Harley Carruthers

California Forever is a company aiming to develop a new city across 50,000 acres of undeveloped land in Solano County, California. The company was founded in 2017 by Jan Sramek who also serves as the CEO. California Forever is the parent company of Flannery Associates, which has purchased the land for California Forever.

Image rendering of a faraway view of California Forever's proposed city.

Image rendering of a neighborhood in California Forever's proposed city.

The city created by California Forever would hold a population of 75,000. Tens of thousands of new homes would be built, along with a solar energy farm, over 10,000 acres of parks and open outdoor space, and orchards with millions of trees. Much of the purchased land is already equipped with wind turbines, which would all be replaced with new ones. Before California Forever could begin building, Solano County voters must approve a ballot initiative that would allow the undeveloped land to be used for urban purposes. The land is currently zoned for agricultural use only and Solano County’s Orderly Growth Initiative prohibits landowners from creating residential subdivisions on agricultural land zones. CEO Sramek stated that California Forever is "quite serious about putting this on the November 2024 ballot" and would soon "be putting forward much more specific plans." California Forever has attracted investors including Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Patrick Collison, John Collison, Chris Dixon, John Doerr, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Reid Hoffman, Michael Moritz, and Laurene Powell Jobs.

Flannery Associates began purchasing land in Solano County, California for California Forever in 2018. The land it owns is primarily located in the southeastern area of the county. Solano County was chosen for the project because California Forever's founder, Jan Sramek, "fell in love with the area" during fishing trips he had taken on the California Delta. As of August 2023, Flannery owns over 140 properties in Solano County and has paid over $800 million for them. Flannery Associates is said to be the largest single landholder in Solano County. It has purchased nearly all of the land surrounding the city of Rio Vista and about half of all properties in eastern Solano County. Flannery has sued multiple Solano County landowners who refused to sell their land, accusing them of conspiring to "overcharge" out of "endless greed." Flannery is seeking a total of $510 million in damages from the lawsuits. Some of the parties unwilling to sell are farmers who are “land rich and money poor” and whose ranches date back multiple generations.

Flannery's land purchases were not revealed to the public until August 2023 in order to avoid short-term speculation regarding the purpose of the land. The secrecy behind the transactions drew the attention of various government officials and agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and US Department of the Treasury. The proximity of the purchased properties to the Travis Air Force Base raised national security concerns and suspicions that Flannery Associates may be a foreign adversary. As a result, the company is now under investigation by the FBI.

In August 2023, residents of Fairfield, California began receiving a survey via text message regarding a building project of a new city consisting of tens of thousands of new homes, orchards, a solar energy farm, and thousands of acres of open outdoor space. California Forever's website was launched on August 31, 2023. Also released on that day were image renderings of the company's proposed city. The images depicted neighborhoods of European or Mediterranean architectural style houses amongst rivers and scenic hillsides. A software analyzation of the images by Hive revealed that they had been generated using an artificial intelligence (AI)-based photo program called Midjourney. The renderings contained several errors that a human illustrator would not be expected to make, such as the missing foot of a girl riding a bicycle, an asymmetrical plane, and human faces that appear to point in both directions.

For the rest of 2023 and into 2024, California Forever stated it will focus more on community engagement and educating the locals of Solano County about the project. The company aims to meet with community organizations and as many local residents as possible to gain their support. Founder and CEO Sramek said, “What we want to do in the next four months is hear from everyone about how we could design it to work for them.” He stated that California Forever has already met with several local politicians about the project and aims to continue meeting with elected officials and other local groups including the Solano County Farm Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, and Travis Air Force Base.

