← The Person Who Believed In Me
The Person Who Believed In Me
The Man Printing Homes Opens Up About GRIEF and PURPOSE | Jason Ballard, ICON’s CEO
01:09:49
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- [00:00]
A
You print houses? That's nuts.
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B
People, like, tried to talk us out of it. The only way we're going to get people to take us here is like, we have to just do it ourselves.
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A
How do you just go do it yourself?
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B
Well, we have built hundreds of homes. We have the contract with NASA to develop the lunar construction system. Someone has to try before it's obvious.
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A
Jason Ballard is the co founder and CEO of Icon, the company using robots and 3D printing to reinvent how humanity builds homes and even NASA backed habitats for the moon.
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B
She was just such a charismatic and beautiful and intelligent and articulate woman. It felt like the first person who also wanted to fearlessly do the biggest, grandest thing they could think of at any given moment.
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A
We're gonna do this together.
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B
And if that doesn't work, we're doing the next big thing we can think of.
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A
December 28, 2024. What was that? Christmas like?
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B
Jenny used to say, if I'm going to die, then we better keep living. And if I'm not going to die, then we better keep living. Thanks for having us up. Thanks for dialing up the good weather.
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A
Thanks for coming with the hat.
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B
Just take a look at your shot too. David, I was calling here.
- [01:21]
A
I want you to please welcome to the show a man who I met fairly recently, but came to like right away. Jason Ballard.
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B
Happy to be here.
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A
Good to have you here.
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B
So good to be here.
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A
The point of this podcast is that each of our guests is a big name in their field, but the star of every episode is the everyday person who believed in them before the world did. And so the person who believed in you was.
- [01:49]
B
The person who believed in me was my wife, Jenny Yuri Ballard.
- [01:55]
A
And to that end, I want to begin with this. Tell the audience listening what we're looking at. David, take your time.
- [02:24]
B
We are looking at a picture of my wife and I with our boots on, dancing on the prairie.
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A
You remember when you took that?
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B
I.
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A
Do you remember what the day was? Was it an event? What was it?
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B
We were in South Dakota for the summer. It was our tradition as a family to go. That's where she's from, the Black Hills of South Dakota. And in a sense, it was an ordinary day and this was an ordinary behavior. But maybe what makes the picture exceptional is that this was so ordinary for us to be together in this way
- [02:56]
A
because you guys spent so much time together in this carefree way. I mean, you're. You're bending her backwards. She has this smile on her face. It's. It's A little cheeky. It's very playful. So what I'm hearing you say is this is how you always were.
- [03:11]
B
Yeah, I think that was a very. That was not a professional. That's a very candid photo. Hmm. Yeah.
- [03:20]
A
Same day, same place.
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B
Same day, same place. More serious.
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A
Had she been diagnosed by this time?
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B
She had been diagnosed. She'd been diagnosed somewhere on the order of a decade when that picture was taken.
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A
Diagnosed with breast cancer. Tell me about the diagnosis. How old was she? How old were you? When was it?
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B
We. Let's see. Her first diagnosis with breast cancer was in early 2012. She would have been 28 years old and I was almost 30.
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A
She found a lump. She did went in. No family history.
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B
No family history.
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A
No genetic markers.
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B
No genetic markers. No other signal of anything. She was just a very healthy, vibrant person. And so it was a real. She had discovered it months and months earlier and kind of ignored it because, oh, wow, we were so young and she was so healthy. But it continued to grow. And so we went and got it checked out and found out it was cancer.
- [04:29]
A
Do you remember her reaction in that moment to that news?
- [04:41]
B
Yes. I was upstairs with our children and we'd kind of gone. We had gone to get it checked out, had just her normal general practitioner doctor because we thought it was just sort of like an abundance of caution. It's like, oh, we better check this out, but it's probably nothing. And I was upstairs with the children and I remember her running up the stairs and I remember the way she ran. I already knew something bad. There's somehow about the way she moved and she came in the room and she had just gotten. They'd called her and told her over the phone and we just sat on the bed and held each other and cried.
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A
Now the oldest baby was not even a year old.
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B
Almost two. Yeah, it was a year. A year. And let's see, it would have been like probably a year and nine months. And then our second child was nine months. So we had a not yet two and not yet one year old. And so they were too young to know what was happening. In fact, you know, their whole, all of our children, their whole. My oldest is 15 now and my. His little sister is 14 and then we have five year old twins. And so all the kids, their whole life, as far as they can remember, their mother had cancer.
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A
Your children are Titus?
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B
Yes, sir.
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A
Eden.
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B
Yep.
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A
Artemis and Apollo.
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B
That's right.
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A
Great names.
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B
They are, they are great names.
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A
And it's not to mention the pets are Jupiter, Luna and Astro.
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B
That's right. So the dog and the cat, you like space and we do like space in our family. Yeah.
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A
At the time Jenny was diagnosed, had ICON be. Had it started?
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B
No, we were. We were still running our first business that we started together, which was Treehouse, which was like a sustainable building, supplies, materials and service. Imagine Whole Foods took over Home Depot and you're in the right ballpark. Okay. Yeah. It was like trying to think about even, even then, better ways to build than we were. And this was like a long running thing we were concerned about. And that was our first go at the problem.
- [07:10]
A
When I think of you and Jenny, based on all the research I've done, the words health conscious come to mind, Would you agree?
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B
I would agree, yes.
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A
Where does that come from?
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B
That would definitely be Jenny. And it wasn't just because of her cancer. It certainly preceded her cancer. She was, how to say, wasn't a kind of. It was just a desire to live well and for our children to live well and the people around us to be healthy and vibrant. And that was. It was animated by that, this sort of vivaciousness. It didn't feel like a discipline or something like that, or it was just like wanting to live as beautifully and fully as possible.
- [07:58]
A
And you guys lived in these free spirited, health conscious spaces. You lived in Boulder, Colorado, in Austin, Texas. Right. I don't know if the Black Hills are as free spirited and helpful.
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B
Yeah, they're different. The Black Hills. Yeah. Andy's Texas are very different than Boulder. Very different.
