's been almost, I mean, over eight years. And people are still living in tents. Like little kid, a mom and her, you know, three little girls are living in a tent with no protection from intruders, from storms, from anything. And you kind of just go back to like, I don't know, first principles. Maslow's hierarchy and think food, water, and I think sometimes we forget about Shelter. And we saw it firsthand and came back and right before I met Alexandria, I actually tried to find other nonprofits that could like really champion and support that were solving this issue. And then as we went out and started telling more people about it, kind of found another problem,

which was skepticism. and so many people that were skeptical about where their money actually went, right? So we're here in Silicon Valley. We're giving to ex-organization. How is the money actually being spent? It kind of seems like a black hole. What percent is going? How efficient is it?

Like all these things. And so we uncovered another problem, which was a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability, and kind of like a status quo in a sense. And then teamed up with Alexandria, and our other co-founder Matthew. And like the early catalyst was how do we take those pain points that we know donors have, right? Like our end user, reverse engineer, a new experience for that. And then we also have another, obviously, the most important end user, which is the families that

we partner with. And how do we provide a better experience for them as well, which Allie can talk through? And now is how it started. But just to clarify, there were companies or nonprofits working in this space, the money it just kind of like, you know, seeps out from little cracks in the business and then they kind of end up living intense. Yeah. At this point, three years into doing this work, we've kind of come across and researched and

talk to over 100, right, well over 100 different organizations focused on housing. Yeah. And unfortunate, well, the good news, start with the good news. The good news is that there are a lot of, you know, people and organizations that care about this, right? So there's a lot of money being put towards social housing. Yeah. The bad news is there's a huge spectrum with respect to what Brett mentioned, like the donor

experience, transparency, accountability, what's actually happening with the funds that are being allocated there. But then also, unfortunately, on the quality side. So the spectrum of quality of output of the homes and the communities that are being built, it's stark. You have some good quality stuff, but a lot of it leans towards, you know, fairly subpar, which is part of the problem we're trying to solve. Yeah. So like one example. And I won't name the organization, but it was a pretty prominent article. This was actually like right before we went through White Combinator. It was one of the largest humanitarian organizations, like a bunch of big headlines came out that they raised basically like half a billion dollars.

And within like six years, it only built, and this is not an exaggeration, I think like six houses. That's like legit, not an exaggeration. What's it? Yeah, right? Totally. I don't think moving to Haiti's the people's writer. That leads into, so I didn't get to mention, I won't go too much into it, but my background is almost entirely in international development work, right? That's what I became passionate about when I was 15, like kind of solving poverty is like my life's mission or putting a dent in extreme poverty.

That's what I studied, did a lot of work with, you know, various organizations in Latin America and Africa, et cetera. And, you know, became fairly jaded in that work. I think a lot of people in the space, you know, become. And then doing international development work and having a decent understanding of that led me to want to understand poverty more deeply here in the United States. And so I did teach for America. And unfortunately, about a third of my students were homeless for either all or part of the year. And through the lens of those students, I got to see that when you have housing instability, your attendance in school decreases. that leads to performance decreasing, mental and physical health impacts, parents' ability to

attain and retain jobs. And so when Brett and I had our first conversation about, you know, building homes in Haiti and solving that issue, I was just really excited about the opportunity to see what the broad-ranging, you know, implications of that could be. So that's how, you know, I got super passionate about housing as it relates to poverty. And then through my experience, in development work. Brett mentioned that large organization, only building six homes.

You know, that organization didn't build six homes and then pocket the rest of the money, right? What really happened, if you look deeper into it, is, you know, they said that they were going to build however many thousand homes. They realized things like getting land is extremely difficult. Things like doing quality control on homes post-disaster is incredibly difficult. And so they shifted away from that need and, you know, focused on things that. were important, a little easier to do, et cetera. And so I think that highlights one of the core reasons why we've been successful is because we value, truly partner with, you know, heavily

vet local partners. One of the biggest observations in my work internationally is that everywhere you go, you know, spin the globe, point your finger, everywhere you go, there are competent people and organizations who are going to know their communities, how to do business in those locations, better than you ever will. And it would be very presumptuous of us as, you know, very young, at that point, we're 24 years old, right? People with ambition to say, like, we're going to go into Haiti. We're going to go into El Salvador and make a difference. What we did, which I think, you know, is crucial to our success, is find locals who help us to navigate effectively. They're uniquely positioned to help us be successful.

So, yeah. So what does it look like in the very beginning? So you meet and, you're like, okay, we're going to work on housing, specifically in Haiti at this point. Yeah. Does that mean like you take a trip and try and find contractors and build one on your own? Do you raise money first? What do you do? Yeah, I think it kind of going back to, so we had already like, before we got into YC, we were already like loving white commenter, like listening to podcasts, like all the stuff. It was actually a big point of connection between us, right? I think you were surprised like, oh, this person who's like a nonprofit background watches startup school. Yeah. Which is unfortunately unique.

Yeah, like speaking the same language. And if you kind of go to, I mean, like really a core value you all have is make something people want. And we looked at that from really two users, right? So the first was a large pool of donors that, I mean, everybody listening right now. Like if we said, hey, give $1,000 to an international, large organization, how many of you would actually trust where 100% of the money goes, how efficient it is, the end results. And the reality is about.

half the people would say no, right? And so how do we, how do we make something that they want? Right. And then we designed our experience we can get into later, right? That got traction. And then to Alley's point earlier, how do we make something that our end users want where we know they don't want just, you know, they don't want us going down there and building homes for them and like these super large organizations without using local talent and local materials and local jobs? And so that was really the catalyst of how things got started. And then, so we had the idea and then now getting into MVP mode. We were super young. We were 24. We had, you know, really no capital of our own.

