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. We bring in utilities, subdivide the land, and then families who were previously living in let's say 10 slums in Haiti post-earthquake or in active 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, I definitely was not. It was 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 of years after the 2010 earthquake. Not right after, but there were a couple of 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. 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. And 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. We saw it firsthand and came back.

Right before I met Alexandria, I tried to find other nonprofits that could really champion and support, and then we’re solving this issue. As we went out, we started telling more people about it, kind of found another problem, which was skepticism. So many people were skeptical about where their money actually went. Right? So, we’re here in Silicon Valley. We’re giving to an 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, yeah, in a sense.

And then we teamed up with Alexandria, 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. 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, and the money kind of like, you know, seeps out from little cracks in the business, and then they kind of end up living in tents.

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. An 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. 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 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 dark. 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 Y Combinator. It was one of the largest humanitarian organizations, and a bunch of big headlines came out that they raised basically like half a billion dollars and within like six years had only built—and this is not an exaggeration—I think like six houses. It’s like [ __ ] not an exaggerated number. I don’t think moving to Haiti, so I didn’t get to mention—I won’t go too much into—but my background is almost entirely in international development work, right? That's what I became passionate about when I was fifteen; 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, Africa, etc., and, you know, became fairly jaded. I think a lot of people in the space, you know, become jaded. 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. So I did Teach for America, and unfortunately about a third of my students were homeless for either all or part of the year. 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.

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 implications of that could be. So that’s how I got super passionate about how it relates to poverty. And then through my experience in development work, you know, 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 gonna 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, etc. So I think that, you know, highlights one of the core reasons why we’ve been successful, is because we value truly partnering with, you know, heavily vetted local partners. One of the biggest observations in my work internationally is that everywhere you go, you 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—at that point—24-year-old, right—people with ambition to say like we’re gonna go into Haiti, we’re gonna 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 what does it look like in the very beginning? So you meet and you're like, okay, we're gonna work on housing specifically in Haiti at this point. 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—and kind of going back to—so we had already—like before we got into YC—we were already loving like homemade, or like listening to podcasts. Like all the big points of connection between us, right? I think you were surprised like, oh this person who has a nonprofit background watches or ships; cool! Yeah, unfortunately, uniqueness. And if you kind of go to—I mean like really a core value we all have is make something people want, mm-hm? 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, if we said, “Hey, give a thousand dollars 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, right? And the reality is about half the people would say no, mm-hm? Right? So how do we make something that they want, right? And then we designed our experience—we can get into later—that got traction.

And then to always point earlier, how do we make something that our end users want, where we know they don't want just, you know, lark, but 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 we had the idea, and now getting into MVP mode, mm-hmm? 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 donors. I was really three steps. The first one was we were gonna 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. The second thing is that 100% of what you give will go towards building the house. We’re not going to cover any of our overhead, and we do that by having a couple private donors that fund all of our overhead—private investors basically. And then the third part was when the family moved in, we wanted to be extremely accountable to the donors. And so—and 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 moving video and we send that back to all the donors, right? So that simple user experience of see the family upfront digitally, 100% goes to it, and then you get to see the end result of the video—that was the initial concept.

And 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. So we made—I'm gonna give a plug to Webflow—yes, Webflow. So, other co-founder Matthew, his nickname is MacGyver just because he can like legit do anything. We said, all right, we're gonna 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 and 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 go in and move them. Yeah, so it’s all like static, yeah? But it would be like, I’m at a dinner—can you just—like we just got 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, yeah. It was always like, you know, usually a delay. People would call or email and say, “Did it go?” And our good excuse was credit card processing; it takes a little bit of time, you know?

And then we still hadn’t—and then we were like, okay, well, we’re gonna still prove them he—and when the homes are built, we’ll just like go in ourselves and do the videos, yeah? And so we actually—I think it’s a good startup lesson; we were able to launch that concept, like legit, in only a few weeks, and we started getting money. We got a decent amount of money; we got like a hundred thousand dollars within like a couple months, and that allowed us to use a local partner that we had already known in Haiti that had a lot of experience there build our first six houses. We went down to not build the homes because we employed 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. I think that, you know, just really emphasizes core principles, right? Like something people want. Like we wouldn’t have gotten that traction, gotten over $100,000 in the matter of a couple of weeks if it wasn’t an experience that people really liked. People were shocked at the beginning. Like, you're gonna send me a video of like this exact family I just met on the website moving into their house? You know, if that about you—that’s something that, you know, I want to be a part of. Yes, we would get—we would say, “Yeah, this is cool; I want to be a part of it,” but also this is not going to scale.

