Visionaries

Join Whiteboard founder Eric Brown in conversation with Brett Hagler, CEO and co-founder of New Story, for an inspiring deep dive into visionary leadership, social entrepreneurship, and pioneering solutions to the global housing crisis. In this episode, Brett shares his remarkable journey from a 23-year-old college graduate on his first mission trip to Haiti, to building one of the world's most innovative housing nonprofits that's revolutionizing how we think about affordable housing through technology, land ownership, and market-based solutions.

Meet Brett

Brett Hagler is the CEO and co-founder of New Story, a nonprofit dedicated to pioneering solutions to the global housing crisis. Under his leadership, New Story has built thousands of homes across Haiti, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala, and created the world's first 3D printed neighborhood. A Y Combinator alum and recognized thought leader in social innovation, Brett is passionate about creating market-based solutions that serve underserved families while building sustainable, scalable models for lasting impact.

Key Highlights

The Origin Story (00:00-05:11)

How a life-changing trip to Haiti sparked the vision for New Story
The intersection of faith, entrepreneurship, and social impact
Early lessons from a failed e-commerce startup that led to breakthrough insights

Y Combinator & Early Growth (05:11-10:28)

Becoming one of the first nonprofits accepted into Y Combinator (Summer 2015)
The "100 houses in 100 days" campaign that outpaced the Red Cross
Building transparency and trust in international charitable giving

Innovation in Action (10:28-16:54)

Creating the world's first 3D printed neighborhood in partnership with Icon
Taking calculated risks with R&D funding for breakthrough technology
Lessons learned about the true complexity of the housing puzzle

The Evolution to Market-Based Solutions (16:54-22:09)

Shifting from charitable beneficiaries to customers
The importance of land ownership and building credit profiles
Creating sustainable, scalable solutions that attract other market players

Advice for Emerging Entrepreneurs (22:09-26:53)

"Dream big, but start small" - beginning with just one $6,000 house
Why courage is in shorter supply than genius
The power of being different and attracting the right resources

Key Takeaways

Start Small, Dream Big: Every massive vision begins with a single, achievable step
Challenge the Status Quo: Innovation happens when you question why things aren't working
Customers vs. Beneficiaries: Market-based solutions create more sustainable impact than charity alone
Courage Over Genius: Taking calculated risks attracts opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist
Systems Thinking: True impact requires understanding all pieces of complex problems

Resources Mentioned

New Story - Learn more about their housing innovation work
Icon - 3D printing construction technology partner
Y Combinator - Startup accelerator program
Charity: Water - Clean water nonprofit
Mission of Hope Haiti - International development organization

Connect with Brett Hagler

Creators and Guests

Host

Eric Brown

Co-founder of Whiteboard

Producer

Nick Blackmon

VP @ Whiteboard

What is Visionaries?

On Visionaries, we dive deep with today’s boldest thinkers—leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs—who are crafting the next chapter of our world. How do they see what’s coming? How do they make the impossible, inevitable? And how can we learn to think like them?

Eric Brown (00:00)
In 2010, when we started whiteboard, the sort of hook that we were sort of trying to at least communicate at the time was how can we empower visionary leaders to lead meaningful brands? And Brett Hagler is is the Brett Hagler, you are the archetype of the type of people that we just

Brett (00:12)
That's a good hook. You must be a creative guy.

Eric Brown (00:20)
always aspired to sort of come alongside, serve, whether in a big way or a small way. And I know there's lots of overlapping circles and lots of mutual friends that are sort of in our orbit, but Brett, I'm so thankful that you made time to do this and always inspired by the vision of New Story.

And I don't want to communicate that vision because I think you're the guy who's going to do that. But new stories in the work of ending homelessness and creating solutions to do that. And this conversation is going to sort of trail into all the ways that you all just stayed locked in on that big vision over the past how many years now?

