Exactly. I'd even call 20x for Hyperloop in 5 years excessively optimistic. you'd need 15-20 years.
Then you run into the whole playing of the odds. Invest in 20 companies, hope 1.5ish make great returns. Even the largest VC firms can't afford that on mulitbillion dollar industrial ventures.
There is investment for new and groudbreaking technology, but it is much MUCH slower moving. We're talking 5 years of simply drumming up investors and getting everybody onboard before any ground breaking even happens.
Also, you have to be much MUCH more connected to your industry than say, an SV programmer. There is A LOT of checkboxes one has to hit before one takes on large scale industrial ventures. This shit doesn't get a proof of concept built up in a dorm room over the weekend, and it's user base isn't going viral to signal interest in the product if there is no product to use until you're already $4,000,000,000 in the hole....
"This shit doesn't get a proof of concept built up in a dorm room over the weekend, and it's user base isn't going viral to signal interest in the product if there is no product to use until you're already $4,000,000,000 in the hole...."
Exactly. And on top of that, there is no making serious pivots. If you're an Instagram and you realize that people don't just want to share photos, they want filters, you can make that change in minimal time. In a Hyperloop situation, you're designing something that you're hoping to convince people that they want, and if you build it and no one comes, you're massively screwed.
Not to mention that Hyperloop would have a massive cost over-run--I don't care what his estimates are. The cost of land-use alone is going to be just outright insane. If you run a pilot in CA, you're going to blow through several billion just securing basic land rights, running years-long ecological and wildlife surveys, determining impacts to groundwater/rivers, etc.
Then the real work begins. This would make the Big Dig look well planned & executed.
Then you run into the whole playing of the odds. Invest in 20 companies, hope 1.5ish make great returns. Even the largest VC firms can't afford that on mulitbillion dollar industrial ventures.
There is investment for new and groudbreaking technology, but it is much MUCH slower moving. We're talking 5 years of simply drumming up investors and getting everybody onboard before any ground breaking even happens.
Also, you have to be much MUCH more connected to your industry than say, an SV programmer. There is A LOT of checkboxes one has to hit before one takes on large scale industrial ventures. This shit doesn't get a proof of concept built up in a dorm room over the weekend, and it's user base isn't going viral to signal interest in the product if there is no product to use until you're already $4,000,000,000 in the hole....