New Story and Icon's 3D Printed Home in Austin, Texas
Brett Hagler, Founder of New Story, the housing start-up that is making waves with its 3D house printing technology that it developed with Icon laughs when he thinks about how different his youthful passions were to his life today. “I think the pursuit of ‘gold, girls and glory’ is what I describe my early years growing up.” But a resurgence of his faith and a life-changing trip to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake sparked his passion and purpose. “I saw the problem firsthand of little babies being born into tarp tents that were supposed to last for a couple months which turned into years.”
Hagler, who is a Y Combinator graduate, author, cancer survivor, and a 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur, quickly also saw the global scale of the problem. “It’s about a billion people that don't have safe, adequate shelter. Aside from climate change, there's arguably no global crisis that affects a larger group of people.” That realization, coupled with his insight that the solution could lie in the merging of non-profit and technology R&D skillsets, led him to start New Story.” It's called New Story because we want to create a ‘new story’ in how we think about building a next-generation social impact organization. We believe there should just be more calculated risk taking, there should be bigger bets, there should be more research and development that's going towards the poorest of the poor.”
Brett Hagler, CEO and Founder of New Story
Hagler is clear about the purpose of New Story. “Our mission statement is ‘to pioneer solutions to end global homelessness.’” The ‘pioneer’ part of the phrase is especially important: New Story is focused on transformational not incremental solutions to the housing crisis. “We believe that ‘technology is a force multiplier for impact.’” This impacts who New Story hires: software engineers and data scientists, who can help the company find new ways to use data and technology to solve problems,” said Hagler.
He continued, “Another core belief is that ‘creating change should be an open source pursuit’. We think that when there's a billion person problem, you need a group of partners to do that. And so everything that we create–from our 3D printing machines with Icon to the software that we create–all of it is with the intent that we democratize and open source what we're building so that other nonprofits and governments that are working on the same problem can use it. And then by doing that we're going to be able to impact more people than try to keep it all ourselves.”
New Story (which has also partnered with Sothebys, Goldman Sachs and Architectural Digest) gained attention because of its partnership with Icon, a housing technology company, which resulted in the creation of the Vulcan, a 3D printing machine for houses which could print a 650 square foot house in 24 hours for $10,000 (with the cost estimated to drop to around $4,000 with scale). “We started with Version 1.0, and we worked on that for a while, very quietly together in Austin, Texas. Before anybody thought this was cool or exciting, honestly more people were telling me that we were crazy for trying something like this. And then, it worked. And so our mantra at new story is that it's only crazy until it's not.”
The result was the first habitable, permitted 3D printed house. Hagler related the pushback he got.“Two months before that was printed, people were telling me, why would you not use that money and just build another 20 houses for people, right? That is not a mindset that going to create breakthroughs. And when there's a billion people in need, we need breakthroughs.” Setting their sights even higher, the team is now focused on creating an entire community of homes. “The last year has been making the next version of the machine and our intent was always to start 3D printing communities, so we're about to start on a 50 home community in Latin America.”
Hagler has some parting words of advice. “I always tell people is to ‘dream big, but start small’. In my case, the goal was just do one house to start, create one machine.And when you're trying to work on innovations, try to ‘fire bullets before cannonballs.’” The latter speaks to the idea of managing your resources smartly so you don’t utilize all of them in one shot. He also is frank about his perspective on innovation. “I think a lot of creativity and innovation is remixing what's out there. Try to try to figure out how you can put all these different ingredients together and then make your own thing.”
As the population of the world scales from 7 to 8 billion, the global housing crisis is a problem that requires transformational solutions like the ones Hagler and the team at New Story are pioneering. We can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
