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The dream. Build a livable, affordable, eco-friendly community. California Forever owns more than 100 square miles
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of land here in Solano County, backed by Silicon Valley investors to build a new
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city. We're going back to what the Bay Area and Northern California used to do back
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in the 60s and 70s and 80s when it was the center for high-tech manufacturing in America.
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This new city will be entirely self-funded and sustainable. The innovation engine that we have in
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Northern California is really special and the fact that we are throttling it by not building up housing is just
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crazy. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome California Forever's Yan Stramic. Morning.
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As you've just heard, I run California Forever, which is building the next great American city. And we are building
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it right here in California. And I know what all of you are already thinking, which is uh California. Really? Well, uh
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where are we today? We are in California. The Allen Summit is in California. And I think that's kind of
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the point because despite all of its flaws and challenges, California is irreplaceable.
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Whether you like it or not, there is nowhere else in America that can play the role that California plays uh in the
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United States right now. And so we have to fight for fixing all of the things that are wrong with the state.
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[Music] I was born in Eastern Europe in 1987 in the Czech Republic. Uh which was two
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years before the wall came down. And uh growing up as a kid in posts Soviet Eastern Europe, um California was the
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California dream. California was this. And then after 26 years, I finally got here in 2013. And what I found was
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this. It was homelessness. It was people throwing rocks at Google buses. It was companies beginning to leave the
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state. And and all of it was entirely self-inflicted. All of it. This was a self goal. 100% of it. Because we had
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failed to build enough of everything that you need to run an actual state. We failed to build enough housing.
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We failed to build enough office space. We failed to build enough factories. We failed to build enough freeways and
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trains and energy. All of it. And uh I found that profoundly sad because to me, California and more broadly America, we
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we were defined by building to the rest of the world. I mean, we were the place that could build better than anyone else
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in the world. The Golden Gate Bridge was built in four years. The Boeing 747 went
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from an idea to carrying a fair paying passenger in three years. The Navy got the idea to build a nuclear
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submarine in 1951. It was in the water in 1954 and I thought it was really sad. Now
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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
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that this question of how do we build in America is going to be the defining question of um the next 20 years and
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that brings me to this. Shortly after coming to California about a decade ago, I started working on what became
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California forever. And we wanted to build a place where California would build at a scale that is worthy of this
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great state. And we are doing that in a place called Solano County, which is about halfway between Silicon Valley and
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Sacramento. Very importantly, it's also about half an hour east of Napa. Over the decade,
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we've raised over a billion dollars and we've acquired nearly 70,000 acres to build. That's over a 100 square miles.
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This is what it looks like. It is this incredible canvas for California to build. Again, it is five
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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
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Francisco. It is where the Sacramento Bay meets the Sacramento River. And what we going to build there are all of the
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things that California and America need right now. And we're going to start by actually going back to what built
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Silicon Valley. Uh we're going to start by building the Solano Foundry which will be the largest advanced
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manufacturing park in America. Um where Silicon Valley can once again colloccate
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R&D and um and production. There's been a lot of talk about China here today and
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on shoring manufacturing. We cannot compete with China and onshore manufacturing
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by throwing bodies at the problem. We simply don't have enough people in America to do that. The only way that we
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can compete is by building factories of the future where we use robotics and AI to dramatically increase the
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productivity per worker. That also makes the job more fun. That also allows those
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companies to pay those people way better to work in those factories. Who are the people who can build the
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factories of the future? Who are the people who do robotics and AI? Where do they live? They predominantly live in
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the Bay Area. And right now we are making it insanely hard for them to do their job by forcing them every time
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they need to go to the factory floor to get on a plane in Silicon Valley and fly
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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
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Texas or Ohio. It's a 3-day trip. We should have places where Silicon Valley can build an hour outside of Manuel
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Park. And that's what we're building with the foundry. The second major national security issue that we're
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working on is ship building. As you might have heard, we have quite a serious problem, Houston. Just as one
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example, Jong Jing Island shipyard in China built more ships last year than we have built collectively in the United
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States since the end of the Second World War. One shipyard. And by the way, every
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ship in China that is a commercial ship is built to military standards. so that if you need to in a conflict scenario,
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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
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news. Jong Jing Island, the Death Star of Chinese ship building, is the area that you can see in red on this image.
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Newport News, which is the biggest shipyard we have in America, um is shown in blue. And then the next few shipyards
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are the next shipyards where we build submarines and other programs. The good news is that they all fit on
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the 6 and a half miles of waterfront that we own in Solano County on the deep water ship channel. All of them. And
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that is less than 10% of the holding that we have overall in the area. So this shipyard has the scale to really
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move the needle for the country. But it's not just that. This is a map of all of the shipyards in the United
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States, public and private. And what you can see is that most of them are huddled
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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
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Chinese Communist Party, the first thing that you'll do in any kind of conflict in the Pacific is you will bomb or
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otherwise shut down the Panama Canal. And if you've done that, there is no way to bring our ships back into the United
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States into the shipyards for repair. And there is no way to bring new ships out into the conflict without going
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around Argentina, which is tens of thousands of miles away. So we desperately need new shipyards. We
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desperately need them in on the West Coast. And the good news is that the best and the biggest site in America for
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ship building, for new shipyards, happens to be located in the Bay Area, which is number one, the best natural
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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
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the shipyard of the future. Lastly, you can't just build a shipyard and a manufacturing park. You need to
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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
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unlike the shipyard and the foundry, which are about technologies of the future and of the 21st century, the city
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is inspired by old American neighborhoods, by places like Charleston and the West Village and Marina in San
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Francisco where you have traditional, beautiful architecture. Your 80-year-olds can walk to school alone
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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
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Americans and Californians want to live in, but right now they either can't afford it or they even can't find it at
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all. And so in summary, there is this incredible energy whether it's the re-industrialized movement,
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whether it is um the abundance movement, people who say let's it's time to build
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and all of them are calling on America to meet the moment. And in the past eras whenever that happened, we had symbols
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that were built in those eras. The Guilded Age had the transcontinental railroad and the rebuilding of Chicago.
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The New Deal had the Hoover Dam. Uh during the war, we built ships in Kaiser shipyards with Rosie the Riveter and the
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space age put a man on the moon. And our proposition is that because of its scale
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and its location and ambition, California Forever is a physical manifestation of all of the most
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important things in America right now. this new optimism, manufacturing, ship building, homes for everyone, speed and
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abundance. And that's why this matters for Solano County. That's why this matters for California. That's why this
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matters for America because all of these places need a new shining city on a hill and
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that's what we are building. Thank you very much. [Music]