Well, of course, you know, it’s like I guess that’s the other lesson too, right? Do you think that’d don’t scale? I mean for those first few months like we were literally just pulling in our computers and updating the website constantly. Did you have a design house job?

Yeah, let’s just say that we had jobs. So it would be like in the middle of the work day 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, okay? I just felt like, okay, validate this is something people want, yeah, and prove it with them.

And then after that we go, okay, and where, you set up as a non-profit at the time or you just ran the money through?

Yeah, oh, you saw! Wow, no, what? Yeah, not immediately. It just takes some time. It’s actually a process that takes probably much longer than a couple weeks—yeah, 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, so people knew in the beginning like you know we’re not a non-profit yet; they’re making the donation knowing that, yeah? And then you know we were able to give tax deductions kind of in retro—in retrospective, gotcha, yeah! Yeah, cool. Okay, and so YC, 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, Cap Money, Alec—they were our partners, one of them. Yes, and I remember I was at my apartment building. We had our fur—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 six thousand dollars!

But yeah, okay, context! Yeah, 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 a hundred homes. He said, okay, great! You’re gonna do a hundred homes during YC. So we’re gonna take your 12-month goal and make it a 3-month goal, right? So then we launched this a hundred homes in a hundred days. And I think a funny story is that we agreed to it, right? Because you know—we’re in YC, 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, yeah?

And so one of our big core team values now is, you know, think big, break down, and execute. So you have this big goal; you just have to, you know—this is not news—but like backwards plan it, and we did that, and then actually hit a hundred homes in like 92 days. So we are—yeah, so during YC was just tons of fundraising, basically, to get these things going. Yeah, Fogg bought a fundraising, a lot of outreach, and getting people excited about our model and why it’s different, and then—most importantly—the direct life-changing impact that somebody can make for a pretty achievable amount of money—about $6,000, mm-hm? And that back to what we learned, I think it really just infused 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 in executing, and that has—that was the beginning.

And then there've 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, YC ended the summer of 2015. We had our annual planning meeting for 2016 that ended that year, and we said you know how many homes are we gonna fund? Do we do 200? I figured who said it, but it was like, what would it take to do 800 homes? Like, but you know, just let’s just a huge number that’s even conceivable because that hundred homes in a hundred 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 architects program which exists now at New Story where companies actually fund entire communities, right? Instead of doing, you know, one-off homes, we said if we’re gonna hit a big number we need people to be doing bulk, right? Maybe people to be doing, you know, big swaths of homes, and that was gonna catch it, and 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, yeah? Right? So like not saying, all right, we’re gonna shift all our strategy and like everything’s gonna focus on this, it’s like, you know, fire up for a bullet before cannonball, kind of doing, right?

So you create a package, and you shouldn’t send off the companies, and you see what resonates, and then all of a sudden it’s like oh we have this program iterate, right? It’s like—and that, when the program is like, you know, because our homes are so low-cost, they’re not $6,000 per home; a hundred home community where they’d be like all together, like designed 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 see, yeah? And it’s very high impact, seem intuitively, and something else that seemed pretty unachievable last year or pretty audacious, like just thinking of this mindset is, you know, with building a 3D printer, but yes, super young team, fairly early organization doing something that’s very much a technological challenge 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 very clear practical terms, what does that mean so other people can follow?

So actually, our first hire after Y Combinator, 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—so we actually hired an impact data manager; Ali can talk about her. Shout out to Emma; she’s amazing! And we—that was our first thing was we wanted to set up this like very rigorous impact data program, which Ali can talk through.

Yeah, ‘cause it’s not actually number of homes; it’s a vanity metric, right? Yeah, 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? Yeah, 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 delta, by the way.

Yeah, we’re hours to like almost eight hours. Yeah, I’m saying, and you can extrapolate, right? Like what the impact—you know, the broad—I mean, that was a life-changing thing for me in the past few years, realizing just how much it like—for recovery—it’s the number one for—it’s like, moms, people that have kids, listen, like seriously imagine if your kid was only getting four hours of sleep, yeah? Like every night, life is a nightmare. And 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 and you’re half in your tent for everybody, so that means when it’s bad weather, oh that stinks! You have to stand up the whole night and then good try to go to school the next day, right? And then do it again, like it’s just a little basic human good 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 micro economies. 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 greens maybe people want exactly same principle.