Sam Altman is a San Francisco-based American investor and entrepreneur, co-founder of Hydrazine Capital, former president of Y Combinator, founder and former CEO of Loopt, and co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

Altman was born in 1985 in Chicago and was raised in St. Louis. He graduated from the John Burroughs School in St. Louis and studied computer science at Stanford University for two years until he dropped out in 2005 to found Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile startup, with seed funding from the first batch of Y Combinator. Altman served as the CEO of Loopt, which raised over $30 million in venture funding, until the company was acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in 2012. In 2012, Sam Altman co-founded Hydrazine Capital, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm that invests in life sciences, specialty foods, marketplaces, big data, healthcare, consumer networks, enterprise software, internet connected hardware, and education sectors with his brother, Jack Altman.

In 2014, Sam Altman succeeded co-founder Paul Graham as President of the seed accelerator Y Combinator (YC), with a focus on scaling the investment firm and enabling its growth over the long term. In 2016, Altman became President of the newly expanded YC Group, which included YC and other units, YC Continuity, a $700 million growth-stage equity fund that invests in YC companies, YC Research, a non-profit research lab partially funded by a $10 million donation from Altman, and the accelerator's new online class. He stepped down as President of YC Group in 2019.

In 2015, Altman co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research and deployment company with the stated mission, "to ensure that artificial general intelligence- highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work- benefits all of humanity." Altman, who serves as CEO, co-founded OpenAI with Greg Brockman, who serves as CTO, Ilya Sutskever, who serves as research director, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, Wojciech Zaremba, and Elon Musk, who served as co-chair along with Altman until 2018. Altman, Musk, and Brockman, along with Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, Microsoft, and YC Research pledged a combined donation of $1 billion to fund OpenAI.

Sam Altman has made angel investments in Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Asana, Pinterest, Teespring, Zenefits, FarmLogs, TrueNorth, Rescale, Alt, Helion Energy, BRINC, TrialSpark, Roboflow, Wave Mobile Money, Humane, Coco, Kami, LeadGenius, Soylent, and Wevorce. Altman has made partner investments in Beacon AI, Apollo Projects, Cadoo, Boom Supersonic, Titan, Rescale, Reddit, Lob, Change.org, Fibo, and Quora. Notable exits of Sam Altman include Virool, URX, Swiftype, Quill, PlanGrid, Oyster, Optimizely, Nervana, Kimono Labs, and Exec. Altman served on the boards of energy companies Helion, UPower, and Oklo.

In 2008, Sam Altman was named one of the "Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology" by BusinessWeek. In 2015, Altman was named the top investor under 30 by Forbes. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Waterloo.

Sam Altman is an investor and entrepreneur. He is the founder of companies OpenAI, Hydrazine Capital, Loopt, Tools for Humanity, AltC Acquisition Corp., and Apollo. Altman served as the president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019.

Altman was born on April 22, 1985 in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in St. Louis, Missouri where he attended the John Burroughs School. Altman studied computer science at Stanford University, but dropped out in 2005 to found Loopt. Altman was awarded an honorary doctor of engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in 2017.

Loopt was first founded under the name Radiate in 2005 by Altman, Nick Sivo, and Alok Deshpande. Loopt was a location sharing service for mobile phone users. With Loopt, a mobile user's location was automatically updated in real-time through their current global positioning system (GPS) coordinates and displayed on a map viewable by participating mobile contacts. Users could also share other "on-the-go" information with each other such as messages and photos. To get the app installed on mobile phones, Loopt first developed a deal with mobile carrier Sprint, and later other carriers including AT&T, Verizon, Metro PCS, T-Mobile, and Boost Mobile. By the end of December 2008, Loopt was available through all major carriers in the US. However, Loopt failed to stay popular over time. In 2012, Loopt was acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million. By this time, Loopt was reportedly down to only 500 daily active users, a figure that Altman claimed was "off by 100 times." In July 2010, Altman had reported "hundreds of thousands" of daily active users and 4 million total users.

Hydrazine Capital is an early-stage venture investment firm founded in 2012 by Altman and his brother, Jack Altman. The firm's first fund raised $21 million. A significant amount of the fund came from Peter Thiel and Altman's proceeds from the sale of Loopt. In 2016, Hydrazine's value was reported to have grown "tenfold" since its founding. Hydrazine Capital has made investments in ValueBase, Zenefits, BuildZoom, Verbling, and Soylent.

