He Watched a Rocket Land, Then Chose Housing Over Rockets

Curtis Wong was working on launchpads when he watched a Falcon 9 come back down and land on one. He had joined SpaceX to be closer to new ideas, and the first landing he saw renewed his excitement for engineering.

Wong, the founder and chief executive of Cloud Apartments, a startup making factory-built apartments, decided the housing shortage in his hometown was the building problem he wanted to solve.

He had trained for conventional building. About 10 years ago, he finished a master's degree in structural engineering at Stanford University and then worked on buildings in different parts of California. After that he made an unusual pivot to SpaceX to work on launchpads, where he saw Falcon 9 vehicles up close.

After SpaceX, Wong went to Harvard for a business degree. He has said he spent those two years thinking hard about what to do after graduation. He ended up returning to construction, his original field, with a focus on housing.

As Wong tells it, the choice came from what he had seen at home. He grew up in San Francisco, and Wong has said he has "seen the damage that not enough housing does to a city." He has also said he saw unlimited demand for housing and the rise of modular construction, in which apartment sections are built in a factory and assembled on site, and that starting a business around that pairing made sense.

Before starting Cloud Apartments, he spent a year at a startup called Star City, which had raised more than 50 million dollars. There he worked as both an engineer and a developer on a 16-story steel tower called Star City Mina, planned for central San Francisco. He learned how developers seek city approvals for a project like that, and how engineers design a modern tower for earthquake country in a strongly unionized city.

Wong says the team got far on that project. It was never built, he says, for reasons that had nothing to do with modular construction. The experience left him more optimistic about factory-built housing, not less. He found an investor and started building Cloud Apartments, with the idea of offering rental buildings made from a repeated line of apartment designs.