And so we had the idea of the donor side was really three steps. The first one was we were to make our own crowdfunding site. So you could see the family, right? Kind of like Kickstarter. You could see a picture of the family, read their story, and you can give directly to them. Second thing is that 100% of what you give will go towards. building the house. Well, it's not going to cover any of our overhead.

And we do that by having a couple private donors that fund all of our overhead, like private investors, basically. And then the third part was when the family moved in, we wanted to be extremely accountable to the donors. And it was also one of the best days of the family's lives, right? Think about it. They've been living in, I mean, like hell on earth conditions, legit, for seven years. And they get into a new house.

It's one of the best days of their lives. And so we take a simple move-in video and we send that back to all the donors. So that simple user experience of see the family up front digitally, 100% goes to it, and then you get to see the end result of the video. That was the initial concept. And then the way that we wanted to launch it was

we didn't have an engineer at the time, actually, and we didn't have any money. Great, good start. So we made, I'm going to give a plug to Webflow Is it Webflow a YC company? Yeah. So our other co-founder, Matthew, his nickname is McGiver just because he can like legit do anything. We said, all right, we're going to make basically a fake crowdfunding platform on Webflow.

And so we staged it as basically looking like our own crowdfunding platform that we built organically, where donors could come online, see the family, have the crowdfunding meter, have the percentage, all the things, give directly to it. And when that happened, our MVP was Matthew, Alexandria and ourselves, we would just update the landing page and literally like go in and move the meter. Yeah. So it's all like static. So you get money. You move it. Totally. But it would be like, I'm at a dinner. Can you like, we just got a donation. Can you go in and you go in? You do a quick calculation. This is the percentage. And you like move the meter over. There were a few mistakes. We made. It was always like, you know, usually a delay. And people would call or email and say, did our email go through? And our. good excuse was credit card processing like it takes a little bit of time you know um and then we we still hadn't and then we're like okay well we're gonna still prove the MVP um and well when the homes are built we'll just like go down ourselves and do the videos yeah and so we actually um i think this a good startup lesson we were able to launch that concept like legit and only a few weeks and and we started

getting money. And we got a decent amount of money. We got like $100,000 within like a couple months. And that allowed us to use a local partner that we had already known in Haiti that had a long, had a lot of experience there, build our first six houses. We went down to not build the homes because we employ local workers to take the videos, see the impact. And then we send it back to everybody. And that happened in a very short period of time. And then we applied to YC after that. And I think that, you know, just really emphasizes core principles, right? Like, you know, make something people want. Like, we wouldn't have gotten that traction, gotten over $100,000 in a matter of a couple of weeks if it wasn't an experience that people really like. People were

shocked at the beginning. Like, you're going to send me a video of like this exact family I just met on the website moving into their house. You know, if that actually happens, that's something that, you know, I want to be a part of. Yeah. So we would get, we would say, yeah, this is a cool. I want to be a part of it, but also this is not going to scale. Right. Of course. So I guess that's the other lesson too, right? Do things that don't scale. I mean, for those first few months, like, we were literally just pulling out our computers and updating the website like constantly. Did you have a design for the house?

And we had full-time jobs. Yeah. Let's just say that. We had full-time jobs. So it would be like in the middle of like the workday of my like supply chain logistics job running to my computer, like moving a meter. So you just like, you know, make it happen. Yeah. We partnered with an organization that had already started a project. And so, like, we didn't have to start everything from scratch. We just felt like, okay, validate NDP, validate this is something people want. Yeah. And prove it with them. And then after that, we go. Okay. And were you set up as a nonprofit at the time? Or you just ran the money through? Yeah. Oh, you just, wow. No, well, we, go ahead. Yeah, not immediately. It just takes some time. That's actually a process that takes probably

much longer than it should. A couple of months. I know that's why I was surprised when you were saying, like, we got it all done in a couple weeks. I was like, hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So people knew in the beginning, like, you know, we're not a nonprofit yet. They're making the donation knowing that. And then, you know, we were able to give tax deductions kind of in retro, was it retrospect. Gotcha. Yeah. Through our partner. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. And so you got to IC. Everything changed. Yeah. Yeah. And what changed about the business? when you got into YC and went through?

Thinking bigger, I think was one of the key ones. So Kevin Hale, Aaron Harris, Kat Maniallik, they were our partners. We love them. Yes. And I remember it was at my apartment building. We had our, you know, you get in and you have your first kind of call with your partner to set your goal for the three-month stint that is YC, right? What's either like your revenue goal, your customer goal, whatever?

For us, it was how many homes we were going to fund. And by the way, our homes are about $6,000 per home. Okay. So, so, so Kevin asked us, you know, what are your goals for home funding? And we said, you know, this year, this was 2015, in the year of 2015, we want to do 100 homes. And he said, okay, great.

You're going to do 100 homes during YC. So we're going to take your 12-month goal and make it a three-month goal, right? So then we launched this 100 homes and 100 days. And I think a funny story is that we agreed to it, right? Because, you know, we're NYC. Like, we can't say no. And we hang up the phone. And I was actually like, guys, I think we should call them back.

Like, we just set a goal that we cannot accomplish. Like, this is not smart. Yada, yada, yada. So I was being a lot more conservative. And we were just like, we just got to figure out how to do it. And so one of our big core team values now is, you know, think big breakdown and execute. So you have this big goal. And you just have to, you know, this is not news, but like backwards plan it.

And we did that and then actually hit 100 homes in like 92 days. So we exceeded our goal. Yeah. So during YC was just tons of fundraising, basically, to get these things going. Yeah. A lot of fundraising, a lot of outreach and getting people excited about our model and why it's different. And most importantly, the direct life-changing impact that somebody can make for a pretty achievable amount of money. about $6,000.

