Terra Nova raises $7M to lift flood-prone cities using wood chip injection robots — San Rafael is first target

in California and so they're doing massive clearing of of forest and then they really just don't have anything to do with that wood. Okay. So, goal is to save San Rafale or save them from this, you know, massive uh infrastructure bill.

How do you start small and prove that the company can you know execute on this type of operation? Are there specific sites that are uh you know much smaller scale where you can kind of start uh proving out uh the the thesis? Yeah. So I I just got this text from our team.

They are all at our pallet site right now uh doing some drilling, doing some pumping. Um you can see we use like augur drill bits and uh you know big injection machines to do our our pumping and have our shipping containers. So we are deployed this works.

We've been doing this for about a year and we are looking for more commercial projects to do right now. So what site what site are they on specifically? Is that like a testing ground?

They're undisclosed site near Sacramento um that is primarily a testing ground but they also have huge drainage and subsidance issues that we are are fixing. Huh. Fascinating. Wild. So, so what what are what what's like the the dream customer right now?

Yeah, we would love to do strangely some wetland restoration projects and also some new home development projects. So, things that don't already have a lot of infrastructure in place are very ideal.

Uh we've seen a customer willingness to pay slightly higher there because their risk appetite is a little more because there's there's not much to go wrong. Uh we feel ready to do some roadway projects as well. Sorry, break that first one down. It's basically like I have a bunch of land that's undeveloped.

I'm thinking about putting a bunch of houses on it, but there's a problem because there's like a marsh in the middle of it and you can kind of get rid of the marsh. Is that roughly correct? Not quite. So, in the bay, it's usually you've dyed or levied off an area and then because it's organic, it's subsided.

So, there's an example. It's an 80acre parcel uh right on the water infell near the target. This has subsided 2 m. And so because of that, if you were to break the dyke, it'd be under sea level, of course. And so they want to do two things. They want to put some wetland on that.

To do that, you have to lift it so it can become title. And they also want to put um about $100 million worth of homes on that property on the more upland section. And so that you would also need to lift it because that section is also too low.

So both are fixed by the same solution which is ours which is just directly lift it and make it so you can develop it and make it into higher quality wetland. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Uh how long until you have uh you're getting death threats from conspiracy theories. Yeah. Modifying the world easy.

Yeah. People, you know, obviously Augustus has been on the show. You're going to get blamed for earthquakes. That's what's going to happen. Like there's going to be an earthquake. We actually think we're going to help with earthquakes as well. We haven't been publicly claiming this cuz we're still doing testing.

But this performed dramatically better. Um, this underground looks very much like particle board. It doesn't look like wood chips. It's compact. And so this is better than normal earth. Uh, this is very controllable. It's very physical. Get ready to go on info wars, buddy.

Because I I no matter what the science says, you are going to get blamed for uh for earthquakes because people are just going to be like they were doing something and then the earthquake happened. you have you have Augustus as as as a as a model. Augustus, you know, was was in the hot seat, but he's done a great job.

And I think that there is a path for communicating with all constituents, not just tech, not just Twitter. Augustus has done a great job getting to, you know, AM radio listeners and and random uh random shows that uh do not break through in tech Twitter. He's done a great job there.

Uh but yeah, communication across all the constituents has to be really important for this business. But yeah, I think it's important to say this is not like a blue state solution. This is very much red and blue. Totally. We pitch this all over Florida. Of course, Miami faces some of the worst flooding issues.

And this is also not just a US problem. This is something that's happening all over the world. Uh Southeast Asia is particularly bad. We've had ministers from Indonesia, from Cambodia come here. They're saying like, "I'm moving my entire capital city of Jakarta. Help me.

" And this is very much going to be the fundamental way that you solve large scale flooding problems. And so I I hope that conspiracy theorists don't come for us. Um we definitely are willing to show them what's happening.

You know, this kind of looks like a black box underground, but actually we have systems where we can measure this to like a a 2 millimeter level precision. And so you can have very good idea of exactly what's happening. That's amazing. Uh one more question just because I'm trying to wrap my head around the scale.

