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 Yan Stramic.

Morning.

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 uh California. Really? Well, uh

where are we today? We are in

California. The Allen 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 uh in the

United States right now. And so we have

to fight for fixing all of the things

that are wrong with the state.

[Music]

I was born in Eastern Europe in 1987 in

the Czech Republic. Uh which was two

years before the wall came down. And uh

growing up as a kid in posts Soviet

Eastern Europe, um 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 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 uh I

found that profoundly sad because to me,

California and more broadly America, we

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 uh 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 um 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 a 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 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. Uh we're going to start

by building the Solano Foundry which

will be the largest advanced

manufacturing park in America. Um where

Silicon Valley can once again colloccate

R&D and um and production. There's been

a lot of talk about China here today and

on shoring manufacturing. We cannot

compete with China and onshore

manufacturing

by throwing bodies at the problem. We

simply don't have enough people in

America to do that. The only way that we

can compete is by building factories of

the future where we use robotics and AI

to dramatically increase the

productivity per worker. That also makes

the job more fun. That also allows those

companies to pay those people way better

to work in those factories.

Who are the people who can build the

factories of the future? Who are the

people who do robotics and AI? Where do

they live? They predominantly live in

the Bay Area. And right now we are

making it insanely hard for them to do

their job by forcing them every time

they need to go to the factory floor to

get on a plane in Silicon Valley and fly

to some other part of America and then

adjust it and then spend 3 days coming

back. You cannot do a one-day trip to

Texas or Ohio. It's a 3-day trip. We

should have places where Silicon Valley

can build an hour outside of Manuel

Park. And that's what we're building

with the foundry. The second major

national security issue that we're

working on is ship building. As you

might have heard, we have quite a

serious problem, Houston. Just as one

example, Jong Jing Island shipyard in

China built more ships last year than we

have built collectively in the United

States since the end of the Second World

War. One shipyard. And by the way, every

ship in China that is a commercial ship

is built to military standards. so that

if you need to in a conflict scenario,

you can mount it with guns and systems

and everything else that you need. We

have a long way to go. Here is the good

news. Jong Jing Island, the Death Star

of Chinese ship building, is the area

that you can see in red on this image.

Newport News, which is the biggest

shipyard we have in America, um is shown

in blue. And then the next few shipyards

are the next shipyards where we build

submarines and other programs.

The good news is that they all fit on

the 6 and a half miles of waterfront

that we own in Solano County on the deep

water ship channel. All of them. And

that is less than 10% of the holding

that we have overall in the area. So

this shipyard has the scale to really

move the needle for the country.

But it's not just that. This is a map of

all of the shipyards in the United

States, public and private. And what you

can see is that most of them are huddled

around on the eastern seabboard and in

the Gulf. I hate to break it to you, but

the enemy is that way. If you're the

Chinese Communist Party, the first thing

that you'll do in any kind of conflict

in the Pacific is you will bomb or

otherwise shut down the Panama Canal.

And if you've done that, there is no way

to bring our ships back into the United

States into the shipyards for repair.

And there is no way to bring new ships

out into the conflict without going

around Argentina, which is tens of

thousands of miles away. So we

desperately need new shipyards. We

desperately need them in on the West

Coast. And the good news is that the

best and the biggest site in America for

ship building, for new shipyards,

happens to be located in the Bay Area,

which is number one, the best natural

harbor in the country. And number two,

where all of the AI talent is that you

need to build the ships of the future in

the shipyard of the future.

Lastly, you can't just build a shipyard

and a manufacturing park. You need to

build a whole city to support them. And

to do that, we building a new walkable

city for up to 400,000 people. Um, but

unlike the shipyard and the foundry,

which are about technologies of the

future and of the 21st century, the city

is inspired by old American

neighborhoods, by places like Charleston

and the West Village and Marina in San

Francisco where you have traditional,

beautiful architecture. Your

80-year-olds can walk to school alone

and um you can have dinner with friends

in a in a public square. Uh it's the

kind of place that so many so many

Americans and Californians want to live

in, but right now they either can't

afford it or they even can't find it at

all. And so in summary,

there is this incredible energy whether

it's the re-industrialized movement,

whether it is um the abundance movement,

people who say let's it's time to build

and all of them are calling on America

to meet the moment. And in the past eras

whenever that happened, we had symbols

that were built in those eras. The

Guilded Age had the transcontinental

railroad and the rebuilding of Chicago.

The New Deal had the Hoover Dam. Uh

during the war, we built ships in Kaiser

shipyards with Rosie the Riveter and the

space age put a man on the moon. And our

proposition is that because of its scale

and its location and ambition,

California Forever is a physical

manifestation of all of the most

important things in America right now.

this new optimism, manufacturing, ship

building, homes for everyone, speed and

abundance. And that's why this matters

for Solano County. That's why this

matters for California. That's why this

matters for America because all of these

places

need a new shining city on a hill and

that's what we are building. Thank you

very much.

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