And that, back to what we learn, I think it really just infuse in our DNA, setting very audacious goals, and then saying, like, okay, no BS. Like, what would it take if we had to hit this, right? And then reverse engineering back to there. And then, you know, making your weekly plan and executing. And that has, that was the beginning. And then there's been a lot of other stages where we've applied, of course, that same principle.

So an anecdote that I'll give is, you know, YCN did the summer of 20. We had our annual planning meeting for 2016 the end of that year. And we said, you know, how many homes are we going to fund? Do we do 200? And I figured who said it, but it was like, what would it take to do 800 homes? Like, well, you know, just let's just throw a huge number out there that seems inconceivable because that 100 homes in 100 days seemed inconceivable. And we did it. So we threw a huge number out there and just said, let's just brainstorm.

If we had to do, what would we do? And, you know, long story short, that launched the architect's program, which exists now at, at story where companies actually fund entire communities, right? Instead of doing, you know, one off homes, we said, if we're going to hit a big number, we need people to be doing bulk, right? We need people to be doing, you know, big swaths of homes. And that's been successful. And when we said that at the beginning of 2016, within three months, we had, what, two or three companies that had agreed to do communities. So it was really a shift in our thinking of what's possible and you have to challenge yourself in order to see, you know, what you can achieve.

And then taking the right steps to package that idea and then go test it. Right. So like not saying, all right, we're going to shift all our strategy and like everything is going to focus on this. It's like, you know, fire a bullet before cannibal kind of do. Right. So you create a package and you send off the companies and you see what resonates. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, we have this program. You iterate. Right. Yeah. It's like and when the program, is like, you know, because our homes are so low cost, they're about $6,000 per home, a hundred home community where they'd be like all together, like design beautifully and intelligently with the families, that's about $600,000, right, which is not cheap, but it's

pretty achievable for a large company. So that's how we, that's how we started. Yeah, and it's a very high impact. It seems, I mean, it's huge for relatively. And something else that seemed pretty unachievable last year or pretty audacious. Just thinking of this mindset is, you know, it's building a 3D printer, which I know we'll talk about more. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But, yeah, super young team, fairly early organization, doing something that's very much a technological challenge and in some of the hardest places in the world to work. So, yeah, before we get there, one thing I am curious about is, so you're dealing with all this apprehension around where does the money go, right? And so one example of how you guys are dealing with that is just showing the output, right?

But are people asking for other things? Like you talk about how your model is like better than others in the sense that you're maybe more transparent, more efficient. But in like very clear practical terms, what does that mean so other people can follow? So actually our first hire after YC, which we had a lot of funding growth was okay, impact, right? And so we didn't go out and hire more marketing. We didn't go out and hire more. We actually hired Impact Data Manager that Allie can talk about.

Shout out Emma. She's amazing. And that was our first thing was we wanted to set up this very rigorous impact data program, which Allie can talk through. Yeah, because it's not actually number of homes is a vanity metric. What if those homes are empty? What if those homes aren't actually better than what people were in before? What if those homes are crumbling, right?

So the impact, like what is the change in people's lives once they move into the home is actually what matters. And so to Brett's point, we've invested a lot into really understanding what that impact is. Things like, you know, when families move into a home, they increase their amount of sleep by like three to five hours. You see immediate health. It's like crazy delta, by the way. Yeah. There's like four hours to like almost eight hours. Yeah.

It's insane. And you can extrapolate, right? like what the impact, you know, the broad reach impacts are of having more sleep. That was kind of a life-changing thing for me in the past few years, realizing just how much, like, for recovery, I think. It's the number one. For imagine, people that have kids listening, like, like, seriously imagine if your kid was only getting four hours of sleep. Yeah. Like, every night.

Life would be a nightmare. And then having to, like, like, when it rains at night, well, usually mud or rain or sewage will go through the floor. Yeah. Right. And you don't have enough beds in your house. in your tent for everybody. So that means the kids are sleeping on the floor. So that means when it's bad weather, oh, that stinks.

You have to stand up the whole night. And then try to go to school the next day. Right. And then do it again forever. It's just like little basic human need stuff that is so life-changing that we believe shelter can provide. Absolutely. You know, we're also not just building homes, right?

We're building entire communities. Right. So these are these kind of like microeconomies. You see entrepreneurship that pops up in the communities. You know, we do a lot in the beginning with community planning to plan for feelings of safety and community cohesion, like how homes are placed, where we have green spaces. Make something people want. Exactly. Same principle.

And the other quick thing on the data is, yes, obviously we want to know what's working. But like the most important thing about our data program and we like could not encourage other organizations do the same thing is we do it to figure out. how do we make decisions from this, right? How do I make data influence decisions of like, okay, what's not working, right? And then we can try, we can iterate and we can test and we can do a lot of new A, B testing that we're doing now. The same type of principles that good startups have, right? Like we believe there should be no difference in how a nonprofit operates. You collect data to make your business better, not just to like show the data on the site, not just for fundraising. Unfortunately, a lot of nonprofits, you know, they start collecting data

because they have to because they're not going to get money. Oh, this foundation is asking for this. Exactly. And it should be used to influence the organization. So like our goal is for every community to be better than the previous one based on the data that we've collected. And how do you communicate that on the site? Because you still have to deal with the psychology of these people, like wanting to donate. Totally.

How do we communicate the data on the site? Yeah. We're still working on visualizations at this point. Also so kind of early into it. Yeah. Yeah. So again, we're three years old. Yeah.

