Hyperloop CEO Dirk Ahlborn built the system with 420 global contributors earning stock options, not traditional venture capital. The company uses crowdstorming to solve design problems and monetization, and community members proposed reusing pylons for vertical gardens, beehives, and water production to cut costs.
Chapters
So this is probably the part I'm mostly passionate about, how we're doing this. It's a new approach. It's completely different. And we're not alone. There's actually 2 companies working on the Hyperloop. A lot might not know this, but to sort of give you a difference, We started in 2013, right in August actually. We're using an approach where we're using crowdsourcing to get our teams together. It's an open approach, so we partner with as many people as we can. We want to have the brightest minds. Everybody on the team right now works for stock options. So for each hour they, they contribute, they get stock options. We have more than 420 people, some of the largest companies in the world. We have the largest construction engineering firm in the world, AECOM, as part of our team. We have the inventors of the vacuum pump as part of our team. We have programming companies, app guys, AR, VR, social media. We have, I think, 7 or 8 law firms that are part of our team. And we're actually getting ready to build the first Hyperloop. So it's a completely different approach. On the other side, there's a company that unfortunately chose a name very similar to us. They're called Hyperloop Technologies. And, you know, the motives, I don't know why, but It's actually full of venture capitalists, big names. So they started this year. They, they self kind of self finance. It's very easy for them, right? So it's eight point five million dollars. So if they they put in their selves, they're using a very normal approach. They just hired a basically basically a couple of engineers. I think they're between thirty or fifty right now. They're I think they're feeling very threatened. But it's very interesting to see what is a better model, right? And I think it's especially for you guys, you're working on your startup company. A lot of times it might be frightening if you start a business and now you have someone with a name on the other side, right? And in our case, the guy who started this is a VC that invested in Uber, right? One of the early Uber investors. There is someone from Palantir on the boards, one of the co-founders of PayPal, one. So, but they're all just names. They're just names. It doesn't matter. So there's a huge difference in how we use and what we do. So if you want to work for what I call the real Hyperloop, right, and you want to join our team, you got to go to hyperloop.global because one thing they do better is SEO. So the way we're doing this is completely different. I'm sure you all know these companies. They all have something in common. They're all failures. They're all failures, right? Is there anybody here that still has a BlackBerry? Okay. Sometimes you would be surprised in Europe how many people still have BlackBerrys. Or in Canada. And then there's these companies. They all have something in common as well. So all of these companies adopted at one point of their— in their business, you know, crowdsourcing. Some of them actually have more than 50% of the innovation coming from outside. So when we started out, when Elon Musk proposed this project, I was I was part of an incubator, a nonprofit incubator that was funded by NASA. And, you know, we saw a lot of problems in startups. It's really hard to build a company, right? I mean, you're in a group, so you're very lucky because you can talk to each other, you can get feedback from each other. But a lot of times, I mean, when I talk to entrepreneurs, it's like, I need to raise money. And I asked them, what do you need the money for? And they normally— it was something like, oh, I need to build this algorithm, or I need to do something else. And it's always, well, then you don't need money. You need a programmer. You need someone who helps you. I mean, at the end, unfortunately— and I'm European, so as you can hear, right, in Europe it's completely different— but unfortunately in the US, a lot of time your success is measured based on how much money you have raised. Right, it's always like you're the cooler one because you raised $2 million, $3 million, $4 million. Does that matter, or does it matter really how you build your business? Okay, so we wanted to build a platform, a crowd-powered incubator. So basically a platform that allows entrepreneurs to build a community around their projects. We're thinking that if you have 1,000 people that give you their input, their feedback, their opinions, their ideas, you can build a smarter company. If you think of the fact that we use the internet for basically literally everything. I mean, you can order food, get your dry cleaning, find your boyfriend, your girlfriend online. I mean, there's some really crazy ideas you can do online, but when it comes to building a company, it's still you and a buddy with a beer in a bar. That's it. And you start working on a project, and one day you realize that, well, maybe nobody else wants my products, or maybe advertising wasn't the best way to monetize, right? It's always the same problem. So by using crowdsourcing, you can— or building up a community, which I actually like much better as a term— you can avoid those things. So we do something what we call crowdstorming. And in crowdstorming, obviously, we use a community, you know, they can join the team if they have enough time. But we do things like we ask questions and that's a very important part. We ask questions like, do we need a ticket? And not do we need a paper ticket, but Is a ticket really the best way to make money? Right? I mean, hell, you're, I mean, you're all, I don't know, are you still called millennials or are you already in the next one? Millennials. Right? But you're not used to pay for anything, correct? So that's where it's going. So we would find a way to monetize in, in a way that the more the passenger rides, the more money we make. Then the tickets wouldn't make sense. Then you would use a ticket maybe to, during peak times, to optimize demand. That's it. So that's really— so those are the things that we're talking about, and we're trying to find ideas because they are There are other solutions out there, and that's where the market's going. So any of you guys have an idea about that? Let us know. Are we talking about pylons? What are you going to do with pylons? So in a project like this, it's billions of dollars, right? And if I— I mean, we're a startup company. If I have to look at where we spent our money and where the money comes from, and then I look at how much the pylons cost us, How much do the pylons cost us, Bwaba? No, no, in total. LA to San Francisco, remember? So $4 billion, just in pylons. So now I tell you, I give you 200 pylons. They're yours. What are you going to do with them? Sell them to you. No, what I mean, do you believe that you would come up with maybe some ideas on what you could do there? Yeah, I think just because it's looking at the problem in a different lens. Exactly. So obviously we have from the craziest ideas to actually very smart ones. Vertical gardens, have them integrate beehives. which is another problem that we need to solve. I personally actually believe that we can produce water with the pylons. So there's one area where we're looking at some of the technologies. We can obviously create electricity. So there's a bunch of areas where we can, you know, just by looking at it, what can we do there, finding new solutions and build a better product. So the crowd has been amazing for us. Our community is great. That's where everything comes from.