Altman first began working with Y Combinator in 2011 as a part-time partner. In February 2014 he took over as the president of Y Combinator, succeeding previous leader Paul Graham. In 2016, as a result of some internal restructuring, Altman became president of YC Group which included Y Combinator, YC Continuity, and YC Research. YC Continuity is a fund focused on growth-stage companies. YC Research was a non-profit research lab. As of June 2020, YC Research is no longer part of Y Combinator. It is now known as OpenResearch. During his time as president at Y Combinator, Altman achieved higher diversity among admitted startup founders and more than tripled the number of startups that Y Combinator processes in a batch. Altman stepped down as president in May 2019 to focus more on his company OpenAI. He remains involved with Y Combinator as a chairman.

Altman briefly served as interim CEO of Reddit for eight days in November 2014 in between CEOs Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao.

Altman cofounded Tools for Humanity with Alex Blania and Max Novendstern in 2019. Tools for Humanity is the creator of the project Worldcoin. First announced in June 2021, Worldcoin originated as a way to digitally verify a person's identity for the purpose of a universal basic income (UBI) system. Worldcoin launched on July 24, 2023. Worldcoin uses a small scanning device called the Orb to scan a user's eye to create their unique digital identity, called a World ID. This allows humans to be distinguished from artificial intelligence (AI)-powered beings on the internet. Worldcoin also developed a cryptocurrency token and a payments app. Tokens were first issued to eligible people taking part in Worldcoin's beta launch. The initial coin supply is capped at 10 billion. Worldcoin aims to scale operations across twenty countries and hopes to eventually distribute 50,000 of its orbs worldwide to gain billions of new sign-ups. Worldcoin has raised privacy concerns regarding its collection of personal information, as well as criticism for deceptive marketing practices. As of August 2023, over 2 million people have registered with Worldcoin.

AltC Acquisition Corp. is a special purpose acquisition company founded by Altman and Michael Klein through Klein's Churchill Capital franchise in July 2021. Altman serves as AltC's CEO. In July 2023, AltC merged with the nuclear energy company Oklo.

Project Covalence was launched in June 2020 by Altman, Mark Fishman, and TrialSpark. It was a platform that provided the technology, clinical operations, and logistical support needed to rapidly launch and run Covid-19 clinical trials. The project collaborated with several biopharma companies and organizations. Project Covalence was shut down in summer 2021 after multiple Covid-19 vaccines and therapies were authorized.

Apollo, also called Apollo Projects, is an investment fund founded in June 2020 by Altman and his two brothers, Jack Altman and Max Altman. Apollo was launched with the purpose of funding startup "moonshots," a term for companies pursuing forward-thinking deep technologies. Apollo has funded companies including Marvin, Journey Colab, ExcepGen, 44.01, Planetary Technologies, and Terraformation.

In 2008, Altman was named one of the "Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology" by BusinessWeek. In 2015, he was named the top investor under 30 by Forbes. In September 2017, GLAAD honored Altman with the Ric Weiland Award. The award recognizes tech industry innovators who advance LGBTQ acceptance. Time recognized Altman multiple times in 2023. In April 2023 he was listed on the TIME100 list, which honors the 100 most influential people of the year. In June 2023 Altman was featured on the cover of Time in honor of OpenAI, which was on that year's TIME100 Most Influential Companies list. In September 2023, Altman was honored on the new TIME100 AI list, which honors the 100 most influential people involved with artificial intelligence.

Altman is a proponent of universal basic income (UBI). While serving as president of Y Combinator, Altman helped launch a basic income study in Oakland, California in 2016. Through his company OpenAI, Altman has donated to organizations pursuing UBI pilot programs, including UBI Charitable and OpenResearch.