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A
East Texas, speaking of, is where you grew up.
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B
Yes.
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A
In a place your mother still lives. Where there is no cell reception.
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B
That's right. East Texas. They call it behind the pine curtain. And if you want to do a digital detox, East Texas is one of the places you can do it without much effort.
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A
Where you got to go.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You now run this, this big company. You are now a big name in your field. But where did. Where did it all start for that little Jason Ballard back then? I mean, was the dream to do this?
- [08:50]
B
I think I was a rather. I was always an ideas person. Even as a kid, I liked thinking about ideas. And there were definitely some cognitive dissonance emerged as a young kid. Southeast Texas is the most biodiverse area of all of North America. It's called the Big Thicket. And so I grew up in this real sort of. There are moments of my childhood that feel like a National Geographic documentary. I mean, it was like roseate spoonbills and alligator gar and flying squirrels and four species of carnivorous plants and just like, these ancient giant cypress trees and just this, like, the beauty of the natural world, that felt sacred to me. And then the other thing that happens in southeast Texas is it's one of the largest concentration of petrochemical refineries in the world. And so not.
- [09:46]
A
Not as healthy.
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B
No. And so there's signs up all over town. They're like, don't eat the fish in this water if you go fishing. And in my very small high school, I had classmates with cancer. And you can't see the stars at night because the refineries are glowing in the sky. And so it was just sort of. It was a quite a contrast, even at a young age, that, like, I noticed. And I remember feeling that we could do better. I have often said I became an environmentalist, but not an angry one, because what's also going on is those, like, refineries put a roof over my head and food on the table for me and everyone I knew and loved. And so it wasn't sort of this, like, anger at some, like, distant corporation or something. It was just like, we've got to be able to do better. And so I went to university and studied conservation biology. And to keep the story as short as possible, that that concern about conservation biology turned into a concern for sustainable building, like, building in ways. It felt like we. We have to find a way to live on this world without ruining it. And some other things had unfolded. My hometown was destroyed several times by hurricanes, and we would tear out the drywall and put it all right back together with the same terrible materials, and then we would have to do it again in a couple years. And so it was just this feeling that, like, this was going to be a good place to work. I didn't know what it would mean, but I just wanted to throw myself at the problem. And, yeah, there's more to the story. I mean, along the way, I meet Jenny, but way before having any business ideas and.
- [11:21]
A
But was there. Was there something in the meeting Jenny part initially where the consciousness about we can do better is what brought you two together?
- [11:31]
B
Yes. And I think one of my first signals of her believing in me was I was just like. In fact, I'm. Maybe what was. I have often wondered why on earth she had options. She was just such a charismatic and beautiful, an intelligent and articulate woman, that, like, I've often wondered why she chose me. But certainly one of the things about me that animated her in our relationship and in our marriage for the whole 20 years that we were together. Was she, she like, she loved the adventure of the ideas and trying things. And our relationship very quickly were just talking about big ideas. She was very concerned about rescuing young women from the sex trade. And we talked a lot about environmental issues and we talked about, we both had a shared love for architecture and why don't we build so beautifully anymore? And so that was one of the first things where I like, I felt loved by her in a way that I wanted to be loved and believed in it. Because I think in, in small town East Texas, I was kind of a skinny kid in a football town and I felt probably kind of eccentric and maybe she was a person who was excited about dreaming big dreams.
- [13:05]
A
And it's so notable because you both grew up with such big dreams yet in such small towns.
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B
That's right. That's right. Right, yeah.
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A
And in such, in such different cultures. Right. The culture of, of Rapid City, South Dakota and the woods of East Texas.
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B
That's right.
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A
Could not be more different, but they're
- [13:24]
B
similar in some important ways. Sure. In what ways? I mean, like sort of the, the rural sensibility about community, I think was one and then another important one for both treehouse and icon is there are cultures for which the thought of blue collar work has a romantic or dignified quality about it.
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A
In what way?
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B
I mean, it's like everything from like the obvious, like the romance of the cowboy. But just like there were like, my dad worked in oil and gas when I was very young. He had his own field services and repair company. And I remember thinking the floormen on the drilling rigs, they like, they're like covered in filth, but they're like so skillfully could manipulate the machines. They probably get paid pennies on the dollar. But there was a, there was a dignity about it, about the hard work done skillfully under the hot sun that definitely shaped the kind of work that we were naturally attracted to. Like, I don't think it was ever going to be in my future to be like a software engineer. Although I care a lot about software, I think about software a lot.
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A
You have to.
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B
But there was something about the physicality of the real and physical world that was attractive to both of us because where we came from is part of
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A
that attraction to the small town blue collar everyday person. Part of the reason why you wear that hat everywhere you go.
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B
Yeah, I, I'm, I, I, I think I wanted to wear a hat like this for a long time. I just wasn't brave enough. A lot of people think I must wear it because I have an ego. And in fact, it was my ego that prevented me from wearing it for a long time. But I'm depending on who you ask in the family, either a sixth or seventh generation Texan. And I'm. And I wear it very con to remind me of, like, who I am and where I come from, no matter sort of how big and fancy icon gets and how notoriety. Like, I come from a long line of people who work outside with their bodies. And that's, like, important to me to remember and to stay in touch with.
- [15:24]
A
When you first met Jenny and she laid eyes on you, were you wearing that hat?
