sustainable-housing
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Katy Reynolds
Katy Reynolds is the Co-Founder and CEO of Shibusa Systems, a Monterey, California startup turning home construction into precision on-site assembly. A former Merrill Lynch investment banker turned climate-forward homebuilder, she is rebuilding the way American houses get made - faster, cheaper, all-electric, and out of low-carbon materials.
Nicholas Callegari
Nicholas Callegari is the founder, chief engineer, and CEO of Verustruct, a New Haven climate-tech startup building gantry-less 3D printing robots that print entire load-bearing walls - plumbing, wiring, and insulation included. A former SpaceX structures engineer who helped design the Polaris Dawn spacewalk hardware on the Dragon spacecraft, he traded orbit for the housing crisis, betting that the same first-principles engineering used for spacecraft can cut home construction costs in half. He is a 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Manufacturing & Industry and a Yale School of Management MBA.
Neil Rubler
Neil Rubler is the founder and CEO of Vessel Technologies, a New York company that mass-produces small, prefabricated, solar-ready apartment buildings and sells them through the housing industry's first franchise model. After two decades running large multifamily real estate firms - Vantage Properties and then Candlebrook Properties, which oversaw more than $3 billion in assets across seven states - he left conventional development behind in 2017 to attack the so-called Missing Middle: people who earn too much for subsidized housing and too little for market rate. A Wharton MBA and magna cum laude Cornell graduate, Rubler treats housing like a manufactured product rather than a construction project, aiming to build higher-quality homes faster, cheaper, and more sustainably.
Joe Garcia
Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008 out of a San Francisco living room - air mattresses, breakfast included - and turned a half-crazy idea into an $85B company. His current venture, Samara, builds factory-assembled, solar-ready backyard homes (ADUs) that go from permit to move-in in under seven months. In early 2025 he became America's first Chief Design Officer, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000 websites. A Rhode Island School of Design graduate with dual majors in graphic and industrial design, Gebbia approaches every problem - housing affordability, government UX, refugee shelter - through the lens of democratic, empathetic design.