Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit and a veteran of PayPal and Facebook, founded Terraformation in 2020 to restore 3 billion acres of native forests worldwide. In a recent podcast, he discussed the company's efforts to address reforestation challenges through technology and infrastructure. Since its inception, Terraformation has enabled the planting of over 4.7 million trees and created more than 798 jobs.
Yishan Wong's journey from Silicon Valley tech executive to environmental advocate began after his stints at PayPal, Facebook, and as Reddit’s CEO. In 2020, he launched Terraformation with a bold mission: to reforest 3 billion acres of native forest globally, an area larger than the entire United States, by 2050.
The company tackles key bottlenecks in reforestation, including funding shortages that affect 95% of qualified forestry teams, seed scarcity, infrastructure gaps, and verification issues. Terraformation provides modular seed banks, solar-powered nurseries, open-source forest management software called Terraware, and a seed-to-carbon forest accelerator modeled on tech startup incubators.
Achievements to date include planting over 4.7 million trees across 394 species, establishing 19 seed banks and 21 nurseries, and generating more than 798 jobs. Unlike commercial timber plantations focused on fast-growing monocultures, Terraformation emphasizes biodiverse native forests. Native species support an order of magnitude more life due to millions of years of co-evolution.
“We made Terraware not because this is the most genius piece of technology that will change the world,” Wong explained. “We said, hey, let’s just help forestry teams achieve certain basic necessary activities.” He added, “Trees are the anchor species for a forest ecosystem. What you’re doing is you’re growing trees as the anchor species so that all of the other life in that forest ecosystem comes back.”
Terraformation has earned the Keeling Curve Prize, the G20’s RestorLife Award, and SME Company of the Year at the Global Sustainability Awards. Wong applies Silicon Valley scaling lessons to reforestation, favoring replicable low-tech solutions for climate change. More details are available at Terraformation.com.