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B
This is so the first time I remember seeing Jenny and the first time she remembers seeing me are two very different things. Oh, I was outside doing manual work. So we. We met at a summer camp in Colorado for kids, for, like, junior high and high school kids when we were both in college. She was in college in Los Angeles, California, and I was at Texas A and M in Texas, and it was my second year to work there. And they. If you had been a veteran of the camp, you showed up a week early to do. They made it feel like a privilege. I think they just wanted you to work harder for longer to kind of get the camp ready. So I was literally up near the front gate moving rocks around, and everybody was already supposed to be there. And all of a sudden, this blue Subaru comes, like, screaming around the corner and, like, drives to the gate, kicking up dust. But I remember profoundly noticing, like, what a beautiful woman was driving that car. And she had these big, oversized sunglasses on, which were definitely a trademark of hers. And I was like, I don't know who that is, but I have got to talk to that woman. She first saw me, I. I ran track and cross country in university and then also was in just kind of in all kinds of distant sports. And every year in Durango, there is a. It's called the Iron Horse Classic. It's a bicycle race from Durango to Silverton, Colorado. And a bunch of the. The people who worked at the camp rode in the bicycle race. And she not only saw me, but she actually took a picture of me. And I'm in, like, cycling spandex, Texas A and M cycling spandex. And she had a picture of that she had taken of me that she showed me years later, which is like, this is the first time I saw you. So. But we met at that camp.
- [17:12]
A
Totally different looks.
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B
Totally different look. So. That's right.
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A
So what the story I heard was, y' all meet, y' all kind of kick it off. And you write a letter to her parents.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
So who does that?
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B
Well,
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A
in today's world.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I mean, it's amazing, but who does that?
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B
Yeah. So the build up to that was from. From the moment I saw her, I. Eventually, I kind of kept my eyes on her. Yep. The rest of the week at camp, and then the night before the first kids arrive, it was the tradition of the camp to have, like, a staff barn dance. And. And I'm from Texas. And one of the benefits of that was I knew how to dance in a barn, and I was very much watching for her. But I was. There's a. There's a fun country swing dance move called the pretzel.
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A
Right.
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B
That looks very fancy, but it's very easy to learn, so it's a real crowd pleaser. So I was teaching other young ladies how to do the pretzel, and then I saw Jenny watching me do this with other girls, and I freed myself from the young lady I was teaching, and I went up to Jenny and asked her if she would like to dance. And she said yes. And we danced all night together with. Just together, which astounded me. And then we spent every. From that moment forward, every moment we could. We would wake up early to be with each other. We took our time off together. We just spent every moment we could with each other. And she left. And I had to work for several more, at least another month and a half or something like that. But she only worked one term and went home. And I knew that just the summer romance couldn't be the end of it, and that I was going to go try to see her as soon as I got through. But I didn't just want to show up out of the blues like at the house. And, you know, you couldn't make phone calls from the camp. There was no cell reception. And so I had her address because I was writing her letters. And then I wrote one to her parents and just introduced myself and let my intentions. That I don't remember. Whatever. I wish they had kept it, but, like, basically let them know that they should be expecting to see me at some point. And I was, like, very interested in getting to know their daughter better.
- [19:26]
A
So then the way the story goes from there, from what I heard, is you drive what is roughly 20 hours from Texas to Rapid City to see
- [19:38]
B
her to meet them that initial time. Yeah, it was when I got. I was in Durango, Colorado.
- [19:43]
A
But you stayed, like, less than a day.
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B
Yes, I stayed, like. That's right. There. There are multiple instances of this. The most famous instance of this comes later. A part of the story I'm sure we'll get to when she. She breaks her neck at some point in the story. And I drove up to see her for six hours, drove 20 hours, spent six hours with her, and then drove 20 hours home. I was totally cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
- [20:08]
A
You were totally.
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B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [20:11]
A
Your in laws tell this story of a Christmas you spent in the Minnesota airport trying to get to her. It's snowing. You're not gonna make it. You're stuck in the airport. But the way the story goes that I heard was that she implored her father to find a trucker who could pick you up.
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B
That's right.
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A
And get you to South Dakota for Christmas.
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B
That's right. And too bad the roads were snowed in. But ye. Yeah. Her father was involved in trucking and shipping, and there were no buses leaving town. There were no planes leaving town. There were no cars that anyone would rent you. And that was her. Like, her Hail Mary was to. Like, surely there's some crazy trucker that my dad can. Can figure out.
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A
She was as madly into you as
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B
you were into her for reasons I will never understand. Yeah.
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A
So life happens. You guys end up getting married. You. You start to do. Let's call it mission work.
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B
Right.
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A
Mission type work around the world.
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B
Yeah. That started even when we were in college. I mean, our last summer in college, she went to Nepal to volunteer for an organization helping to rescue women from the sex trade. And I went to Papua New guinea and then was intending to go to Indonesia to. There had been a big tsunami, if you remember the tsunami.
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A
Yes.
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B
That hit Southeast Asia at about that time. And so I was going to go spend the summer trying to do, like, relief work. And we thought. Our best thought at the time was like, that's the kind of work we would do the rest of our lives. But that's. That's the summer she broke her neck.
- [21:51]
A
How did she break her neck?
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B
They were driving from one village to another, and they're. I think a person on a bicycle swerved out in front of the car and they had to slam the brakes, but it was like mountainous, and the car went sideways and rolled down the road multiple times and it broke her neck.
- [22:07]
A
She winds up at a hospital in India.
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B
Yeah. So I'm in, at this point, the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Kind of going through, like, cultural training before they send you in to this disaster area. And I get the. The first and last telegram of My life because it's another one of these like remote places, like I'm living in like grass hut and I get a telegram actually, and it says Jenny in accident stop, neck broken, stop. And that's all I knew. And I thought she was in Nepal. So I began a long journey to try to find her. I didn't know where she was, I just knew that I had to get to her. And so by the time I got to it was either in Port Moresby, Papua New guinea or Singapore. I found out she had been live flighted to India. So I changed my travel halfway there, which ended up involving bribing an official because you can't get to India without a visa ahead of time. You can't land without a visa. It was the Queen's holiday. But for a little bit of cash turned out the guy could be persuaded to come into the office and issue me a visa on the spot. I land in India at about midnight in New Delhi, India. And I have no idea where she is. I don't have a smartphone at this point in my life. And I just hire a driver and I tell him to just start driving me to hospitals and he drives me around for probably eight hours and I would, I just go in and say, is, has an American woman been brought here? And eventually that driver gets tired of me and just kicks me out of the car. So I hire another one. He drives me around for six or eight hours. So I'm on my third driver and finally I get to a hospital and they said we don't have an American woman here, but we heard of a clinic, not, we heard it come over the radio or something, a clinic nearby that received an American woman flown in from Nepal yesterday. Here's the name and address and gave it to the driver and he took me there and I walked in. It was a little 20 bed clinic in New Delhi, India and she was there and it was our one year anniversary actually and I slept on the floor next to her bed for the rest of the time she was there. And I got an eye infection and my eyes swelled close. So we were quite a pair. She was in a neck brace and my eyes were swollen closed. And then we flew back to America together and finished up college, graduated and then needed to be together and we moved to Boulder, Colorado.
- [24:32]
A
In those early days, how did she believe in you? Like how did it show up?
- [24:40]
B
It was, it felt like the first person who also wanted to fearlessly do the biggest, grandest thing they could think of at any given moment. And it made Me, it put wind into my sails, and it gave me courage, and it made me feel not alone in my eccentricity. Right. Because you can. It's easy when you're alone to think you're crazy. Right? Sure. But having even one other person, and in her case, not only to like, to say, yes, you should do that, but, like, and I'm going with you, it just felt like you could try anything.
- [25:25]
A
We're going to do this together, and
- [25:26]
B
if that doesn't work, we're going to do the next big thing we can think of. Like, this is just the way we're going to live. And it's. Now that I'm 43, I understand it's an incredibly rare to find people like that in marriage or friendship or otherwise. Just that. Don't count the costs. And don't worry about failure, either. The failure that might happen in front of you, or if you have failed, that, don't hold it against you.
- [25:57]
A
Would that belief in you from her show up simply by the presence of her being there, or was it in the things she would say?
- [26:06]
B
It was the things she would say. It was the decisions she would make. It was the decision she would encourage me to make.
- [26:11]
A
Like, what?
- [26:12]
B
When we first were ready to start Tree House, and when we were on this sort of track of thinking that
- [26:19]
A
we would do, like, social, Treehouse was,
- [26:21]
B
I'm gonna get to Treehouse.
- [26:22]
A
Okay.
- [26:23]
B
We thought we were going to do this, like, social and relief work. Right. But in the background, as I've graduated. So I graduate, we moved to Boulder, and because of my sort of conservation, I throw myself into sustainable building. But I'm kind of just odd jobbing for other green builders and sustainable builders, building houses in Fort Collins, doing remodel jobs in Boulder. Just anyone who will hire me. And then to supplement my income, I work at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, which is another layer of this. Like, I've been around disaster housing. I'm actually building homes. And now I'm, like, working in a shelter for the homeless. But our thought is that I'm going to become an Episcopal priest, and then we're going to spend our life doing this, like, social and relief work. And. But along the way, as I'm, like, building, getting into building, I realized none of the builders I meet can find the materials they need to build in this better way, a more sustainable way, a more healthy way, a more respectful way, both to human health and to ecological health. And I get this crazy idea, like, we should start a company that does this, that can provide These materials at enough scale because people are making like, non, you know, low voc paints and people are making sustainably harvested wood. So people are trying to make the products, but there's no way to get them at enough scale to make it affordable enough for more people to participate in a better way of building. But I'm on this path to becoming a priest, and I end up talking to the bishop of Texas right about the time I've kind of gone through the process and I have been like, accepted to go to seminary. And this idea that we started to call treehouse in the background is kind of coming alive. And I'm finally at this crossroads, like, do I go to seminary and become a priest, or do I, like, chase down this different and new way of building direction? So we went and met with the bishop of Texas, Andy Doyle, and said, what do you think we should do? So we met in his office, we went to the cathedral and prayed, went back to his office, went to lunch. After listening to both of us, he said, you know, I think you should pursue this housing shelter thing, like, and I want you. I don't want you to just like, try it halfway. I want you to. To try it as if this is your vocation. I want you to like, go all in. And if it does, like, I don't want you to look back. And if this doesn't work, hopefully the church will still be here. But I want you to go at this as hard as you can. But in order to do that, this is like a first. Like, I would have to like, quit my job and go try to raise money and like, like, really go for it, really put myself out there. And Jenny said, let's just move in with my folks. And which is what we did. But there's a world in which, hey, honey, I want to. I want us to start a business. And I need to like, we need to like, move into the basement of your parents house. After we've been married for a couple years, there's a world in which that could have been like, very shameful or not the life she wanted to make or something. But it was like she like, could not have been more excited. Like, like in a moment when like all of our peers are beginning to settle into their careers and make money, we're actually like, moving into her par parents basement in South Dakota so that I can go try to raise money to start this business, Treehouse. And so that would be an example of the kind of behavior where it was like, what was expected of her toward me is that we would live, we would just live, we would not be afraid and that we would try to do the biggest, most romantic thing we could with our lives.
- [29:58]
A
Does it also occur to you that she was married to a man who had the confidence in himself to also not feel the sense of pride to not go live in her parents basement?
- [30:12]
B
Right.
- [30:12]
A
I try to think what Jenny would say if she was here.
- [30:15]
B
I think I was probably David would have been a very different kind of man without Jenny. I think there was if you could have met 22 year old Jason. I think the ego and the pride and Lord knows I'm not done with it but like, I think it would have been like quite a bit more pronounced.
- [30:34]
A
Where does the vulnerability in you come from?
- [30:36]
B
I think I learned it from her that it's okay and well, first of all was unacceptable with her.
- [30:44]
A
The vulnerability was unacceptable.
- [30:46]
B
Pride, it was just sort of not like that. Like probably the only thing she didn't. People who are impressed with themselves never impressed Jenny. It's like one of the only very few things she didn't like to see in another human being. But her the sort of the safety to try and to fail and to be wrong that she created in our relationship. And not just in my relationship. I watch her do it. For a lot of people, it's maybe one of the unsung benefits. You know, a lot of people talk about like lifelong monogamous fidelity or like lifelong partnership with another person as like a loss of freedom or the old ball and chain or something like that. But in fact, when it's done correctly, it can actually create a tremendous kind of freedom because you've burned the ships. They're not going anywhere. Often as we go through life, all of us, we put masks on. I want to make sure David likes me. I want to make sure the investor likes me. In some subtle ways, and sometimes not so subtle ways, we try to be what we think people want us to be. There's a real danger that for all people because you're afraid they'll leave or they won't participate with you, or they won't be your friend or they won't be your partner or whatever. But once a person has said I'm not going anywhere, I vow to not go anywhere. And we're. And I've burned the ships. It's the one person on earth you can like take the mask off with and you can say the crazy things out loud and you can have an off day and you can not be your best self. And it creates a freedom to explore life and to explore yourself and to become yourself. That apart from that, you're too scared. You have. You keep the masks on.
- [32:30]
A
Have you found anyone else that you feel like that with since Jenny passed away?
- [32:39]
B
I think she helped me over. Over the 20 years we were together. Learn. Learn to live that way more generally. But no, you know, I'm. I'm a different and far better man in this regard than I would have been had we not been together. But that was a very special relationship.
- [33:11]
A
In many ways, the relationship continues through the children. Yeah, in some that may sound bizarre,
- [33:21]
B
but like, no, I think anybody who has children would understand that. Literally. Our marriage and relationship, literally and figuratively, our. Our marriage continues in them. Our love gave rise to those children. Our genes are in those children, and our story continues in their lives.
- [33:53]
A
The story of the priest, the bishop, telling you to go in this direction is one of my favorite stories. Because if not for that, there is no icon, there is no tree house. Right. You're not sitting here as a leader of one of the next biggest industries.
- [34:11]
B
Correct. Correct. Yeah, it's, it's. It. There are these, like, forks in the road of our lives. Right. The first and most profound one for me, of course, is meeting Jenny. But that conversation that day with Bishop Andy Doyle turns out to have been a profound fork in the road of my life. And perhaps for the lives of lots of other people.
- [34:34]
A
For the lives of lots of other people. So Treehouse gets stood up and it does essentially what?
- [34:41]
B
Yeah, we sell sustainable, healthy building materials and technologies and services, and things are going good. At sort of the height of my time there, we had three stores, one in Plano, one in Dallas, one in Austin. But there's like this sneaking suspicion that it's not good enough yet. And what I mean by good enough yet is I mean two things. Like, despite our best attempts to, like, do things at scale and lower prices and make this way of building accessible to more people, it just is more expensive than conventional building materials, and it wasn't. And so, of course, like, our clientele was a higher end clientele, and I don't begrudge them for that, or I'm very still proud of all the things we did for our customers. But there was a feeling that this won't work if we only make 2% of houses more healthy and more sustainable. Like, this isn't going to work. Then the other thing, because I'm working with that clientele, I'm in the best houses in Austin and Dallas and Plano, like, the best houses that can be get built with conventional methods and have all these problems. It's like if these are the houses the wealthiest people in our society live in, we are building wrong. Like these people should have a plus houses.
- [36:03]
A
The best of the best.
- [36:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, right. Something is wrong with the way we're building. So this starts a problem. And again, Jenny, who would have been well within her rights to be like, hey honey, like one idea is enough, got so fixated and entranced on this, like with me. And so we went on this little research project. We're like, well, how else could we build that would be better? We looked at sip panels and zip panels and prefab houses and modular houses and shipping container houses and houses grown out of fungus. And we were looking for a way to build that would both allow us to build in accordance with our values, sustainability, safety, comfort, beauty, while lowering the cost and increasing the speed. We thought this is the whole purpose of technology is to not have to make these terrible trade offs. And it was only 3D printing that on paper looked like it could offer a solution. You could believe that it would be more sustainable. You could believe that it would be faster. You could believe because it was so fluid that the architecture could be incredible and beautiful and cheaper in scale. Yes. 100 you could take. You know, because it's a robotic approach, you take the cost of labor asymptotically towards zero. Because it's a very simple material supply chain as opposed to like you have drywall and you have lumber and you have moisture barrier and you have siding. It's like a single simple material that's very closely related to like raw geology. So you've simplified the labor problem, you simplified the material, but it was just the only one on the spreadsheet that even looked possible. And she was like, we have to try, we have to try. Having spent seven years building like this multi million dollar three store business, it was like she was like, not only like, maybe we should think about starting over. Like, we have to, we have to do it because it's the best thing we can think about from this moment.
- [37:51]
A
So I have the chills and I want to marinate on this for a moment because I'm in a process right now of building in my life.
- [37:59]
B
Yeah.
- [37:59]
A
And one thing I'm always up against is the notion of good people who love me and support me having the patience to say, oh, we can start over again. And you know, as a founder, the key to success is you've got to try and try and try and try and Try. And every time you try, you essentially, to some degree, you're starting over.
- [38:23]
B
Yes.
- [38:24]
A
To have your ride or die partner be willing to say, after we build these three stories, the three stores, multi million dollar business, we'll do it again is so profound.
- [38:39]
B
It was profound because it was the moment where like, it might have actually, like, paid off in terms of, like, being able to like, afford our own house and like, you know, like, right, right. It was like right at the. It was. We didn't like, we hadn't like, cashed out or anything. It wasn't like we had a bunch of money in the bank yet. It was like, right at the moment where like, we could have finally, it's gonna get good. It was about to get good. And not only like, hey, you may start over. We have to. We have to because that, because this would be better. And like, who cares about any of the rest if we don't, if this is the problem, we're going to walk on. Like, who cares? This is now the best thing we can think of and this is the thing we have to do.
- [39:21]
A
What makes you emotional?
- [39:25]
B
Because I'm old enough now to have other entrepreneur friends and I know. I don't know if I. We're in the middle right now, David, of building 110 more homes for the homeless in Austin about, like, real human lives and real human suffering. I don't know that I would have had the courage without her.
- [39:50]
A
Damn, that's good.
