- The interview is with the founders of a non-profit organization that builds houses and communities in developing countries, particularly in Haiti and Latin America.
- They work with local governments to acquire land, bring in utilities, and design homes for families living in poverty.
- The families not only own the homes but also the land, which is seen as crucial for escaping poverty.
- The founders were not previously involved in non-profits but became passionate about the issue after witnessing the living conditions in Haiti post-earthquake.
- They noticed a lack of transparency and accountability in other organizations working in the same space.
- The founders partnered with local organizations to navigate effectively and ensure success.
- They focused on creating something that donors and end users want, with a crowdfunding site as the first step.

- The founders created their own crowdfunding site similar to Kickstarter, where people could see a family's story and donate directly to them.
- 100% of the donations went towards building houses, with overhead costs covered by private investors.
- The founders wanted to be accountable to donors, so they sent videos of families moving into their new homes.
- They initially created a fake crowdfunding platform using Webflow and manually updated the site themselves.
- They made some mistakes, but were able to launch the concept and raise $100,000 in a few weeks.
- They partnered with an organization in Haiti to build the first 6 houses and sent videos of the impact back to donors.
- They applied to Y Combinator and got in, which led to a shift in thinking and bigger goals.
- They raised funds and focused on the direct life-changing impact they could make.
- They set audacious goals and reverse-engineered their plans to achieve them.
- They launched the Architects Program, where companies fund entire communities, and it was successful.
- They also started exploring 3D printing as a technological challenge in difficult locations.
- Transparency and efficiency were important factors in their model, but practical details were not mentioned.

- The organization hired an impact data manager to set up a rigorous impact data program
- The focus is on measuring the change in people's lives after they move into a home, rather than just the number of homes built
- The data collected shows that moving into a home leads to improvements in sleep and overall health
- The organization also focuses on building entire communities and planning for safety and community cohesion
- The data collected is used to make data-influenced decisions and improve the organization's practices
- The organization is still working on visualizing and communicating the data on their website
- The decision to pursue 3D printing for home construction was driven by the need to build homes faster, less expensively, and without compromising quality
- The technology uses cement as the printing material and creates a complete thermal envelope for the home
- The construction method has the potential to be stronger and has almost zero waste, reducing costs
- The organization worked with a partner called Icon to develop their own 3D home printer

- A non-profit organization has developed a 3D home printing machine and successfully printed the first house in Austin, Texas.
- The 3D home printing technology has the potential to significantly reduce costs and construction time, while maintaining high quality.
- The organization plans to customize homes based on local needs and involve communities in the design process.
- The next phase involves bringing the 3D printing technology to El Salvador to create a community of homes.
- The organization aims to bring emerging technology to emerging markets and inspire other organizations to invest in R&D and innovation.
- The organization partnered with a company called Icon, which has technical expertise and shared values.

- New Story, a non-profit organization, is partnering with construction technology company ICON to build affordable homes in the United States using 3D printing and other methods.
- The goal is to bring promising construction technology to areas where it can be immediately applied.
- The partnership aims to make 3D printing of homes more practical and actionable, rather than experimental, with a focus on addressing housing issues in the present.
- The printer designed by New Story and ICON is specifically tailored to work in remote and challenging areas, taking into account design constraints such as power outages and limited access to potable water.
- The project started as a moonshot idea just a year ago and has progressed rapidly, with the first printer and home already built.
- The team is focused on educating and gaining acceptance from the local communities, governments, and architects who will be involved in the project.
- While the project is a calculated risk, the potential to innovate shelter for those in need outweighs the uncertainty.
- The biggest challenge ahead is scaling up the project and getting people to understand and embrace the concept of 3D home printing.
- The team initially consisted of a small group of individuals from New Story, with additional expertise brought in to help with the project.
- The project has garnered significant attention and donations, with the funds being used for further research and development of the printer.

- The founders of New Story emphasize the importance of having the right people on your team and building strong relationships with advisors and donors.
- They believe that credibility, results, and a clear story are key to attracting support and funding.
- They recommend being creative and unique in getting the attention of influential people, as traditional methods may not yield the desired results.
- The founders also stress the importance of doing impactful work and constantly testing and improving to ensure meaningful impact.
- They advise co-founders to have excellent cohesion and check egos at the door, as a strong co-founder relationship sets the foundation for a successful organization.
- Building a supportive community of cheerleaders and sounding boards is crucial for overcoming challenges and feeling empowered.
- Bold ideas attract bold people and can lead to spectacular results.