And so the other big 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 actually cannot encourage other organizations to do the same thing—is we do it to figure out how do we make decisions from this, right? How do I make—how do I make the decision of like, okay, what’s not working, right? And then we can try, we can iterate, and we can test. 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 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 gonna get money if they ask you 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, hmm.

And how do you communicate that on the site? Because you still have to deal with the psychology of these people wanting to donate.

Totally! How do we communicate the data? Yeah, we're still working on visualizations at this point and like it’s just so kind of early into it, 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, you know, what are people's living conditions before and then work—you know, families move into a home, and then you do six months, twelve months, two years. So we’re really at the point now—it’s an exciting point in the organization where we’re starting to get some really big 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 is it a data partners? Now if we go back to kind of in the beginning days, was how do you do 100 homes? And then they do a thousand homes, then it’s like, wow, there’s about a billion people in the world, right? Which is like more overwhelming that do not have—correct? 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 higher quality, mm-hmm, right?

So there’s kind of—there’s a quote I like; 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 our IP; like, sorry, guys, like we’ve got this 3D printer. But then open-source or democratizing that so all the other nonprofits and governments around the world really—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 create exponentially faster, better, and higher quality, mm-hmm?

And 3D home printing came up and to the top.

And then you can talk a little bit more on that, yeah?

And for context, the houses you were previously making or still are making, how are they made?

With CMU block. So it’s in a very traditional construction method. They’re cement blocks; it’s reinforced with steel rebar. It’s incredibly safe for seismic conditions or hurricane-prone conditions. So, we are completely satisfied with the way that we build houses now as far as durability, resilience, etc. 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 gonna you know hit that big number or even you know try to scratch the surface of that big number of housing inequality.

Yeah, so we started just doing some research—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, right? It’s such an archaic space that there isn’t a lot of momentum and change since the 1950s. Like, things haven’t really been passable—wearing it, right? For the interruption, there’s 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 the people are listening and can't watch a video.

Yeah, 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 I say it to people they’re like, “Is this home made out of plastic or like…” They’re thinking about like the desktop printers and what that prints out. It’s like how does that build a home? It’s printed with the most common, most readily available material in construction that exists. It’s built with, what? Cement! Right?

So if you think about a hose that you know—that with water, right? Like a water hose you have in your backyard; think of cement coming out instead and then you use that cement, and 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, yeah? And you know, ways like Brett mentioned, it’s a nearly zero-waste construction method, which also helps reduce cost.

And how he 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; they’re very public; they’re called ICON, the 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; there was no manual! Yeah, and so like we literally, as a nonprofit, we unfortunately 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 looks great; it passed the Austin city housing code which is actually really strict code. And when we tested the PSI levels actually came in three times stronger than our normal cinderblock homes.

So what PSI levels? Like compression strength?

Yeah! Oh yeah, so that was our proof of concept, hmm. And then 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 about 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, right? 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 that the house in Austin—is that like the, basically the model for the future homes? Or they like, do they have the same fixtures and windows and all that stuff? Is that a—

Yeah, yeah! The roof will be a bit different. In each—the homes that we work, the homes are a bit different, right? You have to develop them for local contacts and communities; actually, we’ll mention earlier, are 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 in 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, and 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 the plumbing work and electrical?

Yeah, so this is a bit hard to explain without seeing the video, but the printer is printing kind of like—let’s think of it as like two—like a interior and exterior. Aha! Printed layers of cement. And then inside there’s kind of little triangles, 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 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 right—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.

And that point is actually really exciting to us because if you 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.

Exactly, as well, which is extremely exciting from an architectural standpoint, aesthetic, and 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?

How do you get a curved window?

But, yeah, yeah. And kind of the design thing is important because when you look at social housing developments now, yeah, 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, yes sir! I would just—I’m not trying to plug in your story but see the video like visually, it’s really amazing I’m worth and I could just YouTube it—type a new story or 3D home printing, and it—this concludes phase one for us which was to 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 a place that we’re gonna 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.

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 that need it most first, right? They’re kind of one of the last ones to get it, of course! And we’re so excited because this could change how we innovate shelter for the families that need it most and I’m 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 you 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 like 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 this 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.

Partnership models interesting as well, yeah! How did you guys write a new story?

Yeah! How did you go about doing 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, of 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 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, right?

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.