And so we did a lot. The way that we do it is we collect baseline data. So what are people's living conditions before? And then families move into a home. And then you do six months, 12 months, two years. And so we're really at the point now. It's an exciting point in the organization where we're starting to get some really robust data on what the impact of a home is. And, you know, transparently we're really

thinking about what are the best ways to, A, communicate that. And then more importantly, to use that information to change what we're doing on the ground, to be better practitioners. So what made you want to do the 3D printing? Well, so. Was it a data point or is it just cool? No, if we go back to kind of in the beginning days was, how do you do 100 homes? Yeah, yeah. And then how you do 1,000 homes? And then it's like, well, there's about a billion people in the world, right? Which is like pretty overwhelming that do not have one of life's basic, sorry, that do not have

one of life's most basic human needs shelter, right? And so we thought, okay, well, we obviously can't solve that ourselves as one organization. But how can we start to think through new innovations and new R&D that if it works, we could be able to prove it in our communities, that we could do it exponentially faster, better, and a higher quality. Right? So those kind of thing that are like,

oh, it's too good to be true. Right. But if it works, we believe it could be a breakthrough. And then we want to prove that in our communities

and then not keep that from new story. Right. Like, no, this is RIP. Like, sorry guys. Like, we've got this 3D printer. But then open source or democratize that.

So with all the other nonprofits and governments around the social housing sector. And so we can talk more about that. methodology later, but Alexandria started looking into a lot of other, a lot of different things, right, for innovation and how do we, how do we create exponentially faster, better, and higher quality? And 3D home printing came up as to the top. And then you can talk a little bit more

on that process. Yeah. And for context, the houses you were previously making or still are making, how were they made? With CMU block. So it's a, you know, very traditional construction method. There's cement blocks. It's reinforced with steel rebar. It's incredibly safe for seismic conditions, for hurricane-prone conditions. So we are completely satisfied with the way that we build houses now as far as durability, resilience, et cetera. The big question was how do we build homes like Brett said faster, less expensively, without compromising quality? Because that's the only way we're going to hit that big number or even try to scratch the surface.

of that big number of housing inequality. Yeah. So we started just doing some research at the beginning of last year. There were a few promising construction innovations that rose to the surface. We also found out that there's just not been a lot of advances in construction over the past few decades. It's such an archaic space that there just isn't a lot of momentum and change. Since the 1950s, like, things haven't really moved. It's a gigantic market.

Right. For disruption. With not a lot of incentives by the big players to invest in R&D and invest in changing the way that things are done. And so, you know, long story short, 3D printing was one of the things that rose to the top. And the technology is there. The technology, you know, last year when we were looking into it was there to be printing homes. We should describe this in a little more detail because especially if people are listening and can't watch a video. It's not 3D printing in the sense that you've seen before with a filament.

It's a different material entirely and in a much larger scale. But what material are you using? Yeah. So I love that question because typically when someone hasn't seen the video, right? And maybe we can link to the video. You see the video. They're like, are these? 3D printing.

You'll see the video. Yeah. 3D home.org. So when I say it to people, they're like, is this home made out of plastic? They're thinking about like the desktop printers and what that prints out of. Like, how does that build a home? It's printed with with the most common, most readily available material in construction that exists. It's built with cement, right?

So if you think about a hose that, you know, with water, right, like a water hose that you have in your backyard, think of cement coming out of it instead. And then you use that cement and you, you know, print the perimeter and the interior walls of the home. And then you go and you print another layer on top of that. So layer by layer, you are creating a, you know, complete thermal envelope. You're creating an incredibly durable structure. Think about the cement blocks that I mentioned, right? You know, that's many hundreds or thousands of parts that are put together.

At each point, there's opportunity to make a mistake, right? versus a technology where it's one continuous loop of this very strong material. So we're confident that not only are these homes going to be as good as traditional methods, but there's a huge opportunity and we're already seeing signs through testing that it's going to actually be much stronger. And no waste, like Brett mentioned. It's a nearly zero waste construction method, which also helps reduce cost. Yeah. And how we went about this was once we figured out we wanted to try it,

First of all, we met an amazing partner that we work with, very public called Icon, a robotic construction startup company. And this was not, like, there was no 3D home printer machine out there that we could, like, buy parts of. Like, we had to make it. It was no manual.

And so, like, we literally, as a nonprofit, we fortunately have somewhat of a license to do this because we have a private set of donors that believe in R&D and calculated risk and innovation. And so we actually had the funding to fund the R&D efforts of this. Right. So we had to make the 3D home printing machine, which is, I think, the largest machine in the country right now, I'm pretty sure, 3D home printer. And then we had to print the first house.

Right. And we did that two weeks ago in Austin, Texas. And it turned out, I mean, the reality is it turned out probably better than we anticipated it. It looks great, guys. It's very well designed. I was like, yeah, totally buy one of these. And it passed the Austin City Housing Code, which is actually a really strict code. And when we tested at the PSI levels, it actually came in three times stronger than our normal center block homes.

To what levels? PSI levels. It's like compression strength. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. So that was our proof of concept. And the promise of 3D home printing, when we look at really three bullets, one is cost.

Right. So right now our homes on average are about $6,500 per home. we believe with 3D home printing we can get that down to about $3,000 over time. Not in the beginning, but over time. And then speed. So right now it takes about 15 days to build a house. This would be under 24 hours and then under 12 hours is the goal. Wow.

Yeah. And then you have to do that without sacrificing quality, of course. And we believe we can actually increase quality and make it stronger, more durable, zero waste, etc. So when you talk about these. numbers like 6,500 now, 3,000 later. Yeah. Is that all in? That includes labor, everything?

