‘I’m converting Silicon Valley money into forests’: Ex-Reddit CEO reinvents himself as climate warrior to plant a trillion trees

For Yishan Wong, one of the good things about deciding to reforest the planet is that no one hates trees. 

That’s a new feeling for the software engineer who spent nearly a decade working for some of the most polarizing tech companies in the world including Reddit, PayPal and Facebook, where tens of millions of self-appointed “internet warlords” log on to scream into their own little echo-chamber.

Between 2012 and 2014 he turned up each day to the top job at the meme and troll-tastic forum site, Reddit, (tagline: “Come for the cats, stay for the empathy”). It was his job to fight “draining” and “stressful” virtual fires which constantly reached new lows, from the infamous celebrity nude photo hack of stars like Jennifer Lawrence, to hate speech and the “witch hunt” of the Boston Marathon bomber which wrongly named several people as suspects.

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He burned out, leaving the world of tech agog when he walked away moments after a $50million round of investing. It followed a seemingly minor quarrel over plans to move the office to central San Francisco, with its spiraling rents, rather than Mr Wong’s preference of the less expensive, and less glamorous, suburb of Daly City, later described by one commenter as “the Bay area’s equivalent of purgatory”.

After exiting the building, Mr Wong spent the next few years recovering in blissful obscurity, occasionally popping up on Reddit or Quora during high-emotion moments to spill more of his ex-employer’s secrets.

“I’m probably unhireable now,” he joked in one old post. “I’m pretty sure no one will ever hire me as CEO or any other executive position again.”

Fast forward to 2019. Mr Wong, now a married father in his 40s with an estimated multi-million dollar fortune, read an academic paper on mass reforestation as the “primary and default way to save the planet from climate change”.

“I jumped up”, he told The Independent.

It made perfect sense to him as the simplest, safest, most politically-neutral option to tackle the climate crisis.

As he dug deeper he learned that offsetting, for example, the 45billion tonnes of carbon dioxide the world emitted in 2017, would take planting an estimated three billion acres of forest with one trillion trees, an area larger than the US and Mexico combined.

The idea is that as forests grow they act as carbon sinks, absorbing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions which are heating the earth.

And at that epic scale, the new trees’ natural carbon-fixing ability might have the potential to stabilise the planet, if done within a tight deadline of ten years.

But rather than compete for the 1-2bn acres suitable for planting and receive enough rainfall, why not focus on the estimated 4.7bn acres of “undesirable” desert, he wrote in 2019, by using technology to convert seawater to fresh water?

Mr Wong’s theory is that the degraded land could be irrigated for 20 years, “until the vegetation changes the climate and induces its own rainfall”.

It was a theory with no working solution. Yet.

But it was also by far the “cheapest” option that Mr Wong had seen, with a cost he estimated at $3trillion annually for the next two decades.

By contrast, in 2019, world GDP was $87.55tn. Three and half per-cent of the world’s income sounds a lot, until you realise that in the same year Silicon Valley’s GDP alone was $275bn, making a city suburb “richer” than Finland.

“For decades people knew tree planting was the solution but they were chronically underfunded and no one listened to them,” Mr Wong said.

“But [I knew that] Silicon Valley is uniquely good at scaling a small working solution to something that is a billion times larger. It’s daunting but it’s possible.”

In other words, trees might be the saviours of the planet, but they have terrible marketing and not enough angel investors.

By early 2020, Mr Wong had moved his family to Hawaii, bought up a pilot plot of dry land, and launched Terraformation; a team that was part forestry, part ex-tech bros with deep pockets, and got to work.

“Hawaii is one of the most difficult places to build things”, he said. “Most people think of it as tropical but there is a corner of the big island that is essentially a desert. If you can do it here, you can do it everywhere else.”

He added: “There are also more sustainability projects in Hawaii per capita than anywhere else in the world. There is respect and connection to the land, when you are on an island in the middle of the ocean, you are at the mercy of the environment.”