Brett (00:59)
More than 10, about 10. Yeah. Well, it's great to be here. It's great that Whiteboard has a pod. It's an honor to be on with you guys. So thank you.

Eric Brown (01:00)
love it. I love it.

That's right.

Awesome. Well, take us back to the beginning. How did it start? Who are you with? And set the stage.

Brett (01:19)
Yeah, so it started. It started when I was about two years out of college. So I've got a little older now. And I look back and I was 23. And I was on a mission trip to Haiti. It was my first time that I've ever gone on an experience like that. Right out of college, I had a

a big life change, which for me was about becoming a Christian. And that just really changed my perspective and my interest. And so that ended up sending me down on a trip to Haiti. And I went down there a couple of years after the 2010 earthquake. I always loved entrepreneurship and I loved startups, but I didn't think in college or in high school that

the kind of intersection of entrepreneurship and helping people in need would overlap as early as it did. But yeah, going on that trip, seeing kids and parents that don't have life's most basic human needs when it comes to safety and shelter and the one place that anybody listening would say home is everything. When you don't have that, it's just...

I just hit me that it was nearly impossible to actualize your potential and just become who I think you have a chance to be. And so that was the earliest days. Looking back, as I mentioned, I loved startups. so I actually had a, started a for-profit company where I had a college. That was the first thing I did. It was an e-commerce company, ended up not working. ⁓

Eric Brown (03:04)
What would

you sell?

Brett (03:04)
And I

was, we had a, we tried to set up a, a, an e-commerce platform and we resold products. And this was back in the day when like Tom's and Warby Parker, everybody was doing the buy one, give one. And so we were trying to get on that bandwagon and, and we had this, this concept where we would, every time somebody bought this product, which was kind of like a

Eric Brown (03:15)
Yep.

Uh-huh.

Yep.

Brett (03:29)
We tried to have these like curated products that were hard to find, but like really cool. And when you bought it, you would basically have a chance to give to a charity. And we were transparent about who that was. And so one of the charities was Charity Water, which is amazing. And I'm sure many folks listening are aware of Charity Water and Scott Harrison. And another one was an organization based in Haiti called Mission of Hope. And that was

who we actually ended up building thousands of homes with and who I went on this mission trip with. that was kind of the earliest days. And, you know, I mentioned the for-profit startup because one, you know, it was the stepping stone that actually got me on this trip. It ended up failing, but it ended up teaching me so much right out of college. And it also ended up teaching me

Eric Brown (04:15)
Yep.

Brett (04:26)
or I started learning about principles from this startup accelerator out in Silicon Valley called white combinator and white combinator was, was teaching startups back then like Airbnb and door door dash and Coinbase how to get their first customers, all these, you know, early, early tricks and hacks. And, I got obsessed with trying to learn those things. And that was why

we started a new story, we applied to white combinator because we had already been learning from their resources and became one of the first nonprofits to go through their program, which was completely game changing. And that was back in summer 2015. So I'll stop there.

Eric Brown (05:11)
I love it. love it. I think one of the things, you know, that I'm really interested in is, is you along with some co-founders started a new story from Atlanta. Is that the front? Was that was, was day zero Atlanta. Tell me about the early days. Tell me, tell me what the culture was like and, and tell me what was the main problem that y'all sort of locked into that you're like, Hey, I think we can double down and solve this one.

Brett (05:20)
Mm-hmm.

That's right.

Mm.

Okay, I'll answer that in two parts. know, with early days, I'll just try to recall what comes to my mind. I mean, at my age, I was 24. I was in a season in my life where I was extremely excited about entrepreneurship. I was in a season where really all I cared about was learning about entrepreneurship and my newly found faith. And so,

Eric Brown (06:02)
Yep.

Brett (06:03)
it was a season where I was basically obsessed with building new story is the most honest answer. And I wasn't yet I wasn't yet married and have kids. I just got I just saw this vision ⁓ and got hooked. And then we a couple months into the very beginning idea of new story. We got accepted into white Combinator. And that was just

Eric Brown (06:14)
Yep.

