3D Home Printing for the Developing World – Alexandria Lafci and Brett Hagler of New Story Charity

How about we start with you guys explaining what you do, and then we'll go back in time and talk about how you ended up doing YC and all the rest of it.

Also, sure! So, we're a nonprofit, one of the first ones to go through Y Combinator, and we build houses and communities throughout the developing world. So right now, throughout Haiti and Latin America, 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. That's the really high level of that, and Ali can add onto 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, ten slums in Haiti post-earthquake or inactive landslide zones in El Salvador will bring those families into the communities. They actually helped 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. 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?

Yeah, it 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. When I was in my early 20s, I had a for-profit startup before this. So, I loved entrepreneurship, loved technology, loved innovation—all the things. Then I took a trip to Haiti a couple years after the 2010 earthquake, so like not right after but it was a couple years after. But it looked like it was a few months after, you know?

And I was blown away by the tens of thousands of people that were living in tents because the earthquake destroyed like close to a million households. Yeah, like that. Everybody was given temporary aid, right? Which is necessary at the time, but it was—once this lasts 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 Kit and her, you know, three little girls are living in a tent with no protection from intruders, from storms, from anything.

You kind of just go back to like first principles, Maslow's hierarchy, and think food, water. And I think sometimes we forget about shelter. And we just saw it firsthand and came back. Right before I met Alexandria, I actually tried to find other nonprofits that could like really champion and support, and then we're solving this issue.

As we went out, started telling more people about it, we kind of found another problem, which was skepticism. There were so many people that were skeptical about where their money actually went. Mmm, right? So we're here in Silicon Valley, we're giving to X organization—how is the money actually being spent? It kind of seems like a black hole. What person 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, we teamed up with Alexandria, our other co-founder Matthew. 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. How do we provide a better experience for them as well, which Ali can talk through.

And now is how it started. But just to clarify, there were companies or nonprofits working in this space— the money kind of seeps out from little cracks in the business and they end up kind of living in tents.

Yeah, at this point, three years into doing this work, we've kind of come across and researched and talked to over a hundred—right? Well over a hundred different organizations focused on housing. Yeah, and unfortunately, 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 ca...