Per unit, yeah. Okay. And so I saw the house in Austin. Is that like the, basically the model for the future homes? Or are they like, do they have the same fixtures and windows and all that stuff? Is that a, you can talk to you. Yeah. Yeah, the roof will be a bit different.

So in each, in each place that we work, our homes are a bit different, right? You have to develop them for local contacts. And communities actually are like. I mentioned earlier, very involved in the process of community design. So we don't just copy-paste, you know, different types of homes. So the homes will look different. The size, the size will be about the same as the home in Austin. But some fixtures based on, you know, what windows we can get locally. We want to support local manufacturers. In Haiti, for example, people do not want to live under roofs that they feel are very heavy because so many people died in the earthquake with the

roofs caving in, right? So we intentionally use some very lightweight, roofing materials, so that would probably be different in Haiti. But the size will be, you know, pretty much the same. The size and then the construction methodology will be essentially the same. How does plumbing work in electrical? Yeah. So this is a bit hard to explain without seeing the video. Yeah. But the printer is printing kind of like it's, think of it as like two, two, like an interior and an exterior, printed layers of cement. And then inside there's kind of little triangle. So that's spacing that you can, you know, wire and that you can put plumbing through.

And then the printer actually is, you know, it's pretty smart. You, you know, upload a CAD file and it knows where to stop and start. So if you think about where the window sits, we don't have to like, you know, carve into the structure. like the printer knows to stop at a certain point and to start at a certain point, it can do the same thing for areas where fixtures need to kind of feed through into the home. Yeah. And that point is actually really exciting to us because if you could just imagine for our use case, which is the families that we work with in some of the poorest places in the world, we would actually be able to offer them different type of templates and even help customize the homes, right,

because of the technology, which right now we just can't do. Yeah. And you have more design freedom in how you can design stuff. So it doesn't have to be like a rectangle or a square. You could actually make it circular, which is how the first one was done as well, which is extremely exciting from an architectural standpoint, aesthetic, but also like, you know, how we can use it. It's not any more expensive or difficult to design in like loops and curves as it is to do straight lines.

Right. Until you get a curved window. But yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And kind of the design thing is important because when you look at social housing developments now, whether you have two kids or eight kids, typically you're in the same house, right? And if you have a disability, I mean, tough luck, right?

So, you know, we can design houses that, again, kind of best meet the needs of individual families, which happens for you and I, right? And we don't think it should be any different for people just because they don't have as much, you know, purchasing power because of where they were born. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I would just, I'm not trying to plug news story, but see the video. Like visually, like it's really important. Makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, you could just YouTube it, type in new story or 3D home.org. And this concludes phase one for us, which was make a 3D home printer with our partner icon and print the actual first house in Austin, right, which we've done. And now we shift into phase two, which is we'll definitely have to make product development on the printer. we'll make improvements, more testing, but then bringing it down to El Salvador is the place that we're going to bring it to. And 3D printing a community of homes is the next phase. That is happening this year. We hope to finish that, you know, Q1 or Q2 of 2019, the whole community. And we're extremely excited about it because, you know, this type of technology, if you look back, you know, when there's a lot of technological advances, it usually does not reach the families of need at most

first, right? They're kind of one of the last ones to get it. Yeah, of course. And we're so excited because this could change how we innovate shelter for the families need it most and them getting it first, which we have just a unique use case of our homes are small, right? Our homes are simple. And that's why we think we could do it first. Yeah, we want to bring emerging technology to emerging markets because that is the area. Those are the areas where these technologies aren't just to do things that are cool or to make us a bit more comfortable. It's where emerging tech has the opportunity to truly change lives and communities and societies and countries. So, you know, we feel like this is kind of one step, what we're doing with construction, to like fast forward these technologies to the places that need it.

And in everything that we do, we really hope. that we can help inspire the sector, right? Like if more organizations for their respective problems in food security and education, wherever if they are investing in R&D, seeing what technology might be applicable to their specific use case, and, you know,

bringing it to the places that they work, I think we can, you know, solve a lot of the world's biggest problems a bit faster. The partnership model is interesting as well. Yeah. How did you go about... It's the future of a new story. Yeah.

How did you go about doing it? that. Well, I think it depends on what's the ambition of your organization, right? And we've chosen to say, hey, there's this huge problem, right, about a billion people that lack shelter. We want to try to make the biggest dent in that possible, right? And then so that's the thing big. And then you reverse engineer and you think, okay, you can't do that as one organization raising money, right? You're governed by what you could do. But then you look at the market and you see there are thousands of nonprofits, almost every government has budget or is working on this issue. But what we think that is missing is more R&D and more innovation. So we want to prove it ourselves and then say, let's get to

scale by democratizing this and like sharing with everybody and then getting adoption from all of those partners. You get on to it. I think you hit that. And I think you're asking about the icon partnership. So I think this is a good lesson. and Brett does this so well, you know, for people who are thinking about starting a business or they've started one, to just talk to people, talk to as many people, especially, you know, qualified people as possible about your idea because you never know, like where the dots may connect. So when we were doing a lot of research and we said, you know, 3D printing is very interesting. At that point, we did not know very much beyond what we had like read and seen. and Brett really just started talking to everyone about it and we're very, you know, very, you know, grateful through IC, through other, you know, programs to have an incredible network. So we, you know, you really talk to just everyone you knew.

What do you know about 3D printing? Do you know anyone in the space? Have you, what have you learned? Like, what can you tell us? And through that, then someone was like, oh, I actually know these guys in Austin, Texas who are experimenting with this. And, you know, the more you talk about your idea, the more you ask questions, the more you look to gain knowledge. I think the more opportunities present themselves to you. So we got connected to these folks in Austin, the icon team.

Evan, Jason, Alex. Yeah, who are absolutely incredible. Shout out to them. And they obviously had, they hadn't built this printer as we know it yet, but they, you know, through some prototyping. We knew that they had the technical chops, but then also there was a shared set of values, right? So ICON is a for-profit company. They'll be aiming to build homes here in the United States through 3D printing and other methods, which is really exciting. But they had shared values.

They really care about affordable housing in the United States. And they saw this opportunity to partner with us, again, to take really promising technology for construction to places where we can immediately apply it. You know, we're not, I think there's a lot of, if you look at even New Stories video, right, if you look at new stories, three-d-printed video. Videos get the most shout-outs. But I'm saying, if you look at the video, the suggested videos after it will be other videos of, you know, homes that have been 3-D printed in the last, you know, one, two, three years. So, you know, this is not necessarily the first 3-D printer period. But what's significant about what we've done is, A, it's not experimental. We're not doing it just to see what's possible, right?

A lot of the printers that exist are more so in an R&D phase because they're targeted towards for profit or luxury markets or even like building in space, right? Like we are, we want to bring this down to Earth and say we have issues with housing here and now. And so, you know, we were really bullish on, you know, let's get this out of the like experimental, you know, frame of mind. and let's make it actionable to like print homes that people are going to be living in in the next year. And so they very much agreed with us. They believe that, you know, that the technology is ready today. And so the partnership just made a ton of sense.

So for other nonprofits, how does it work on the financial side? Like, do you guys license it? Do you buy the 3D printer from them? How do you set it up? It's in the early days. Yeah. And to be honest, we have we have to first prove it ourselves. And like doing it in Austin is one thing.

Printing a community of homes in El Salvador is the next goal. And so we have to prove it ourselves. And then we'll talk through and figure out what's the best model to scale that out, which we don't have clarity on exactly yet. Okay. And I think something else that distinguishes the printer that we've built is all of the design constraints that we gave the icon team. Right. So a printer that's going to print a home in the U.S.

or many of the examples you see in some places in China, they're not going to necessarily work in Haiti and Al-Solvado with our specific design constraints. So it's hard enough to build a 3D printer. And on top of that, we were like, hey, engineers, you have to make sure that if power goes out midway through, that we're not going to have an issue, that if potable water is not readily accessible, we're not going to have an issue.

Manning, the machine has to be easy enough so that we don't need like super highly technical talent in order to operate or to fix the machine. So our printer that we've designed is a printer that's ready to work in some of the most remote areas in the world, some of the most difficult to workplaces in the world, which is the first of its kind. And this has all happened in less than a year. Like we had a night. We're at one, you know, a team. We do these fun quarterly summits every year. We go place.

And we actually have one night at dinner. we do moonshot ideas. And everybody has to just like pitch big moonshot ideas. And we actually got a lot of good stuff from that exercise. And 3D home printing was one of the things that came up that night. Just a year ago. Yeah, just a year ago. It was just an idea.

And then we started to explore it more, explore it more, talk to the right people and then say, all right, well, this is, we've done a lot of due diligence. Like this was a calculated risk. And we got to the point where we said, okay, news stories are going to invest this. of money and we're going to do it where if we lose it we're going to be okay right of course like this isn't a bet the company kind of thing like it's actually not at all um no significant but not that and then we said okay the the worst case is we lose it we're going to be all right we learn we move on the best case is we could innovate shelter for the families that need it most and and when you look at

that and you analyze that we thought it was irresponsible not to try it right because if it works it could change everything and it could reach more families that need shelter faster. So that was kind of how we made our decision. Yeah. Yeah. What's the hardest thing you see coming down the road, like doing it at larger scale? What's going to be challenging? Everything. Yeah. There's a lot. You know, my head's always like on the ground because I kind of run our on ground operations. So one of the one of many challenges will be just people wrapping their minds around it on the ground. I think talking to you, a lot of people who are listening, when you first hear a 3D home printing, me even, you're just like, is it plastic? How does that work? I don't get it.

And so, you know, it would be naive of us to assume that we're going to print a community of homes in, you know, a watch upon El Salvador. And then people are going to be super excited to live in them without knowing, hey, it's safe. You know, you're worried about your children, right? If I, like, I would not move me and my future kids into a home that, you know, I was unsure about. Well, you don't want to be like a science experiment. Exactly. You don't want to be a guinea pig to something new. And so while we know that it's, you know, incredibly safe and durable, et cetera,

there's going to be a lot of kind of just education and talking to people and, you know, getting their minds around it. And by they, I mean, you know, both the families that we are working with that we, you know, build homes for as well as. governments and, you know, local architects and, you know, people literally operating the machinery too. Yeah. That's going to be wild. Yeah.

Yeah. And the whole thing is we have a kind of a macho we say as a team. Like it's for sure a seemingly crazy idea right now, especially when we bring it down to El Salvador and like show people and everything, right? To governments, to a lot of people listening. It's a crazy idea. Like until it's not, right? Until we can prove that it's not.

And so we say like it's crazy until it's not. But we also know that this is obviously not guaranteed, right? This is an R&D project that we feel now actually more confident than ever in because of how the first phase went. But we have a long way to go. Yeah. Last August is when we said we're going to start building this printer. Yeah. We want to do it by South by Southwest in March.

At that point, no printer existed, right? And not only was the printer built, but the house was built. And that's just to say, like, you know, it seemed very crazy. It seemed audacious, but it happened. And I think when you're like super crystal clear on what your goals are, that's just incredibly powerful in order to like make it happen. Yeah. So what percentage of the team was working on this?

