Niklas: Hi and a huge welcome to you, my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today you're joining me for a chat with Bebop. Bebop is an Italian entrepreneur, futurist, impact investor and expert in advanced mobility technologies. And to me, he's best known for the Hyperloop. Bebop, so lovely to have you.

Bibop Gresta: It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Niklas: I think, and your beginnings are also very interesting. Not only are you working on one of the most interesting transportation initiatives of our time, but you also don't have a classical CV, I would say. ⁓ How did you end up in the Hyperloop?

Bibop Gresta: So well, you want to know the long story short, I started as a programmer because my father bought a computer and forbid me to touch it. It was ⁓ a Commodore 64, the first German console. And ⁓ I did everything I could to actually touch that computer. And ⁓ while I was studying it in secret, ⁓ My father was doing accountancy. At a certain point, he discovered me and he said, we did a deal. I can touch the computer if I help him with the accountancy. And that's where my programming career started. I was nine. Then he sent me to a course, one of the first course that was ⁓ held by IBM. I passed the course with the maximum results. So there was a multinational company that was a Canadian company that was searching for a programmer they knew about video and databases. And I happened to have studied both because databases with my father and video on my own. So they say, we don't have a programmer. IBM said, we don't have a programmer. We have this kid that knows what you need. And because probably they were Canadian, they asked my parents for permission. They said yes. So I started to do school and work to this multinational company. At the age of 18, I was already the head of programming of this multinational company. I was lucky enough to be shipped around the world. So I started to learn also how to speak English and ⁓ By the age of 18, I've had already my company. Then long story short, the company was very successful. I sold it to Telecom Italia during the new economy. It was 1998 before the Twin Towers collapse and the collapse also of the economy. I was able to sell it for a lot of money. I was at the right time at the right moment. So with that money, I created an incubator, was one of the first incubator of startups in Italy. the incubator, Digital Magix, is still a big deal. After 24 years, the incubator became the largest incubator in Italy. In 2000, 2010, we listed it in a stock exchange and I had my American dream. I always dreamed to go to America. So with the proceeds of the IPO, I said, bye bye, bye bye Europe. I want to try my American dream. For the first time I've had money and let's say the energy, I was 40. to actually try my American dream. I moved to California and at the beginning I was thinking about doing ⁓ something big for humanity, something that had an impact. I was looking for also, let's say, philanthropic work. In fact, I was one of the contributor of the Q-Rates project in San Francisco. We worked for a year. to find a cure with Professor McKeown, the University of San Francisco. But then I moved to Los Angeles because of a group of people that interested me in the startup community in Los Angeles. The group was called Meta and it was uniting CEOs and ⁓ prize winners. in Hollywood and had a very mix of people. And in that environment that the first time I heard my future co-founder was a German entrepreneur talking about the Hyperloop. So Elon Musk has published the white paper. It's 2013. I'm already two years in California, just moved to Los Angeles. And during a meeting of metal, ⁓ this German entrepreneur talked about ⁓ Elon Musk that published a white paper in a website called SpaceX and was proposing a new transportation system called the Hyperloop. And they published a white paper, open source, and this entrepreneur, the German entrepreneur, ⁓ published this white paper in his website. And it was a website that had a very innovative idea. He was allowing people from all over the world to actually participate in bleeding edge projects like the Hyperloop, giving in exchange their time. So instead of doing crowdfunding that was just starting, he was proposing a model of crowd sourcing. So he talked to me about the idea and at the beginning I was very arrogant. You know, when you are 20 years into startups, you think that you know everything about startups. And this guy was talking about paying people through shares in exchange of their work and create things like the Hyperloop. And I told him, listen, you're delusional. This is never gonna work. ⁓ and you're underestimating ⁓ what you need to do these kinds of ideas. And this shows you two things first. Investors are usually arrogant in the way they think they know innovation. And if you have a good idea, my first suggestion is never follow your investors' ideas, follow your idea. In that case, I was the investor. And the other side was my future co-founder. They had a great idea. But I didn't believe it. And I was completely shattering his idea. But two weeks later, this organization organized a hike in one of the mountains around Los Angeles. And for some reason, I had my Tesla that was in repair because someone bumped in my parking lot. And so I was without a car. So the organizer of the group says, listen, I can send you someone to pick you up. And then we go up in the mountain. I said, OK, thank you. And this guy, the German guy, was basically the guy who gave me a ride. And at the beginning, I was like, ⁓ my god, no. I have to talk about his thing again for an hour. But in reality, that was really the occasion where starting to talk about it, he made me change my idea on the opportunity. And the thing that made me change was this document that he had where there was the Elon Musk white paper that they published in the website, in the Cloud Source website. And what happened was magic. Basically, 100 people from 20 countries started to participate. And there were people from NASA, SpaceX, Boeing, aerospace, Lockheed Martin, MIT, Stanford. And each one of them were analyzing the Elon Musk white paper. And if it was doable, they were writing why. And if it wasn't, they were giving us two or three ideas on how to fix the problem. And I got intrigued because I said, listen, if this works, you're into something bigger than the Hyperloop. You're on a new generation of companies that can change everything because you don't have to raise money anymore. You can raise brains, right? So I said, you your pitch is terrible because you should have pitched... ⁓ Not that I don't need to raise money because I have all these people working for me. You could teach it, I have already accumulated $7 million of value without spending a penny. That's the perfect speech to sell your idea. And then we started to work together. And I literally didn't do anything else than the hypo for two months. Abandoned everything else. It became an obsession. And then I interviewed all these hundred people and I discovered that ⁓ 60 were not worth it, but 40 were the best of the best in the planet. There was the inventor of the passive levitation system inside Lawrence Livermore lab. that invented Indutrack, the only passive meditation system that was actually ⁓ a patented technology classified. And he was talking to us, you can use this. And also, I can help you declassify it, because I know everyone at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. Or someone from Label, the inventor of the vacuum pump, saying, we already have an Hyperloop. It's called the... a hard-on collider in Switzerland and we are working at 10 minus 10 Pascal while you need 10 minus 3 Pascal. So it's easier to build an hyperloop than what we have the 80 kilometer ring that works at 0.07 Pascal of pressure. So all these people were basically working for us for free in exchange of shares. And that's where my life changed completely because from there on, we developed an entire system. That's what I told Dirk. What I did without him knowing when I started to study Hyperloop was to do two things. First, I called my lawyer, Perkis Nkui, the lawyers of Google, and I said, can you check who owns the brand Hyperloop? And they came back after a week and say, wow, B, I think you're into something. We found a filing of SpaceX for intent of use for R &D. But in US, there's first to file, first to use. And you need to file in the category and use it, right? So. I said, file the shit out of the Hyperloop. I want everything. So I took the brand Hyperloop in 52 countries. And because we were the first, we actually still own the brand. I then, talking with Elon, we realized that the brand should not be owned by anyone. It should be open source. But at the time, we needed the brand because if you... incorporate a company and then someone else filed the trademark, you're basically, you cannot operate. And that's not my first rodeo. So I know how to do this. So I went back to, and then I called the Lawrence Livermore scientist that was writing us and I said, I want this patent. I want to buy it. And he said, well, it will cost you half a million dollars probably. I said, yeah, let's declassify it. Tell me what to do to declassify it. want it. And that's what I did. And then I went back to my future co-founder. said, Dirk, I think you found me for a reason. First, you need an organization because what you have now, it's a mess. Second, you need a partner that actually help you deliver that. And my first contribution as the future your future contributor is the trademark hyperloop and the patent that will allow you to actually do it. And that's how everything started.