- [39:51]
B
To walk away from seven years of work with basically nothing and start over at zero and not just like a permission, but like, it, like proper encouragement. Like, let's go. Like, we have to try. And so we started in nights and weekends after kids soccer practice. We started in a warehouse in Austin. We just started, me and Jenny and the kids and a couple, the people who eventually became my co founders. And we just started building prototype printers in a warehouse in West Austin with our own money.
- [40:25]
A
First of all, pause for a moment. This is 2000.
- [40:29]
B
This would have been, let's see, 2016, 17 kind of time frame.
- [40:35]
A
When you say to people, oh, I'm going to use a 3D printer to build a house, what was the initial reaction?
- [40:42]
B
Oh, just complete.
- [40:45]
A
Like you're bat crazy.
- [40:47]
B
Yes, complete.
- [40:50]
A
Because it still sounds crazy to me today. And I've seen the videos of it happening.
- [40:54]
B
So if you can. If you can rewind. 10 years ago, 10, nine, 10 years ago, it was just everywhere we turned, people, like, tried to talk us out of it. They're like people who are like, I've worked with concrete all my life. Like this. This is not how concrete behaves. Like, this cannot be made to happen. The carbon footprint will be too high. There's no way it'll be cheaper. Machines break down all the time. You're competing against an industry that's been perfecting itself for a hundred years. Like, how are you going to like, especially because a lot of these people who know it's like, knew that like, Treehouse was potentially on the verge of a breakout. Like, what on earth. Right. But we had.
- [41:35]
A
Did you have investors in Treehouse? What did they say when you talk to them about.
- [41:39]
B
You know, they were all pretty skeptical and we're. Because I felt like I had to tell them what I was doing because I was a CEO and I'd taken their money and they were all pretty happy to let me work on it as a sideline project. Mostly because I thought they would. They thought it would fail quickly. But one in particular, Garrett Boone, he's one of the co founders of the Container Store, actually was like, quite encouraging. Even though I was like, had taken a lot of investment from him, he actually ended up coming to the unveiling of the first 3D printed house himself just to see it. Yeah, so they, they didn't discourage me, but they didn't want. They just wanted to make sure Treehouse didn't have anything to do with it.
- [42:23]
A
My friend Melanie Perkins, who is the co founder and CEO of Canva, was rejected 100 times. She runs a company valued at roughly $40 billion and she got turned down a hundred times. How many times did you get turned down trying to raise money for icon?
- [42:46]
B
Oh my gosh. I mean, before we had printed a house at all because we started talking to people about it. I mean, it was 100% rejection. Not a single. Like, it would have been at least dozens and may have easily approached like 100% rejection. We realized like, the only way we're going to get people to take us here is like, we have to just do it ourselves.
- [43:09]
A
How do you just go do it yourself?
- [43:13]
B
I mean, I guess I should mention, like along the way had done a master's program in space resources at Colorado School of Mine.
- [43:21]
A
Kind of important.
- [43:23]
B
So some picked up some engineering chops, had built houses for years. Knew my way around building materials. Had two co founders, one of who was a mechanical Engineer, and Alex LaRue who was already working on an idea like this. My other co founder, Evan Loomis, had a strong business background and, and we got one of our engineering buddies, a guy Named Nathan Wang, who now works at Rivian. And it's just when you like raise your hand, you start telling people you're trying to do something you both figured out yourself. I bought every book on 3D printing off of Amazon. I went and took classes on 3D printing at the tech shop. And we, and a lot of the 3D printing community was open source and online at the time. It's called the reprap community. And we just tried to scale up a bunch of those ideas that were meant for like desktop 3D printing. And you just try to like times everything by 10 basically and start trying to figure things out. But we have to self fund it, right? We, there's because nobody's giving us a dollar, like we are going to have to pay for this ourselves. And so Jenny and I like went at the moment where we should have been arriving at some financial stability. We went deeply into debt buying the materials for the printer. And then ultimately once we realized the printer probably would work and we needed to try to print a house, buying materials to print a house. And in fact I had already maxed out the two credit cards. We had to fully maxed out the week we were finally trying to print the first house. We had to have it done. We believed we had to have it done. I still believed that that was true before south by Southwest because the whole world was going to show up in Austin and that was going to be our moment to show people that this could be real. And we ran out of material halfway through the print because some of it had gone, it had rained and gotten humid. It like sprayed, spoiled and ruined a lot of the material. And so I went to Jenny and I said, Jen, this feels like this, this, this could work. And it had been a struggle to print that house. Like nothing's, we're not working correctly yet, as you might imagine. I need to go to Wells Fargo and get a new credit card and I need to immediately max out a third credit card to buy enough concrete to finish the house. And she said, do you really think we're going to finish? We have enough time because we only had like three or four days left before south by at this point, we're probably only halfway through printing. And I said, I believe we, I think we have a shot. And she said, well, what are you waiting on? So I went down to Wells Fargo, got a credit card, drove straight from the Wells Fargo branch to the concrete supplier and bought all the concrete, like maxed out the, the credit card and we ended up finishing that house. And no small things to Jenny. That wasn't all the end of the challenges of printing that house. And Jenny saves the day at the very end. But we finished that house. And once you could see for yourself, a 3D printed house that had been permitted in a real city like Austin because we got. Had we actually permitted the house. All of a sudden people were able to believe alongside of us. But up until that moment it was. Well, I think we were the only ones in the world who believed.
- [46:41]
A
I'm just sitting here quietly because it's mind blowing. You know, I drive a car right now.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah.
- [46:49]
A
That self drives itself.
- [46:51]
B
I know.
- [46:52]
A
And it's nuts.
- [46:53]
B
It is nuts.
- [46:54]
A
You print houses.
- [46:56]
B
Yeah.
- [46:56]
A
That's nuts.
- [46:58]
B
Yeah.
- [46:58]
A
But the reality is the next biggest thing is something that today everybody thinks is nuts.
- [47:04]
B
That's right. That's right. And this is. And this is always the way progress is made. Someone somewhere has to try before it's obvious because of all you do. What's obvious is what is obvious. Then all you will do is what we already do.
- [47:25]
A
So what's the lesson for the dreamers like myself and other people listening and watching?