Brett (06:27)
electric. mean, it was like a shot of the biggest dose of momentum and opportunity that a younger entrepreneur could ever could ever imagine. And we just made the most of it. And so I met three amazing co founders. They were kind of divinely put into into my life and into new story. And the honest answer, man, is we just got after it.

We just got after it for our first couple years. We do not regret it. We worked so hard. We were so excited and we were fortunate to have things go our way early. So there was tailwinds behind us. There was momentum. And so I think that helped even cultivate more excitement and hunger for what we were doing.

And so, so yeah, it was like the very beginning we, we started out by, uh, we've always focused on housing. Um, what we do today is completely different than how we started out with how we deliver our mission. But the mission has always been about the housing crisis. Um, back in the day, the initial problem that we were trying to solve was, um, was housing, but there's always these like problems behind the problem. And so.

The problems behind the housing problem back then that we were working on was from a charitable perspective, there was a big lack of trust and a lack of transparency for when you were trying to give to international organizations. And this was actually after the earthquake in Haiti. And there was just all these like bad articles and the kind of the natural thinking was

Eric Brown (07:57)
Yep.

right.

Yep.

Brett (08:13)
I can't trust these international charities. I don't know where the money goes. I don't know how it's being spent. I'm seeing this article about this big organization raises a couple hundred million dollars and they've only built a few homes. And naturally you're very skeptical, right? And so the entrepreneur side in us said, we want to call those things out and say, we feel these two and we feel like there's no transparency. It's so hard to know where your money goes.

Eric Brown (08:28)
Yep.

Brett (08:41)
It's so hard to know the impact. You're not. We agree that, that you shouldn't use volunteers, but you should actually use local, local labor. Like we basically made a list of all the objections that many people rightly had. And we said new stories doing the opposite. So we positioned ourselves in the beginning as the kind of the counter to why somebody wouldn't give.

And the main reason why somebody wouldn't give was not because they didn't want to help a family get access to a home. The main reason was because of the medium to get there was not trustworthy. And so that was the very beginning. And we did a marketing campaign our first summer of trying to do a hundred houses in a hundred days. That was the campaign.

And we ended up doing a little more than a hundred homes in a hundred days. And the Red Cross did, I think only about 12, 12 homes that summer. So you had this contrast of this earlier stage, kind of more, more modern thinking, blah, blah, blah. These younger founders, white combinator, and that was all in our first year. And so that was.

Eric Brown (09:39)
Amazing.

That's right.

Yep, all the momentum.

Brett (10:02)
long way of answering your question, Eric, that was kind of how things got started. And then the last thing I'll say is we've, always had this, in our DNA, like wanting to challenge the status quo and wanting to challenge, wanting to now we say pioneer, you know, like pioneer new solutions. And what started out as a couple, basically kids trying to create a more transparent version to give

Eric Brown (10:15)
Ciao.

Yep.

Brett (10:28)
has now over a decade completely evolved into trying to transform and pioneer how you do financing, how you create capital markets for underserved families. It's completely evolved. but the kind of core DNA was like, how do we figure out what's not working and then try to come up with solutions for why it's not working and then try it. And that's, that's what we've done for about a decade.

Eric Brown (10:37)
Yep.

Yep.

I love it. Well, and I think anybody who's familiar with your work, know, innovation is the sort of the silver lining that you can sort of see all across the new story portfolio, all across your mission, all across your work. know one of the one of the more fascinating case studies is just oriented around everything y'all did to build the first 3D printed community. And then even pulling that to now a real focus on land ownership.

Brett (11:19)
Yeah. Yep.

Eric Brown (11:26)
⁓ What were the lessons learned of like, hey, we're still doing 3D prints at home. We're still gonna build this. We're still building them. But at same time too, adding this perspective around land ownership that I think is really compelling.