How many like you know truckloads or shipping containers worth of wood chips would you need to let's say raise a square mile like uh call it like five feet. I will do that math for you right now. Um so let's do acre to square mile.

So basically, you need 20 truckloads per acref foot, which is actually much better than fill because with fill you're an acre an acre foot is an entire one foot like picture an acre and then one foot. Okay. So one foot deep, acre wide long. Yeah. Yeah. So um you want uh we're doing math on TV right now.

I got Well, while he's doing the math, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. This book a wander with inspiring views of photography cleaning a 24/7 concier services vacation home but better. Uh and you know maybe in the future your wander will be on terraformed property.

We might be increasing the number of of vacation homes. Absolutely. So a square mile lifted by 5T is a lot. Of course you know that. Um this would actually be uh 64,000 truckloads of Let's go. Let's go. However, however, as much as it sounds, there is way way more than that.

just in California, we could absolutely source that much. Okay, we looked and it is very straightforward to source a thousand semi truckloads a day in the Bay Area. Um, so that would maybe be a two-month project if you were really about your logistics and maybe a two-year project if you didn't care quite as much.

Okay, fantastic. Well, we're looking forward. Yeah, you're taking taking something that people want to get rid of and saying we'll take it. Yeah, lot of people. Thank you so much for taking the time to to stop by. This uh fun. The chat was mentioning you. How how are you guys not talking about this?

And we did we did sort of miss the the the the announcement, but we're really happy to have you join and really appreciate Thank you for having me, John. I've been watching you since you're making YC videos instead of tech startup videos. So, that's amazing. Well, uh well, thanks so much. Well, super exciting.

Uh congrats to the whole team. Good luck. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Uh before we move on, let me tell you about bezel. getbbezzle. com. Your bezel concier is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And in tariff news, Switzerland has been making moves. Oh, yes.

The luxury watch market might be in turmoil again. We might need to call get them on the show again. And Switzerland are working on a deal to slash the 39% tariffs and try to get them um to 15%. Uh Rolex got uh Trump a oneofone desk watch clock that has been photographed on Trump's desk. Uh and that might win him over.

And uh yeah, 101 Rolex and win a lot of people over. That's pretty cool. Kind of uh uh So, didn't didn't uh Barack Obama get a Rolex as well? I believe he got some sort of watch from his secret service agent. His Secret Service agent probably might have been an Omega.

might have been a Speed Master, but uh but it became the watch that he wore. He wasn't a watch guy. Then one of his Secret Service guys was like, "You got to wear this watch. " And he did. Yeah. Very cool. Uh did you see this post? Jeff Davies in 2016. A lot of posts from 2016 uh these days.

Jeff Davies in 2016 said Apple should buy Nvidia and lock up VR, AI, and autonomous car tech for the next decade. Look back 10 10 years from now and great use of cash. And Apple would be a uh a10 trillion dollar company basically. Wow. Wild. Uh looking also back this uh Fireflies. Is this AI noteaker?

Someone was talking trash about AI noteakers today on the stream. Uh I I I don't even remember who at this point, but uh so Shiel Monot says, "This is wild. It's about a screenshot of a LinkedIn post by Sam Udotong, who's the co-founder and CTO at Fireflies AI. This is an AI note-taking startup.

I think they're doing very well. I think they've raised money recently. Um, and uh, and they say, "Came across this post on LinkedIn. Turns out the first version of Fireflyy's AI uh, the AI meeting assistant doesn't even have AI. It's just founder joining the calls, taking notes manually, and sending a summary back.

Sounds crazy. " Uh, and that is exactly what Sam wrote on LinkedIn 10 hours ago when this screenshot was taken. said, "We scaled Flyerflies to a1 billion dollar valuation after six failures from our original crypto food idea, food delivery idea. " Um, that's hilarious.

Uh, if you're if you're working on a crypto food idea, pivot to AI noteaker, get to a get to a billion dollars, uh, uh, a billion dollar valuation. And so, uh, he says, this is the key segment. When when when customers scheduled a meeting, we'd manually dial in as Fred from Fireflies. ai.