- [47:38]
B
You have to burn the ships and you have to try because it's going to be too hard if you leave yourself and out. It'll become a self fulfilling prophecy. If you hedge, if you believe, check your math. Take a cold shower, stare in the mirror if you still believe that nothing should be able to stop you. And you have to go all in. You have to go all in. And what allowed me to go all in was my wife's insistence that we go all in. You can't run Treehouse and like we have. You have to, we, we have to commit to this.
- [48:20]
A
Now let's talk about the screen. Right. So there's this story of her using a window screen.
- [48:28]
B
Yes.
- [48:28]
A
To fix a printer.
- [48:29]
B
Yeah. We had to get that house printed. And it had been real touch and go the whole way.
- [48:34]
A
Was this the very first house in the world? Okay.
- [48:37]
B
South by southwest is five days away, four days away, three days away. Tuesday. Finally, it's the last night. Okay. If we don't finish tonight, we don't have enough time to get the windows, doors, roof in. That only give us two days to finish out the house. Okay. We've already got the sub scheduled. We have to finish that night. It is two in the morning. We have run out of the new concrete we bought and all we've got left is this old concrete that we had tried to stop using because it had gotten humidity in it and like little like rocks had formed inside of it and the pump's not working and the printer keeps derailing, but we finally get things running again, but we're out of material. We put the bad material in and it immediately clogs the printer and just like bricks it. And it's two in the morning and we are probably a foot away from being able to complete the house. And me and my other two co founders, Alex and Evan, are just ready to give up. I mean, I think we all like sat on the ground and you're like practically weeping and my wife is out there with us and she's like pacing around and looking and thinking. And I'm talking about like cubic yard super sacks of concrete. And she was like, guys, I have an idea. And she like runs over the house and pulls a window screen off the house and just like kind of takes and puts it on top of a five gallon bucket and just starts like scooping out and like sieving concrete through and it's catching the rocks. And I'm like, or I don't know who was like. I mean like, we can't hand sift. We're Talking about like 10 tons of concrete to sift by hand to finish printing the house or what are like tons of concrete. We can, we can't do it. We can't. And she's like, of course we can't.
- [50:16]
A
What else are we going to do?
- [50:17]
B
What else are we doing tonight except printing this house? And somehow her sort of like enthusiasm about it. We sort of like jump up and we start and for the rest of the night we hand sift rocks out of tons of concrete through a window screen with Jenny. And we finished printing that house and it's the first permitted 3D printed house in the world. And we win. South by and the rest is history. But it's an example of her like indomitable spirit to like find a way and to never give up and to always believe.
- [50:48]
A
I want the audience to clearly understand how successful ICON has become. So say spare me the humility with all due respect and help me paint the picture of the success ICON has now been able to achieve.
- [51:02]
B
We have built hundreds of homes. We have partnerships with the Department of Defense and with NASA. We have the contract with NASA to develop the lunar and Martian construction system. We have hundreds more homes under contract. We will grow by 300% next year and we're launching the multi story printer in just a few months. Now what's the company value that we don't disclose that publicly but it's more money than I ever imagined when I was growing up in small town East Texas.
- [51:31]
A
And what does a young cowboy hat wearing, former cross country track dreaming kid think about that when he ponders on that?
- [51:42]
B
You know what, David? If I had a billion dollars liquid, I would start this company. It really is incredible to get to run right into the teeth of human suffering in such a basic, fundamental way. To invent new architecture, to put homeless people in housing, to work with the world. The Titan, the next generation printer, is the world's largest robot. To work with the world's largest robot. To dream about building the moon base with NASA like it's the best job in the world. And Jenny was the first lady of icon. None of it exists without her and her belief and her courage. And even as she fought cancer, she put more energy on, like, pushing the world forward than she did worrying about her own mortality. And it is an honor to continue to do this work with her, for her and in her memory, and to be the blessing to do the good that she wanted us to do.
- [52:49]
A
Was there ever a point where you and her said, this is a real big money opportunity?
- [52:58]
B
Honestly, no. No. And even at the end, even, I mean, like, even when Trails is like, every now and then, of course, we're like, trails. Excuse me. ICON does start getting a lot of success. We not only print that house, we print dozens more. And then the first 3D printed neighborhood in the world, and things are like, really happening. We get defense partnerships, we get a partnership with NASA. And she was just completely uninterested, completely uninterested in the company's valuation or what our shares might be worth. Like, she never asked. And if I ever tried to bring it up, it's like, hey, we should just know. She was just like, I don't care. I think when she died, she did not know what percent of the company we owned and how much it was worth. I don't think she ever knew. And she never asked and she wouldn't let me tell her.
- [53:45]
A
Was there ever a moment where you were somewhere where the two of you looked each other in the eye and acknowledged, we made it, we made it? Meaning this works. We've proven it works?
- [54:00]
B
No, because I don't think we're quite there yet. And part of my challenge now is like, I think we're in the red zone. You know, I think we're, like, very clever. We're. As you know, David, we're about to launch the second generation of the printer architecture, which should cut our present cost in about half can do multi story construction. And I think this is the, the printer that can do the things at scale that we created this company to do. But she didn't live to see it. She saw the prototype print and she stood in the building that it printed, but we never got there.
- [54:43]
A
This is the first time you're speaking so publicly or really at all about Jenny, what happened, the life, how she believed in you and how it made this, I'm going to say it, iconic company come to life. Jenny died of breast cancer after 13 years of living with it.
- [55:07]
B
Yes.
- [55:08]
A
And she died Shortly after Christmas, December 28, 2024, almost a year ago. What was that Christmas like?