Brett (11:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think for for entrepreneurs or folks that are, I mean, that are early in the journey or even if you're later on the journey, I mean, you learn by doing right. So I'm going to kind of reverse engineer how things happen. But if you would have told me six years ago that I would have been obsessed with land and infrastructure.

and legal property titles and credit profiles and access to financing, I would have probably rolled my eyes because that didn't seem like, at the time, exciting, innovative. And so now I am obsessed with about those things and I will explain why.

Eric Brown (11:59)
Yep. ⁓

Brett (12:18)
I think as time has gone on and you get out there and you're trying projects and you're learning and if you have a culture of continuous learning and continuous improvement as we do, you're always trying to get better, right? You're trying to say like, how do we get, how do we get more leverage in this? How do we get more, more impact from this model? What would it take to evolve to this? And that said, as a dichotomy, cause you don't,

Eric Brown (12:33)
Yep.

Brett (12:45)
want to always be changing, right? You want to have, you want to have its dichotomy. You want to have focus and creativity, right? It's not, it's not one or the other. It's, it's, it's both, which is hard, but that's so much about what leadership and entrepreneurship is. And so, so for us, we've, we've learned by doing and on 3d printing, which is, you know, about as, about as cool as it gets, from an innovation standpoint. Yes, we were, we were part of

Eric Brown (12:48)
Yep.

Yep.

Brett (13:12)
literally creating the first neighborhood of 3D printed houses in the world with our partner called Icon, which is based in Austin, Texas. The idea there kind of again back to what I said of having the status quo challenging DNA. ⁓ This problem was the actual home construction costs seemed too high.

Eric Brown (13:20)
Yep.

Yep. ⁓

Brett (13:36)
how do we take a risk and use technology to try to reduce the direct costs of home construction? And so we thought, and we looked at things and we continue to look at things like modular and prefab and you name it. But 3D printing was very interesting to us. And so long story short, we decided to take a calculated risk and use some of our philanthropic funding to do an R &D project.

Eric Brown (13:49)
Yep.

Brett (14:03)
and essentially invest into this incredible, very early stage startup called Icon. And we were the first R &D money into the company. And that was able to produce the first machine that ever 3D printed a house in the United States. And that happened back in 2018. And then from there, which was

which was a success. So we took a risk and the odds were that it wasn't going to work. The odds were that it would be too crazy and would fail. But it didn't and it worked. And then from there we were able to, to 3d print the first neighborhood of homes in history in Mexico. And, Apple TV actually did a documentary about that. And so, so yeah, so, if you kind of take those, those two examples together, so like,

Eric Brown (14:26)
Yep.

Yep, which is awesome.

Brett (14:49)
So we believe and still believe that the home construction costs of just the actual materials of the home itself needs to be reduced, right? That's the 3D printing example. What we also learned is there are so many more pieces to the housing puzzle than we really understood. So when you think about it from a first principles perspective, what we learned is that the

The big, big, big idea is how do you help a family in El Salvador or Mexico or Guatemala that we've worked in Latin America now is our focus. How do you help them not have a free home or a home gifted or subsidized by the government? But how do you help them get a loan so that they can actually pay for the home themselves?

Eric Brown (15:35)
Yep.

Brett (15:41)
when you bring that into the equation, then a lot changes because then you have to think about how do you, how do you help the family build a credit profile? How do you help them own an asset that could then be used as collateral? So that's what we do with the land now, right? We have a path where families can pay for their land and then they own that land as an asset. And then they're able to use that asset to go get a home loan. And so

Eric Brown (15:45)
Right.

Yep.

Brett (16:12)
And so then we also learned about putting in infrastructure and in our opinion, not being reliant on the government to do that because governments usually take too long and they, their way, they're never on time. And so we figured out how to use an investment fund and we do the infrastructure now and we buy the land now. And so that's a lot to say over a decade. You, you learn a lot as you go, and then it's up to you as the entrepreneur.

Eric Brown (16:18)
Yep.

Yep.

