Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of Hyperloop, describes a metro system designed for 800-900 mile routes with 40-50 minute trip times. The project relies on a community of 10,000-20,000 participants and 420 professional contributors, funded by over $11 million in donated man-hours and $7 million committed by team members, with partnerships from Ansys, Microsoft, and Autodesk.
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So this is a map that we used in one of those CrowdStorm documents. And most people thought this is a map of the best routes. It's not. We just released this and basically had some of the obvious routes in there and others that are very questionable. So just because we were— we had Albuquerque on there, we were 3 times on TV in Albuquerque. And whole Albuquerque was just like, why a Hyperloop in Albuquerque? Like, oh, maybe it's because of— and, you know, we were there looking at all the discussions and figuring out if our assumptions were actually correct, because the people that live there, they really know what's going on, right? So that's the reason. What it also shows is what the Hyperloop really is. It's a metro system. It's a metro system that connects metropolitan areas. So our sweet spot is somewhere below 800, 900 miles. Ideally, we start with trip times around 40 minutes, but not only. We're even looking at it for inner-city transport because, again, remember, it's green. Yes. Right now, there's no green transport method And we have very low operational costs. So we're still better than any metro system you can imagine. Well, but now you can get from LA to San Francisco in 36 minutes. I don't know you guys, but I don't know how often you are in LA. But I'm up in San Francisco quite a lot. And if it takes you an hour and a half to get to the station, you haven't really solved anything. We want to build a product that you use every single day several times. It changed our life. So we're looking a lot at the first and last mile issue, right? How does it affect the user? How are you going to use it? So it has to be as simple as pushing a button, a self-driving car, an Uber, Lyft comes and picks you up, brings you to a local Hyperloop station, which brings you to the main station, and yet now you're from LA up in San Francisco within 50 minutes. So there are ways that you can be within basically 20 minutes out of the city with no problem. And that should be the goal in any city. So, which really, as you can see, it's much more than just trying to levitate a capsule inside a tube, which by the way we did last year. But that's all existing technology. So technology-wise, it's all about putting things together, There's a little trick for the guys of you that work on technology in itself, like when we talk about hardware, for example. Go to national research labs. NASA, JPL, Lawrence Livermore, the Aerospace Corp. The US spends $64 billion every single year for research and development. Wow. Which is crazy. And you can just go there and you can license their technology. In addition, you have all the universities. I don't know if Draper University, but MIT actually has more technology transfers than Italy, just to give you guys an idea. So they're really smart people that are developing really cool things that need amazing entrepreneurs that just pick them up. and make them a business, right? Or if you have a problem, someone else might have already solved it for the military. It's incredible what's out there. I mean, most of you guys, for example, have probably heard about technology with the ultrasound electricity. Just got funded, I think, 2 days ago, $10 million. I saw that technology 4 years ago at the Aerospace Corp. The reason why we didn't pick it up, because the guy that works for the government told me, I don't have time to write the patent. So, but it's there. They're super smart, and you pay them with your tax money, so go and take a look. Anyway, so now our community is more than 10,000 people we're crowdstorming with, almost 20,000. We have more than 400, actually 420 professionals, and these are not some guys in a chat room. These are guys that worked on the Manhattan Project, for example. Like, we really have some of the older retired people that have done amazing things. Like, one of them invented the insulin pump. He's on our team. I mean, it's really fun to talk with him. And obviously, then we have students that are just out of university that— there's a lot of knowledge transfer that happens there. But we also have the professor of psychology of Stanford University, people that worked on the Mars rover. We have— What's the most interesting thing you've learned? the top social media guys that, that worked on the Obama campaign. We have some of the top companies in the world, as I said earlier. So that's really exciting. What we're trying to do here is we're building more than a company. We're trying to build a movement. And I think that any entrepreneur always should try to build a movement rather than a company, right? You have to have this wow factor. You have to get people passionate passionate about what you're doing, and obviously you have to be passionate yourself about what you're doing. So in our case, you know, this is really a way— and remember, all these people are working only for stock options. So a lot of people, when we talk about this and we say, hey, you know, we haven't raised any funds so far, they're like, oh really? So you're not really serious. That's not true. It was just that we didn't want to take any money in at the beginning because we didn't know if it was feasible. It's not about just raising money and then I can have a great car, get a nice paycheck. That's— I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to go and then maybe go back, oh, by the way, we just found out it's not feasible. No, no, so, but we had more than $11 million of man-hours till today going into the company. We had more than 5 new applications every single day, so our team is growing constantly. We had more than 470 accredited investors and institutional that came to us and were interested in investing. Most of them, we said, we're not ready yet. We'll get there, and I'll get to the next point where we are now. But again, we're kind of doing this to show people also that you can do great things without necessarily having to raise money. Money is not the first thing you have to go after. Our team is absolutely committed. So when, when we do that, when they do the applications, they not only write You know, we ask them, what can you bring? But they not only write something like, oh, I'm a super good dancer, but we also ask them, can you bring any money? And some of them actually say sure. So we have more than— by now it's actually way more than that, but more than $7 million that were committed through the team members. We never asked for the money. But we see their commitment through that. And I mean, there's obviously a lot of regulation issues and so on, but it shows just for us how committed people are to make this reality. We also got land. So we have land easements where we will start construction next year. It's worth more than $12 million. And obviously, as more we move forward and more Quay Valley moves forward, the value increases. And this came out of the community, just to give you guys an idea. So I said we have several companies. We have Ansys who gave us millions of dollars of licenses. Microsoft sponsored us. Autodesk—every team member on the team gets to use all their products. AECOM is part of it with a huge team. We had a partnership with several universities, so. It's all the same thing. They're coming on board, they're receiving, they're part of the company in most of the cases, and they're sharing the passion to make something amazing happen.