I don’t do it. I think you hit that and tears. I think you’re asking about ICON, the ICON partnership. So I think this is a good lesson, and Bret 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 ‘cause 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, you know, very—you know, grateful through YC, through other, you know, programs to have an incredible network. So we—you know, you really talked to just everyone you knew, “What do you know about 3D printing? You know anyone in the space? What have you learned? Like what can you tell us?”

And because through that, 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, Jason, Alex, yeah—who are they? Absolutely incredible! Shout out to that! And they obviously had—they had it 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, alright? If you look at New Story's 3D home printer, the videos, what 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 3D printed in the last, you know, one to three years.

So you know, this is not necessarily the first 3D printer, period, but what’s significant about what we’ve done is 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 a for-profit or luxury market, or even like building in space, right? Like, we want to bring this down to earth and say we have issues of housing here 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. It’s 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, the technology is ready today. So the partnership has 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 a nearly days, and to be honest, we have to first prove it ourselves and like doing in Austin is one thing; doing a community of homes in El Salvador is the next goal. Yeah, and so we have to prove it with 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, yeah?

I think something else that distinguishes the printer that we’ve built is all the design constraints that we gave the ICON team, right? So a printer that’s gonna print a home, you know, in the US or many of the examples you see in some places in China—they’re not going to necessarily work in Haiti and El Salvador 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 gonna, you know, have an issue that if potable water is not readily accessible, we’re not gonna 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, you know, most difficult to work places in the world, which is the first of its kind, yeah?

And this has all happened in less than a year. Like we had an I/O, we’re at one you know, a team. We do these fun quarterly summits every year; we go places. And we actually have one night at dinner, we do moonshot ideas, and everybody has to just like pitch big moonshot ideas, and we’ve actually got a lot of good stuff from that exercise. And 3D home printing was one of the things that came up that night—a year ago.

Yeah, just so a year ago just an idea, and then we started to explore it more, explore more, and talk to the right people. And then say, “Alright, well, we’ve done a lot of due diligence. This was a calculated risk.” And we got to the point where we said, “Okay, New Story's gonna invest this amount of money, and we’re gonna do it where if we lose it, we’re gonna be okay.” Right?

Of course! Like, this isn’t a big company kind of thing—like, actually not at all. No significant amount, but not that. And then we said, “Okay, 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 when you look at that and you analyze that, we thought it was irresponsible not to, 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 gonna be challenging?

Everything! There's a lot; I mean I had to always like on the ground because I kind of run our own ground operations.

So one of the 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, 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 gonna print a community of homes in, you know, a watch up on El Salvador, and then people are gonna be super excited to live in them without knowing, hey, is this safe? You know, you’re worried about your children, right?

If I look, I would not move me in my future—hit into a home that you know—oh! You ought to be like in 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, etc., there’s gonna be a lot of kind of just education and talking to people and you know getting their minds around it. By they, I mean you know, both the families that we are working with that we, you know, build homes for as well as, you know, governments and you know local architects and people literally operating the machinery too.

Yeah, that’s wild!

Yeah!

The whole thing is we have a kind of a much—always 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—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. Last August when we said we're gonna start building this printer, yeah—we want to do it by Southwest help us, and it was helped 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, hmm. And I think when you're like super crystal clear on what your goals are, that’s just incredibly powerful in order to 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 to making stuff like shipping things—everyone has the same problem. Like how much of the team was 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 our CEO and cofounder, and we weren’t spending that much time. I think we were pretty disciplined on like five to ten percent of 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 in Joann, and she wasn’t spending like that much time on it either.

So we’re able to do it where we kind of carved out a percentage, basically, like our weekly schedule, yeah? 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 like exciting new creativity and innovation, but you can’t do that without the 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 of research, legal project management, launching, etc. 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 us all working together to get toward a common goal.

Yeah, well it’s so easy to take your eye off the ball, right? Because I mean, as by nature, she’s a shiny object is like the reality is it, yes, it is a shiny object, and we saw that in our launch two weeks ago. I mean, we had been like I think like six million views now, over 500 media outlets have written on it, and not— not yet—it was good, and we and we prepared heavily for that, but other donations looking within the last week, we now have about like 1.3 million in donations, so it’s resonating with people.

Yeah, and burst, we’re funding basically more of the RD of the printer, okay, of the next product development phases. Yeah, you got to put yourself in the mindset of like, like obviously people can fund houses which is incredible and amazing and life-changing, and 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, I think about, you know, the government of Mexico, they’re building tens for than thousands about tens of thousands of homes per year that would kind of fall into that social housing bracket. So if this technology is promising, it’s able to slash costs, you know, be safer, be quicker, etc… imagine that, you know, the governor 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, mm-hmm.