Because like obviously so, I mean, you guys already spoke to it, but all the troubles that you're dealing with, all the challenges, making stuff, like shipping things, everyone has the same problem. Like how much of the team was working? working on this and how did you get it to move so quickly? Yeah. In the beginning, it was really just Alexandria and I. So Alexandria's are COO. I'm CEO and co-founders. And we weren't spending that much time. Like I think we pretty disciplined on like five to 10 percent like our weekly time in the early days, right? And then you learn more and it grows. And then we really only brought on one other

person from our team to help and Joanne. And she wasn't spending that much time on it. either. So we're able to do it where we kind of carved out a percentage of basically our weekly schedule that we were going to allocate towards it. And we just stayed pretty disciplined on that. Because I think there's a, there has to be a balance of like obviously you want to go out and have exciting new creativity and innovation, but you can't do that without that disciplined focus on everything else. Totally. And so in the beginning, I think what's really critical and one thing we've done really well, I already mentioned this with local partners in the countries that we work, in, but finding people who are experts in their space, right?

While Brett and I did a ton with research, legal, project management, launching, et cetera, we're not mechanical engineers, right? We're not cement experts. Yeah. And so, you know, what we did was find those people and then help coordinate, you know, us all working together to get toward a common goal. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's so easy to take your eye off the ball, right? Yeah. I mean, as by nature of people. Especially as a shiny object. is this, right? Like, the reality is, it is. It's a shiny object, and we saw that in our launch two weeks ago. I mean, we had, there's been like, I think, like six million views now. Over 500 media outlets have written on it. Yeah, that's insane. Yeah, I mean, it was good. And we, and we prepared heavily for that. How are the donations looking? Within the last week,

we now have about like 1.3 million in donations. So it's resonating with people. Yeah. And we're funding basically more of the R&D of the printer. Okay. Of the next product development phases. You've got to put yourself in the mindset of like, like obviously people can fund houses, which is incredible and an amazing and life changing. And then there's a very small amount of people that understand like creating a product like this that if it works and then could be scaled out around the world. Like that's a massive impact.

And that's people are starting to fund that as well. Yeah, if you think about the government of Mexico, they're building thousands, not tens of thousands of homes per year, that would kind of fall into that social housing bracket. And so if this technology is promising, it's able to slash costs, you know, be safer, be quicker, et cetera. Imagine, you know, the government of Mexico being able to use this to make their work more efficient. And the savings, right, that may go into other social programs. That may help to alleviate poverty in different ways. You guys have been so effective at like picking a goal and going for it, both on the fundraising side and on the product side. What other advice do you have for nonprofits that are going through YCE or just watching this and just curious about you in terms of like the fundraising, which I know can be really challenging for nonprofits?

And then like, you know, just having the guts to like go for a product, which is again, like you said, your investors are excited about these goals that you have, but not everyone is. like that's a wholesale process as well. Like how do you get to be in that kind of position? Yeah. Well, that's a big question. That was a long question. I think it really like people ask us a lot of, you know,

how can other organizations be, especially nonprofits or social impact organizations? Like how can you be more innovative or how can you, you know, do some of these things? And I think just the reality is it all sorts of people. Right. You have to have the right people on your team that have the competence to innovate or to be an engineer or to have the right networks. And so- Good. I was going to say the same thing. Yeah. We really value, we really like, like I believe with all my heart, our number one asset as an organization is our team and our culture. And then that just, it spirals to other areas of like what kind of advisors can we attract, right? And then we start getting a few very respected. advisors or board members and then they get to know what's better and they're starting to tell their

team about it right and so it's like kind of this domino effect where you have at the tip of the spear is definitely a clear story of like why your organization matters and how important it is for you to do what you're trying to do um for us it's a lot about you know accountability direct impact working with locals human center design innovation r and d and just like tripling down on that story with clarity and then getting the right resources behind you that are excellent, as best as you can. And then over time, that builds. Yeah. Plus one to everything Brett said, team absolutely critical. We actually take, I mean, people really remark and kind of anxiously laugh after they go through our hiring process.

But it usually takes like, yeah, it's like a part-time job to go through it. We take a really long time. I think especially as a small team, it's so important because it's like family. You spend more time with these people than anyone else in the world. And so, you know, we do interviews with like every single one of our team members. They come into the office and they work for a day. Like, we take a long time to like vet and bring people onto our team so that when they come on, we're fully confident in their work ethic, in their sense of urgency and their, you know, values, character, et cetera. Relationship building, you know, that's something that I'm actually like learning more of the importance.

I think Brett's like a master of that. And that's one of the reasons why we have such an incredible group of. advisors, donors, people are just advocating for us because, you know, we treat them as part of the new story family, right? Part of the big vision. You know, when they have a kid sending them a new story, ones it's just like relationship building. It's really genuine, right?

Like these people are investing in like our vision for how the world should be. And so, you know, we want to invest in them and continue to build those relationships as well. So just like genuine relationship building is key. And then for nonprofits, I think, for for-profits too, but at the end of the day, none of that matters if what you're doing on the ground is not actually working. So it's really critical to, A, get the right people on your team, to always be testing your hypotheses, to be super critical of your work, and to make sure that you are actually

having meaningful impact. Because if you did none of the other things and you just did that, right? You make something people want. You do incredibly impactful work, then it might be slower, but you will eventually get other people to like support and rally around you whether that be team members whether that be you know donors etc if you're doing really high impact work so that cannot be overstated i'd say one one i've just thought that's in my head like one equation that i think we've done well for fundraising and other growth and other resources is i think first to alia's point you have to have

like credibility of who's supporting you what's the work that you've done what are your results what is your story, right? So you have to build that up, right? Which takes a lot of tenacity and all the things to get it started. And then it's like, how do you get the attention of like influential people? And I think it's the equation of first having the results and the credibility and then being very creative of how you're getting to those people. Right. So we do like really weird and creative things of like getting to people, right? Like we'll mail a Lego kit of our house to somebody that we really want to get in front of, right? We'll make, we don't sit just send emails. We'll make videos and we'll send like a video of us like directly to somebody, right? Like, we just try to think

really creatively of how do we get these people's attention? Because if they could just give us 10 or 15 minutes of their time, we know that our story and our credibility and our results will speak for themselves. But these people are extremely busy, right? And have a very important thing to do. And they're not just going to come find new story. Yeah. Right? You have to be very creative. of how you're getting people's attention. And the more humanized you can make that, and the more unique you can make that, the better it happens.