Despite the Covid pandemic, in six months they had successfully planted 1,900 trees, working at five times the usual rate.

The team also identified practical fixes for the four major limiting factors to rolling out their project world-wide: Land, fresh water, seeds and money.

Mr Wong is the money.

Born in Minnesota to Chinese-American parents, he joined the start-up PayPal in 2001 straight out of college. He was one of the ‘PayPal mafia’, a group of early staffers who went on to found or develop companies like Tesla, YouTube and LinkedIn.

In 2005 he moved to Facebook as director of engineering, a year after it was launched in a Harvard dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg, back when stock options were on offer.

And so, using some of Mr Wong’s personal fortune, as well as “a couple million” from investors, the Terraformation team started to develop a high-tech, DIY forestry kit, which can be adapted to different climates and flora, and be scaled up by anyone from governments to private landowners.

The company also functions as a bridge between rich companies who want to buy carbon offsets but don’t know how, and climate and forestry organisations who could use the funding from carbon offsets but don’t have the contacts.

“We knew that no matter how fast we scale, we can’t forest three billion acres ourselves”, he said. “[Instead], we want to inspire 1,000 copy cats. We are the only company who wants as many copy cats as possible.”

For the cost-price of $100,000 you can now buy Terraformation’s 40-feet, off-grid, solar-powered, IKEA-esque storage container with three workstations, space for 3-5 million seeds, detailed how-to manuals and open source software on everything related to reforesting.

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This includes how to collect, dry and store native seeds; how to germinate and care for plants; how to use solar power, rather than the usual fossil fuels, to desalinate seawater and alleviate the fresh water scarcity problem; and how to fundraise to pay for it all, from government grants, Silicon Valley and FTSE 100 companies, to agro-forestry, where you plant a crop alongside the trees to harvest and sell.

The pod was the idea of Terraformation’s head of forestry Jill Wagner, a “hardcore seed collector and tree planter” for the past 26 years in Hawaii. She based the concept on her own storage container home on a lush 49-acre plot, and calls it  “a safety deposit box for the future”.

“The next size up container will hopefully store 40-50million seeds,” said Ms Wagner, who is also director of the Hawaii Island Seed Bank, and was impressed by Mr Wong’s vision and enthusiasm. “Scaling is imperative. If you want to plant one trillion trees, you need two trillion seeds.”

They are currently working with programmes in Uganda, Ecuador, Tanzania and Haiti, and are reaching out to governments around the world.

Is it really possible to plant one trillion trees in such a short time-frame? And will it be enough?

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“It’s very, very scary,” Ms Wagner said. “A huge mission. [But] I really believe you can re-forest anything.”

For Mr Wong, it’s a welcome pivot from an industry that left him “completely worn out”.

But there’s still a question that has to be asked. If he left Reddit in 2014, and officially started Terraformation in 2020, what was he doing for the six years in between? Lying on the beach in Hawaii?

“I took a break for a couple of years...I played a lot of video games,” he said, laughing.

And how did you fund that?

“I...did fairly well working on Facebook. So basically I’m converting that Silicon Valley money into forests.”

No one can ever quite escape the Reddit forums though. Mr Wong diplomatically says that he has “no opinion” on the recent Reddit/Game Stop/Wall Street controversy and despite what people think “keeps in touch” with his old colleagues, but he continues to be a subject of discussion on the site, seven years on.

From an oddly prescient, resurfaced Facebook post he wrote in 2006 in which he appeared to predict the dangers of social media spreading disinformation, to whether he had a crystal ball on remote working and the desertion of San Francisco, to subtweeting Tesla-founder Elon Musk last month when he launched a $100million prize towards “the best carbon capture technology” and dismissed the first suggestion of “a tree”.

But following the launch of his new project, the tone is different.

Under a post about Terraformation, someone ironically called “Gloomy Objective”, wrote: “Not only is he trying to fight global warming but also using his resources to repopulate the landscape with native flora. These are the type of CEOs Hawaii welcomes with open arms.”

Like I said, no one hates trees.