Brett (16:40)
how do you piece those puzzle, how do you put those pieces together for your future puzzle and your future vision? And so that's clear to me now and our team, but it was not clear five, six, seven years ago.

Eric Brown (16:54)
Absolutely. And I even think, you know, there's something to be said to have the patience to navigate puzzles like that. I thought we had a mentor years ago who basically told us like your business plan is never a final draft. Like it's it's always it's always being revised.

Brett (17:02)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm. Totally. Totally.

Eric Brown (17:14)
you know, based

on economics, based on season, based on services, all these sort of things. And I think, I think one of the things that I've admired about y'all is y'all have been willing to go places others have not and continue to do so. ⁓ Two questions. I mean, one is just given like, how are, how are y'all measuring success and impact within, within, within these innovations that you're leading?

Brett (17:26)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Brown (17:38)
And then two, just like, what are you excited about as far as like thinking about the 10, 20 years? ⁓ Because I think one of the things with land ownership obviously is like, that's a generational asset that there's a long tail in terms of time. Like how are y'all dreaming about that asset for the families experiencing a new story community?

Brett (17:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, the impact side, we're recording this in May of 2025. So our three year target is to partner with 10,000 families to own their land and then to be able to build a home on their land. So that's our kind of more near term goal. From what we know, that will be the largest amount of a three year period in Latin America. It's definitely not the end goal.

Eric Brown (18:20)
Yep.

Brett (18:28)
but it's a good next milestone for us. so, you know, the coolest thing about it is we've created now a path for an underserved family who currently lives in inadequate housing to participate in a like human centered capitalism market. And that is really the biggest idea that we've had.

is how do you create an opportunity where a family who deeply dreams and desires owning their land so that they can have it for generations and then building their home on their land, how do you create something that is affordable for that family and that takes innovation on many fronts? And also, how do you do it in a way that

you know, other lenders or people in real estate are incentivized and see an opportunity to do more of this because there's such an unmet big, big, big demand. Right. And so what, what we, what we measure success by is, families being able to pay for their land. That means it's affordable and then be able to start building their house. which means they could, they could afford it. So

We're bringing these affordable solutions to areas where they currently don't exist. And then the even bigger impact is watching the ripple effect of that where other maybe it's banks or home builders or developers, they'll see this and they'll say, oh, I didn't realize that you could actually work with this demographic. And and it actually is something that could be sustainable and that could have a fair profit.

Eric Brown (19:48)
Yep.

Brett (20:15)
to it and I'm now kind of lighting up and imagining what would it look like to go after this bigger market and bring supply, in this case it's lands and housing and affordable loans to a massively underserved demographic. that's kind of the big idea there is success being other actors in this like

Eric Brown (20:30)
Yep.

Brett (20:43)
market based ecosystem, ⁓ working on the same thing that we're doing, and we're kind of igniting it and like catalyzing it, and kind of getting that engine going. So those those are the main things in the short term. And it's been really exciting because you get to we get to now view the families that we work with as customers, as opposed to charitable beneficiaries. And

Eric Brown (20:45)
Yep.

Awesome.

Yep.

Brett (21:09)
There's nothing wrong with charitable beneficiaries. We've done a lot of that. We've evolved out of that model. But the really cool thing about customers is they're making a choice whether they want to buy something or not. And so all the basic great rules of business apply, right? If the product isn't low enough cost, guess what? They're not going to buy it. If you don't do good customer service and have high NPS, they're not going to stick around.

Eric Brown (21:15)
Right.

Right.

Yep. ⁓

Brett (21:37)
They're not going have good word of mouth. Right. So, so those are things that are very exciting to me and our team is that we see, we see this massively, massively, like millions and millions of households ⁓ of unserved potential. And we have a chance to go in and, like truly be the best in the world at how we deliver great products and great service to them at affordability and excellence that currently doesn't exist. So.

Eric Brown (21:38)
Yep.

Yes.

