Remember when the government used to fund big risky moonshot ventures like, well, the Moon shot? Remember when billionaires used to put money behind their own big ideas? No longer. In the 21st century, apparently, it's up to the Internet to change the world.
That appears to be the message behind JumpStartFund's announcement Thursday that it is forming a team to turn Elon Musk's Hyperloop idea into a reality. JumpStartFund, based in El Segundo, Calif., is a new social network for entrepreneurs to collaborate around ideas, and -- in theory -- to then open them up to online funding efforts along the lines of Kickstarter.
"There's a lot of eager minds out there wanting to work on things like this, but they don't know how to get involved," Patricia Galloway, president of the America Society of Civil Engineers, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I'm sure we're going to find scientists and engineers in laboratories willing to take this on part time or full time."
Galloway will be working with Marco Villa, former mission director for Musk's rocket-launching firm SpaceX, on coordinating the collaboration. Musk hasn't officially endorsed the JumpStartFund attempt yet, but he did say this when he presented his Hyperloop concept last month: "If someone else goes and does a demo, that would be really awesome. And I hope someone does."
It's also a smart piece of publicity for JumpStartFund, which launched a little over a month ago. If there's as much interest in the Hyperloop as we think there is, the online incubator had better hope it is ready for the deluge of interest that will follow -- and that its crowdfunding operation is road-tested.