California Forever: The Startup Building America's Next Great City
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The dream? Build a livable, affordable, eco-friendly community. California Forever owns more than 100 square miles of land here in Solano County, backed by Silicon Valley investors to build a new city.
We're going back to what the Bay Area and Northern California used to do back in the 60s and 70s and 80s when it was the center for high-tech manufacturing in America.
This new city will be entirely self-funded and sustainable.
The innovation engine that we have in Northern California is really special. And the fact that we are throttling it by not building up housing is just crazy.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome California Forever's Jan Sramic.
As you've just heard, I run California Forever, which is building the next great American city. And we are building it right here in California. And I know what all of you are already thinking, which is, California? Really? Well, where are we today? We are in California. The all-in summit is in California. And I think that's kind of the point, because despite all of its flaws and challenges, California is irreplaceable. Whether you like it or not, there is nowhere else in America that can play the role that California plays in the United States right now. And so we have to fight for fixing all of the things that are wrong with the state. I was born in Eastern Europe in 1987 in the Czech Republic, which was two years before the wall came down.
And growing up as a kid in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, California was the California dream. California was this. And then after 26 years, I finally got here in 2013. And what I found was this. It was homelessness. It was people throwing rocks at Google buses. It was companies beginning to leave the state. And all of it was entirely self-inflicted, all of it. This was a self-goal, 100% of it, because we had failed to build enough of everything that you need to run an actual state. We failed to build enough housing. We failed to build enough office space. We failed to build enough factories. We failed to build enough freeways and trains and energy, all of it. And I found that profoundly sad. Because to me, California and more broadly America, we were defined by building to the rest of the world.
I mean, we were the place that could build better than anyone else in the world. The Golden Gate Bridge was built in four years. The Boeing 747 went from an idea to carrying a fair paying passenger in three years. The Navy got the idea to build a nuclear submarine in 1951. It was in the water in 1954. And I thought it was really sad. Now, here's the good news. It took a while, but in the last few years, both on the left and on the right, we have realized that this question of how do we build in America is going to be the defining question of the next 20 years. And that brings me to this. Shortly after coming to California, about a decade ago, I started working on what became California Forever. And we wanted to build a place where California would build at a scale that is worthy of this great state.
And we are doing that in a place called Solano County, which is about halfway between Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Very importantly, it's also about half an hour east of Napa. Over the decade, we've raised over a billion dollars, and we've acquired nearly 70,000 acres to build. That's over 100 square miles. This is what it looks like. It is this incredible canvas. for California to build again. It is five times the size of the island of Manhattan. The land we own is two and a half times the size of the city of San Francisco. It is where the Sacramento Bay meets the Sacramento River. And what we're going to build there are all of the things that California and America need right now. And we're going to start by actually going back to what built Silicon Valley.
We're going to start by building the Solano Foundry. which will be the largest advanced manufacturing park in America, where Silicon Valley can once again co-locate R&D and production. There's been a lot of talk about China here today and on-shoring manufacturing.
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