Brett (22:06)
That's what I get very excited about for the long term.

Eric Brown (22:09)
That's awesome, I'm such a fan.

I think one of the interesting parts about this conversation, and this will be the last question, ⁓ is for that 24-year-old who's trying to architect an idea. ⁓ And maybe they're balancing innovation, maybe they're balancing risk, maybe they're balancing a checkbook and a daunting idea sort of in front of them. ⁓ How would you encourage them?

Brett (22:16)
You good?

Yeah.

Eric Brown (22:35)
to wrestle with what they should do because again, the patience for a 10 year vision that in a lot of ways is still just beginning. It ⁓ takes a certain type of endurance to make that kind of decision. How would you encourage them?

Brett (22:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, totally.

Well, I'm biased because I think if they have something that has captured their imagination, that's a beautiful thing and that's usually a gift. So the first thing I'd start with is say, don't try to force it. The last thing you wanna do is try to force something. So forcing something would look like, I really wanna be an entrepreneur or I really wanna be a visionary and I go search for things.

Eric Brown (23:12)
Right.

Brett (23:15)
That's a different flow than something coming to you more naturally or from a faith perspective, feeling like it's coming from God. You're not forcing it. So I think if you have something that is not forced, the best thing to do is just to try to get started very small on it. So for us, when I had the original concept for a news story,

Eric Brown (23:18)
Yep.

Yep.

Brett (23:44)
I'm not exaggerating. We literally said, let's try to do this for one house. So the, kind of mantra would be dream big, but start small. And when you, when you, when you set a smaller achievable goal. So in our case, it was one house and this was back in Haiti and the house costs $6,000. Right. So it was an easy task, but it was a doable task for a, for a determined

Eric Brown (23:50)
Yep.

Right.

Brett (24:12)
formidable person was a $6,000 home, right? And dude, we worked nights and weekends trying to get that first house funded and built. That was it. Like that was, that took us, that took us months and, we got it, we got it done. And then we set our next goal, which I think was, it was 10 houses, right? And so, the first thing is start small, set achievable goals that you can get.

Eric Brown (24:16)
Yep.

That's right.

Brett (24:39)
momentum on. And I think that way more people are capable of that than they realize. I think people get way too paralyzed and trying to have everything all figured out before they take a step. And I think the best thing you can do is is is get started. You need to be smart about it, right? I'm not saying quit your job and do all this like foolish stuff. But like you can get started small.

And then, and then the other thing I'd say is what I learned from my experience is if you're willing to do something that is different like this, or where you just said, Eric was something that's more daring, something that's a little out there. What I've learned is that's that's scarce. Right? There's there's this quote by Peter Thiel that

Courage is in far shorter supply than genius.

Eric Brown (25:33)
Interesting.

Brett (25:35)
Courage is in far shorter supply than genius. And I think that's so true. And that's been a lot of my story, honestly. I'm not the smartest. I'm not a lot of these things, but I figured out at a younger age that you have the agency to do stuff and to go out there and to be different. And when you're being different, what that's doing is it's attracting the types of people or resources that

Eric Brown (25:52)
Right.

Brett (26:01)
a normal person wouldn't be able to attract. And so if you can start doing that at a younger age, you're going to have so many advantages because almost nobody else is doing it. And you don't have to have all these, you know, long list of prerequisites and fancy degrees and, you know, spending time and all these innovative companies, you can do it at a, at a younger age to get started. And that was certainly

our journey when we were 24 and 25 year old kids.

Eric Brown (26:31)
Yep, I love it, man. Well, Brett, thank you for your time. Thank you for, for me, it's always energizing to be around you. think it's challenged me in the best of ways, and I think this conversation is gonna challenge a lot of people too. So, thank you.

Brett (26:45)
Well, thank you guys. It's a great new podcast vision that you have and I'm so glad you're doing it. Thank you.

Eric Brown (26:53)
And I think Nick, producer Nick.

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