If you use traditional methods, just expect kind of traditional ordinary results. Yeah, probably below average. Totally. Just like no one, especially these high profile people, they're so hard to get in touch with. I mean, you see it at demo day, right? Like here you are full of these,

like you're just surrounded by another hundred great companies. Yeah. And that's like a refined piece of the world already. You have to use this term always. You have to take really big swings of like, and that means investing a lot of time, even resources into something, right? So, for example, right now we have this new program. We're very excited about it's called Her Story. And it's focused just on single mothers that we work with in our communities.

And we are going out and sharing this program with like empowered female leaders in the U.S. right and so we have kind of our dream lists of people that we'd like to get involved and then instead of just like sending them an email or doing whatever we actually made these um and hannah potter who runs this program we made these like beautiful custom like invitations like beautiful and like it looks like wedding branding that they do look like wedding it look like amazing wedding invitations with like a custom note on the back and like we're mailing that rose gold foil on it we're mailing that like via FedEx, so everybody opens FedEx stuff, like to either them or their chiefest staff or their assistant.

And it's like that's the kind of stuff where even though it's going to be a small percentage, like we've invested so much into making that happen, we will get traction from it. And we have. And we have. Yeah. Yeah. Man, that's great advice. Any closing words of wisdom for people?

Hmm. Well, co-founders out there, I mean, our co-founder relationship, I think everything starts there. And before you can build a great team, you have to have just excellent cohesion at the co-founder level. I feel one of the luckiest things in the best day of my life was being able to meet Matthew and Alexandria and our other co-founder, Mike. And the chemistry that we have, how we split up time, how we check egos at the door.

Like there's no ego at New Story and how we're humbled together. that creates a culture, right, of what it's expected to be when you join news story. And then that impacts who you hire, that impacts the companies that want to work with you, all the things. So I think it starts with there. And it goes down to here. Yeah, iron sharpens iron, right? That's with your quote, on a relationship and other people who are, you know, starting businesses

or who maybe aren't, right? That's not the entire audience. Yeah, for sure. I think just having an incredible community, a very supportive and, bright people around you. So like I'm super lucky that I have that every day when I go into work with my co-founders. We had chatted about this earlier, but I also have a group of other female founders through YC that are community for me, people who, you know, are never resentful or jealous. They're just like complete cheerleaders for you, you know, doing big things, doing things that

haven't been done before. It's really scary and challenging and hard. And in all of our careers, whether or not you're a founder, you're going to have so many challenges and having sounding boards and having cheerleaders and just having a really great community around you helps you feel empowered and not lonely. Like a journey like this can be very lonely. So I think placing a lot of effort and emphasis on creating really strong communities of cheerleaders around you. One last thing that we've always said this for the last three years, but especially with a new

3D home printing launch is that, you know, bold ideas attract bold people. Right. And the more audacious, the bigger the idea is, that's going to attract more of that caliber of person, right? They either wants to fund it, that wants to partner with it or wants to come, you know, give up their job at Google or Facebook and come work with you. Right. Do it.

And so if you're a startup founder out there, you've got to have bold ideas if you want to achieve, you know, you know, kind of spectacular results. Right. Especially bold ideas that aren't just PR stunts. Exactly. Like this is the kind of thing. Like it's sort of an understanding of asymmetric risk, right? Like if this works out, it's going to be amazing.

But the downside's like very limited. Yeah. But it seems like it's working really well for you. And I would second the, uh, the group meetings. Yeah. That's like one of the things that people don't talk about all that much in terms of YC benefit. Yeah. Like after the fact, yeah, just keeping that up.

That's so smart. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, I feel lucky because Ali will go have dinner drinks with, with her girls, which are like amazing founders. And she'll come back with like all these great ideas and like all this new stuff on hiring and culture and like everything. And it's like, wow, it's amazing. Yeah. So just like minded people around you who are going to like push you toward your goals. Right.

Yeah. If you read the news all the time, it's like only awesome high updates, but that's not the reality. Yes. That's very true. Yeah. That's very true. And then just one last, this is not advice, but one thing that just always is in my heart is, you know, YC, Y Combinator obviously, you know, has to return a financial ROI, right?

Like, you know, based on what the company is. But I think really at the core of the culture, like what gets YC partners excited, what gets the YC community excited is solving really big problems, right? or kind of just like new ideas and innovations to make the world a better place. And so YC was one of the first to, like with a for-profit lens, look at nonprofits. Nonprofits get a bad rap. But essentially, these are all people that are trying to solve the world's biggest, like, most intractable problems. And so, you know, I just have the utmost respect for the YC community for, you know, taking all the things that they've

learned about running good businesses, you know, over, I don't know how long it is. Over 10 years now. It's 13 years now. And helping, you know, apply and create communities and create awareness around the organizations that are really working to try to make the world a more equitable place. That was very nice of you. Much respect. She's good at that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming in. This has been great. Our pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Greg. All right. Thanks for listening.

as always, you can find the transcript and the video at blog.wycombinator.com. And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.