We'd sit there silently taking detailed notes and send them 10 minutes later after taking notes for a 100 plus meetings and falling asleep in many. We were finally able to make enough money to pay the $750 per month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point where we said, "Let's stop and automate everything.

" And so this is being put in this is being put in like a dunk because they're saying like, "Oh, this billion dollar AI note-taking company doesn't use AI. " It's like, yeah, this was in 2015 or 2016. Like I actually I actually knew Sam at the time and I DM'd with him.

I was a customer and I was completely fine with this because I was like this is awesome. I get somebody to take my notes for me. It's basically like an outsource noteaker. Um but it's being sort of like reframed as like as like this is what how they would do stuff now.

And it's like no obviously it's been a decade almost since they did. Yeah. I think if you're a customer and you didn't know, you have the right to be frustrated that you were just inviting a human and no no uh hilarious hilariously scrappy. Hilariously scrappy.

But yes, they they were and as long as they were being transparent with the VCs at that time that yeah, we're just using couple guys to do this. It's so crazy looking back on this uh this conversation with Sam in my DMs. Uh, and he just says like, "Hey, uh, like I'm working on I I needed notes from something.

Like, can you uh can you send in, uh, and transcribe everything? I've been using Rev, this, uh, this this manual transcription service that would take an audio file and just give you a text text file back, but it was done by humans.

" Um, and so here he says, "You can add Fred at Fireflies to the calendar invite and Fred will join. " Give it up for Fred. Let's give it up for Fred.

I was like just I I was like hey just got my grow first transcript pretty solid like and he's like how would you com how comparable would you say it is to rev lots and ums and captured uh I I I know the exact comparison in a day because I sent the recording to Rev earlier so I was doing like AB testing actually seeing like what was what was useful what wasn't.

It was just funny like actually seeing this company grow so much and having been an early adopter and then uh and then see people get the story wrong. So, you know what? If you're using Firefly, of course they're using Whisper. Why would they be using humans still? It makes no sense. The technology is good.

Uh, um, Tim Sweeney is landmaxing. Oh, what? And behind Fortnite has bought over 40,000 acres of US wilderness not to build to keep it forever wild. Forever wild. I love it. Where else are you in the in the timeline? Are you deep in there? Uh, Mr. Beast says 2% of human time is now spent on YouTube.

M Well, thank you to everyone who's been spending at least We spend way more than We spend way more than that. Oh, yeah. Because we're doing like 15 easily 15 15 to 20 hours a week. Oh, yeah. 50 weeks a year. And uh you know, that's we're we're getting the goal should be to get into the double digits, right?

Somewhere around somewhere around seven or eight% now. Um Dean Ball had some uh support for your take yesterday. He said, "I don't think you should th just throw del at someone who's identifying a negative externality of a new technology. That's not necessarily decelerationist.

" Dean Ball says it's heartening to see such eminently reasonable takes making their way into prominent protect new media.

There's something very well or actually neotrad media uh to be clear, but he says there's something very old man about the terms of AI policy debates and per and perhaps this is because it has been largely old people who have set them.

When I hear certain arguments about how we need to let the innovators innovate and thus cannot bear the thought of resolving negative externalities from new technology, it just sounds retro to me like an old man dimly remembering things he believes.

Milton Friedman once said, "Whereas anyone with enough neuroplasticity remaining to internalize a concept as alien as AGI can easily see that such simple frames do not work. " Um, Ronda Santis says, "We might have to see if we can get Pelosi to run Florida's pension fund. " She's showing, uh, this is pretty incredible.

Generated $133 million of profits and a 16,930% return. I don't believe that number. That's 16,000%. I mean, I guess this is since 1987. She was probably making money and adding to it. consistently over that time.

Uh what if she just invested like she just invested once and then I'm I'm very I'm very skeptical of that second number. You don't believe she could just 10x it and just 10x that again and then 10x that again and then 16x that last time. Uh it's