- [55:33]
B
So we knew it was the end. A few months before. That's when you know if you have cancer every 90 days or so depends on the kind of cancer you have and the kind of treatment. But for 13 years you go in every 90 days and you get a scan and you find out if it's working or not. So you kind of, you stand for a kind of judgment, right? It's sort of a, sort of Damocles that you find out if it's going to drop every 90 days. And there's a good thing that happened to us because of that, that I wish more people could experience, people who are listening to me right now, without having to go through what we went through. Because none of us are guaranteed tomorrow. We were just made aware of it in a very strong way because of her cancer and having to get these scans every 90 days. But for those 13 years, this is a part of this. It's like it made us live differently. Jenny used to say, if I'm gonna die, then we better keep living. And if I'm not gonna die, then we better keep living. But everybody could live that way. Everybody could be alive and aware of the like, the beautiful and beautiful, the beautiful and brutal brevity and that we don't have to be diminished because of the brevity of our lives, that somehow that can actually. Actualize a kind of intensity and intentionality about living that's actually available to all of us. So that's what we did, though. For every 90 days for 13 years, you sort of find out if you're living or dying. So we finally get the news we dreaded in October of 2024, very beginning of October. And so I immediately take leave from ICON to just to be with my wife in her final days. And she, when the doctor had told us, once we had finished weeping, stumbled down to my truck, we got in the truck. And the doctor had told us, of course, you ask, you know, how long do we have or whatever. And she said, you know, I don't know, guys, like, maybe weeks. When we got in the truck and we said two things to each other. We looked each other in the eye and said, We have no regrets. If we would do it all again. Sorry. And she said, gonna make it to Christmas. And she did. But on Christmas Eve night, it was our tradition. Usually go to midnight mass.
- [59:16]
A
Yep.
- [59:17]
B
But she was. She didn't have enough energy. And so our priest shout out, Father Zach Kuns. Between priests are very busy in the holidays. And between. Between the services, he came to our house fully vested and brought everything with him. Brought a bunch of programs. And we had like a Christmas Eve mass in our. In our living room by our fireplace. And her parents were there, and my family was there.
- [59:50]
A
Wow.
- [59:51]
B
And we sang. The kids were there. And it was entirely beautiful. In fact, David, those last 90 days of our time together were somehow entirely sweet and beautiful. It was like some of the most romantic and wonderful 90 days of our whole marriage. And then a few days after Christmas, She never really. She somehow had her whole energy that evening at the Christmas, if she was alert and awake. But pretty quick after Christmas, her energy started failing quite quickly. And the night before she died, she said she wanted to go outside. She'd been in bed a lot. So I took her out on her back porch. She was very sleepy, and I thought she was falling asleep, and I didn't know what to do. And so I just started telling her stories about all. All of our adventures. And I thought for sure she was asleep. But then she would laugh at the funny parts. And then at sunset, I brought her back in the house. And then the next day, she didn't get up really at all. And about two hours before she passed passed, she woke up and set up for the last time. And right as she did, our children were kind of passing by our bedroom. And they ran in the room, said, mama. And she hugged him. She said, I love you guys so much. She hadn't spoken really all day, but it was her last words to her children. And then right at sunset of December 28, she. Her breathing got very fast, and our son was downstairs playing a beautiful song on the piano. And right. Literally, as the last rays of light went out of the day, while her son played piano downstairs, she. She died with me and her sister and her parents at her side. It was almost a year ago.
- [62:41]
A
When I think about what she would say.
- [62:46]
B
Yeah.
- [62:50]
A
Having not had the benefit of knowing her. I go to, well, what can I do to try and channel what she would want to say? And before you came, Somebody on my team spoke with your in laws because I wanted to know what they would want to say. Not have to say, not need to say, but want to say because I know how involved they are in your kids lives. I know that your kids spend every summer with them in South Dakota. And I watched an interview that my producer did with them and this is one of the most beautiful clips.
- [63:53]
B
Jason, thank you for loving our daughter so well. Jason would just give his whole heart to Jenny and to their life. The most important thing is that you've been wonderful husband and father. So it's, it's just been a blessing to us to have you in our lives and now to step up and parent our grandchildren with such an amazing heart and will be forever thankful. They are remarkable people in their own right and in every right, actually.
- [65:01]
A
But I play that because we've spent this whole show talking about the great woman behind you and there's no finish to that story without talking about how great you were for her with her. And I feel like, you know, that.
- [65:27]
B
She was easy to love and it was, it was one amazing adventure, the whole thing. And I hope one day there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who live in 3D printed homes. And maybe even houses on other worlds. And if that can come true, Maybe I will begin to feel like I have done right by Jenny and her hopes and dreams for this world. Because she would not want me to quit. And she believed in the crazy thing the whole way through, but she believed in it because she thought it could make the world more beautiful. And it could reduce the suffering in the world. And so in a sense, the work I still have to do in front of me is to continue to make good on those promises we made into to each other and to do right by all the trust and courage she gave me and to by God, do good and to keep doing good.
- [67:27]
A
Do you feel like her memory is a blessing?
- [67:30]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I know I'm crying like a baby here, but it is a. It is a joy to even speak of her.
- [67:46]
A
You know what I'm grateful for a profoundly real conversation about real life impact, real life tragedy and real life dreams. So thank you for sharing that with me.
- [68:05]
B
Well, thank you for honoring me by letting me honor her. I'm Jason Ballard and the person who believed in me is my wife, Jenny Urie Ballard.
- [68:25]
A
I thought you might want to know, but this podcast is at the heart of a company I founded called Do Good Crew. I've spent 25 years telling stories. It used to be the bad news and now I want to focus on the good news. The everyday heroes who are doing extraordinary things. You can join us. We do live events, but we also have a newsletter. It's free. You can sign up for it by going to www.thedogoodcrew.com. this show was created by me, David Begno. Our executive producers are Ellen Rockamora and Olivier Delfoss. Our associate producer is Griffin Hamilton. Our booker is Sully Block, Director. Director of photography is Foster Parks. Audio Technical production is Joseph Gabay and Will Whitley from Static Creative. Our director of Social media is Mariah Moll. Our theme music was created by Slipstream, Post production and edit done by Longwave Digital. If this episode moved you in any way, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel or following and rating our show on whatever platform you're listening on. This really is the best way to help our show grow and touch more people, and we thank you for it. And one more thing before you go. If you want to join our crew, go to thedogoodcrew.com you'll love what we're doing.