You guys have been so effective at 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 YC or just watching this and just curious about you in terms of like the fundraising, which I know it 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 whole sales process as well. Like how do you get to be in that kind of position?

Yeah, well, big question before that was a long cord you get. I think it really, like people ask us a lot of, yeah, you know how can other organizations be, especially nonprofit or social impact organizations like how can you be more innovative or how can you do some of these things? And I think just the reality is it all sorts of people, mm-hmm, 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, yeah, we really value—we really, 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 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 are trying to do.

For us, it’s a lot about, you know, accountability, direct impact, working with locals, human-centered design, innovation, R&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?

+12 everything Brett said; team is absolutely critical! We actually take—I mean people really remark and kind of anxiously laugh after they go through our hiring process, but it’s actually—it’s like a part-time job to go through. We take a really long time. I think especially as a small team, it’s so important ‘cause 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 and their sense of urgency and their, you know, values, character, etc. Relationship building, you know, that’s something that I’m actually like learning more of the importance. I think Brett’s like a mast of that, and that’s one of the reasons why we have such an incredible group of advisors, donors, people just advocating for us because you know we treat them as part of the New Story family, right?

We’re giving updates, you know, when they have a kid, sending them a New Story ones. It’s just like relationship; 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 profits too, but yeah, 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 you know 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 like 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 gonna 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 just thought this 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 point—you have to have like credibility of who’s supporting you, what is 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 just send emails; we’ll make videos and send like a video of us like directly to somebody, right? Like we just try to think really creatively of how 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 having very important things to do, and they're not just gonna 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 do—if you use like traditional methods, just expect kind of traditional ordinary results, yeah?

Probably below average, oh yeah—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—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 US, 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—and Hannah Potter, who runs this program, we made these like beautiful custom like invitations, like beautiful, and like look like a wedding invite—random? They do look like wedding— it looked like like amazing wedding invitations with like a custom note on the back and like we’re mailing old foil; we’re mailing that like via FedEx. So that everybody opens FedEx up, like to either them or their chief of staff or their assistant, yeah?

And it’s like that’s the kind of stuff where even though that it’s gonna 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, and that’s great advice! Any closing words of wisdom for people?

Hmm, wow! 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 and 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, the how we split up time, how we check egos at the door—like there’s no ego at New Story—and how humbled together that creates a culture, right, of what’s expected to be when you join New Story and then that impacts your hiring, 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 what your co-founder relationship and other people who are, you know, starting businesses or who maybe aren’t, right? That’s not the entire audience. I think just having an incredible community of 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. And we had chatted about this earlier, but I also have a group of other female founders through Y Combinator that are a 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.

Yeah, it’s really scary and challenging and hard, and in all of our careers—whether or not you’re a founder—you’re gonna 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 the lone, like a journey like this can be very lonely.

So I think like 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, especially with a new 3D home printing launch is that you know bold ideas attract bold people, mm-hmm, right? And the more audacious, the bigger the idea is, that’s gonna attract more of that caliber of person, right? They either want 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, kind of spectacular results, right? Especially bold ideas that aren’t just PR stunts. It’s like this—this is the kind of thing, like, yeah, it’s sort of an understanding of asymmetric risk, right?

Like if this works out, it’s gonna be amazing, but the downside is like very limited.

Yeah, but it seems like it’s working really well for you.

And I would—ii, the group meetings that’s like one of the things that people don’t talk about all that much in terms of YC benefit.

Yeah, after the fact, yeah, just keeping that up— that’s so smart!

Yeah, I mean, I feel lucky because Ali will go have dinner drinks with her girls which are like amazing founders and she’ll come back with like all these great ideas like in like all this new stuff on hiring, culture and like everything, and it’s like wow, it’s amazing, yeah?

So just like-minded people around you are gonna like push you toward your goals, right?

Yeah, if you read the news all the time it’s like only awesome hi updates but that’s not the reality!

Yes, that’s very true, yeah! Thank you!

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 of 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, you know, YC was one of the first to flick 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 problem. 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? Is it over time, like decades or two 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.

It was very nice and much respect, yeah!

Well, thank you so much for coming in; this has been great!

Our pleasure, thank you!

Thanks, Greg.