- Start-up founders need bold ideas to achieve spectacular results
- The importance of understanding asymmetric risk
- Group meetings and surrounding oneself with like-minded people can lead to great ideas and progress
- The reality of start-ups is not always portrayed in the news
- Y Combinator (YC) focuses on solving big problems and making the world a better place
- YC community supports nonprofits in their efforts to solve global issues
- YC's respect for running good businesses and helping create awareness for organizations working towards equity.

- Founders of a non-profit organization discuss their work in building houses and communities in developing countries, particularly in Haiti and Latin America.
- They partner with local organizations to navigate effectively and ensure success.
- They created a crowdfunding site similar to Kickstarter, where people can donate directly to families in need.
- 100% of the donations go towards building houses, with overhead costs covered by private investors.
- They focus on accountability to donors, sending videos of families moving into their new homes.
- The organization has expanded its goals, launching the Architects Program and exploring 3D printing for home construction.
- They prioritize transparency, efficiency, and impact data to improve their practices.
- The 3D home printing technology has the potential to significantly reduce costs and construction time, with plans to bring it to El Salvador.
- The organization aims to inspire other organizations to invest in R&D and innovation.
- They have partnered with ICON, a construction technology company, to build affordable homes in the United States using 3D printing.
- The project has garnered attention and donations, with a focus on educating and gaining acceptance from local communities and architects.
- The founders emphasize the importance of the right team, strong relationships with advisors and donors, and constantly testing and improving for meaningful impact.
- They stress the importance of bold ideas, a supportive community, and the reality of start-ups.

Alexandria Lafci - https://twitter.com/laughsee - and Brett Hagler - https://twitter.com/bretthagler - are cofounders of New Story Charity - https://newstorycharity.org/

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 read more at - https://3DHome.org

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.

1 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.

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?

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?

Probably the last thing in the world I thought I'd be doing.

And then when I was in my early 20s, I had a for profit startup before this.

So I loved entrepreneurship, loved 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 was just blown away by the tens of thousands of people that were living in tents because the earthquake destroyed like close to like a million households.

And everybody was given temporary aid, right.

But it was only supposed to last for like maybe 90 days.

And as of today, it's been almost I mean, over

and people are still living in tents, like little kid, mom and her, you know, 3 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 you just, we saw it firsthand and came back and right before I met Alexandria, actually tried to find other nonprofits that could 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 X organization, how is the money actually being spent?

Kind of seems like a black hole, what percent is going?

And so we, 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 Ali can talk through.

But just to clarify, there were companies or nonprofits working in this space, the money would just kind of like, you know, seeps out from little cracks in the business and then they kind of end up living in tents.

Yeah, at this 0.3 years into doing this work, we've kind of come across and researched and talked to over 100, right, well over 100 different organizations focused on housing.

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.

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 fairly subpar, which is part of the problem we're trying to solve.

So 1 example, and I won't name the organization, but it was a pretty prominent article.

This was actually right before we went through Y Combinator.

It was 1 of the largest humanitarian organizations.

A bunch of big headlines came out that they raised basically like half a billion dollars and within like 6 years had only built, and this is not an exaggeration, I think like 6 houses.

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 various organizations in Latin America and Africa, et cetera, and became fairly jaded in that work.

I think a lot of people in the space 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 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 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 housing as it relates to poverty.

And then through my experience in development work, Brett mentioned that large organization only building 6 homes, you know That organization didn't build 6 homes and then pocket the rest of the money, right?

What really happened if you look, you know deeper into it is, you know, they said that they were gonna build However many thousand homes they realize 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 And so I think that you know highlights 1 of the core reasons why we've been successful is because we value, truly partner with, heavily vet local partners.

1 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.

would be very presumptuous of us as, you know, very young, at that point we were 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, 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.

Does that mean you take a trip and try and find contractors and build 1 on your own?

Yeah, I think it, kind of going back to, so we had already, Before we got into YC, we were already loving Y Combinator, listening to podcasts, all this stuff.

actually a big point of connection between us.

I think you were surprised, oh, this person who's a non-profit background watches Startup School.

And if you kind of go to, I mean, really a core value y'all have is make something people want.

And we looked at that from really 2 users.

