By Mike Montgomery
We have all heard the traditional story. You have an idea and take it to an angel investor early on — or a venture capital firm after developing a prototype — to get funding. But this model has its drawbacks. Investors can make demands that a founder might not agree with. Many VCs are only interested in an exit, not building a sustainable company, and VC-backed companies often fall just as quickly as they rise.
What if there were a better way? Dirk Ahlborn, the CEO and co-founder of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, thinks there is.
Back in 2012, Ahlborn was part of an online business incubator called JumpStartFund that harnessed the power of online communities. “If you think about it, you do everything online: your dry cleaning, your groceries, even finding love — but building businesses still very much happens offline,” he says. Ahlborn recognized the power of online crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter to bring people together, and he wanted to find the best way to harness the wisdom of passionate communities.
The opportunity arrived in the summer of 2013 when Elon Musk published a famous white paper proposing the hyperloop concept: massive magnetized tubes that could carry passengers at 700 mph from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Ahlborn thought the project would be a perfect fit to show how a crowdsourcing business model would work and asked Musk for permission to put it on the JumpStartFund platform. Ahlborn invited anyone to participate as long as they were willing to work in exchange for stock options. After sifting through hundreds of applications, he enlisted the help of 100 engineers. Many of them had day jobs at places like Boeing, NASA, Google and Airbus.
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