Yishan Wong is the CEO of Terraformation, a seed to forest accelerator supporting early-stage teams to launch and scale biodiverse projects that restore ecosystems, generate sustainable income, and produce verified carbon credits. The underlying principles are: native restoration is imperative, even if it is more expensive, and that to make projects truly sustainable, benefits from forest stewardship should primarily serve local communities. Through the model, a high percentage of carbon returns go directly to communities, through co-benefit projects and community-based governance structures.

Started in Hawaii in 2020 to develop tools that remove key barriers to global reforestation, the company’s partners span five continents, with over 4.7 million trees planted and projects projected to sequester 7.5 million tons of CO₂.

Bringing Silicon Valley’s expertise in scaling to the climate movement, Yishan was previously CEO of Reddit, Director of Engineering at Facebook, and an early engineer at PayPal. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon.