Terraformation’s Yishan Wong: “Forest as a service”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2021

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Yishan Wong, founder of Terraformation, to talk about his plan to plant a trillion trees (3:30), his days running Reddit (8:10), on whether social media is manageable (10:50), working at Paypal and Facebook in the early days (13:15), marrying tech and tree planting (15:15), how he got into climate change (18:00), making tree-planting a business (23:15), the first project (28:20), the reforestation bottleneck (33:20), why solar is key (36:05), raising venture capital (44:00), selling forest “kits” (47:30), banking on a shift in thought (52:10), his lessons from scaling Facebook (57:45), why trees are the easiest answer (1:02:15), and why the goal is 1 trillion (1:04:50).

PLUS: Gianni Settino on why he joined an investor group that spent $208,000 on a Lebron James video highlight (1:06:40), tinkering with ethereum (1:08:50), cryptokitties (1:11:45), building a crypto football card experience (1:15:40), NBA Top Shot (1:16:30), buying the Lebron James card (1:19:00), what his parents said (1:22:00), and whether this is a bubble (1:25:15).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo!
0:01.0	Technology.
0:02.0	What is it all about?
0:04.0	If I told you I invented this thing, you know, this magical machine that was self-replicating,
0:10.0	and you only needed light and water to construct it, and it was localized into a thousand variants that work around the world.
0:19.0	You'd be like, okay, like, this is the next trillion dollar company.
0:33.9	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley.
0:36.3	Thank you for tuning in.
0:37.5	I really do appreciate it.
0:39.7	We have a great show for you today.
0:41.2	Another double episode.
0:43.3	There's a lot going on these days.
0:44.8	Yeah, so first up, we have Yashan Wong, who is the former chief exec of Reddit.
0:52.6	And before that, he was an early employee at PayPal, then engineering executive at Facebook back
0:57.7	in its early days.
0:58.6	So he's been around the block.
1:00.0	And these days, he lives in Hawaii, obviously.
1:04.3	And he's doing something very non-silicon valley, just planting trees.
1:10.3	That's right, planting trees. But he is doing it in a kind of a
1:13.1	Silicon Valley-ish type way. His company is called Terra Formation, and what he wants to do is basically
1:18.6	catalyze the planting of a trillion trees, which he argues are very clearly the very best CO2
1:26.2	harvesters on the planet.
	...

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