Everybody listening right now, 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, right?

And the reality is about half the people would say no.

And so how do we, how do we make something that they want?

And then we designed our experience we can get into later, right?

point earlier, how do we make something that

Right, and then we designed our experience we can get into later, right?

And then to Ali'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 really no capital of our own.

And so we had the idea of the donor side was really 3 steps.

The first 1 was we were gonna make our own crowdfunding site.

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.

What's not gonna cover any of our overhead.

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 so, and it was also 1 of the best days of the family's lives, right?

They've been living in, I mean, like hell on earth conditions legit for 7 years.

house, it's 1 of the best days of the family's lives, right?

mean, like hell on earth conditions, legit, for 7 years.

And they get into a new house, it's 1 of the best days of their lives, and so we take a simple moving 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.

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.

So we made, I'm going to give a plug to Webflow.

So our other co-founder, Matthew, his nickname is MacGyver, just because he can 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 go in and move the meter.

It could upset payments, but it would be like, I'm at a dinner, we just got a donation.

And you go in, you do a quick calculation, this is the percentage, and you move the meter over.

And our good excuse was, credit card processing.

And then we still hadn't, and then we were like, okay, we're going to still prove the MVP.

We'll just like good on 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.

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 lot of experience there, build our first 6 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.

I think that just really emphasizes core principles, right?

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 like.

People were shocked at the beginning, like, you're gonna send me a video of this exact family I just met on the website moving into their house?

You know, if that actually happens, that's something that I wanna be a part of.

Yeah, so We would say, yeah, this is cool, I want to be a part of it, but also this is not going to scale.

So I guess that's the other lesson too, right?

I mean, for those first few months, we were literally just pulling out our computers and updating the website constantly.

Let's just say that we had full time jobs.

So it would be like in the middle of like 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.

We partnered with an organization that had already started a project.

And so we didn't have to start everything from scratch.

We just thought like, okay, validate NDP, validate this is something people want, and prove it with them.

Okay, and were you set up as a non-profit at the time or you just ran the money through?

That's actually a process that takes probably much longer than 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 of weeks.

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, what is it, retrospect.

And what changed about the business when you got into YC and went through?

Thinking bigger, I think, was 1 of the key ones.

So Kevin Hale, Aaron Harris, Kat Mignolic, they were our partners.

And I remember it was at my apartment building.

We had our first, you get in, and you have your first kind of call with your partner to set your goal for the 3 month stint that is YC.

What's either your revenue goal, your customer goal, whatever.

us, it was how many homes we were going to fund.

way, our homes are about $6,000 per home.

So Kevin asked us, what are your goals for home funding?

And we said, 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.

So then we launched this 100 homes in 100 days.

And I think a funny story is that we agreed to it, because we're in YC.

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 1 of our big core team values now is think big, break down, and execute.

So you have this big goal and you just have to, this is not news, but backwards plan it.

And we did that and then actually hit 100 homes in like 92 days, so we exceeded our goal.

So during YC it was just tons of fundraising basically to get these things going.

A lot of fundraising, a lot of outreach and getting people excited about our model and why it's different.

And then and like 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 learned, I think it really just infused in our DNA, setting very audacious goals, and then saying, like, okay, no BS, what would it take if we had to hit this?

And then reverse engineering back to there and then, you know, making your weekly plan and executing.

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, YCN did the summer of 2015.

We had our annual planning meeting for 2016, the end of that year.

we said, how many homes are we gonna fund?

And I forget 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.

So we threw a huge number out there and just said, let's just brainstorm.

And long story short, that launched the Architects Program, which exists now at New Story, where companies actually fund entire communities, right?

Instead of doing one-off homes, we said, if we're gonna hit a big number, we need people to be doing bulk, right?

We need people to be doing big swaths of homes.

And when we said that at the beginning of 2016, within 3 months, we had what, 2 or 3 companies that had agreed to do communities.

So it was really a shift in our thinking of what's possible.

you have to challenge yourself in order to see what you can achieve.

And then taking the right steps to package that idea and then go test it.

So not saying, all right, we're gonna shift all our strategy and everything's gonna focus on this.

It's like fire a bullet before a cannonball.

So you create a package and you send it off to companies and you see what resonates.

And then all of a sudden it's like oh we have this program.

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.

100 home community, where they'd be all together, designed beautifully and intelligently with the families.

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