It still seems a stretch to me to use the words “Hyperloop” and “soon” in the same sentence, but the corporate structure of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, the start-up intent upon realizing Elon Musk’s design, is at the very least interesting, staffed as it is with largely remote and unpaid (for now) permalancers. Of course, that just makes me more wary. From Steven Kotler at Singularity Hub:

“Musk himself said he was too busy to take on the project, but if other people wanted in on the cause, well, that was just fine with him. As it turns out, other people have taken him up on his offer—about 100 in total.

Meet Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, (HTT) a company that is not quite a company.

Using JumpStartFund, a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing hybrid service/model, wherein the very workers who are going to build the Hyperloop aren’t paid until the train turns a profit.

How is that possible? Simple, the workers don’t actually work for HTT, or not many of them. Most of them work day jobs at companies spread throughout the country—Boeing or SpaceX or NASA or Yahoo! or Salesforce or Airbus, to name but a few. HTT is a company built on quasi-moonlighters, lending their cognitive surplus to supersonic train design. In technical parlance, they’re a mesh network.

Moreover, they’re a mesh network who had to apply for the job. This means that unlike most crowdfunding efforts, where you have to take what you get, this one got to pick and choose. Not only does this give them a much higher level of talent working on the project, it also gives them a pretty healthy reserve pool, should workers involved get sucked into other projects—which, since nobody’s getting paid for a while, is bound to happen.”