Niklas: Yeah, it's really amazing. And I also, I find this crowdsourcing idea very intriguing because you probably get people who are really motivated by the mission. Because you will only see money if the stock options you're paid in gain value ⁓ and what you're building is successful. And if you don't believe in the broader vision and that it's achievable, you will never see money for the time you spend. Therefore, it's very clear that people are incentivized on the mission, which is, I think, brilliant for an early stage startup.

Bibop Gresta: Correct. And there's also another aspect. If you hire a scientist that now works in, let's say, NASA, okay, or Tesla, you hire this guy or girl, and all of a sudden, you need to recreate NASA and SpaceX to have him perform as it was inside SpaceX and NASA. I'm not saying that the value of a person is the company, but... You know, the same scientist, if he doesn't have a supercomputer to do this calculation, can't operate, right? So he's performing in NASA because he also can access a network and a supercomputer and other stuff that, you know, you can't reproduce outside NASA. So if he gets the permission to work with you in his spare time, because they're all authorized by the company, then you only take ⁓ that spare time, the 20 % of their time, for us, the rule was that they can work maximum 20 % of their time, not to violate any of their contract and obligation. So that was accepted by anyone. In fact, a lot of giant corporation has in their contract that they can actually work for pet projects that they like for 20 % maximum of their time. So we were taking advantage of that to actually propose something that was doable. And I always say you get the best of people in their best timing because it's not work for them, it's fun, right? And you don't need to take it out from their environment. That is the best of the world.

Niklas: Yeah, that, that I think is very true. And I also agree that the right environment will create, so the environment will shape people and also shape opportunities. It's probably also reasonable that the Hyperloop originated in Los Angeles in this area of Silicon Valley, where to this day, I think the really big ideas are born and brought to life, whatever you look at.

Bibop Gresta: Yes.

Niklas: And then how much did you profit off that environment when you were there? So now you got started.

Bibop Gresta: So I got started, ⁓ the environment is everything because you know in Europe what we don't have is that kind of ooze. They let these amazing plants grow and there is magic because you know we set up the office in a magic place. It's the art of where they call it Silicon Beach, but at that time there was nothing. There was only Yahoo, you know, and nothing else. We moved there, took the anger of Spruce Goose. I don't know if you saw the movie, The Aviator, okay? Where they did the giant aviation, the Spruce Goose, the airplane, you the wood airplane. So... that in there, all these hangars, they are completely dismissed. So we took one, we basically restructured it through a funny story that I wrote in my book. If any one of you wants to ⁓ read it, please send me an email. I will be happy to send you my book. And the beauty of it is that by magic, all these people, the contributor, came in Los Angeles to restructure the building, to meet each other. So after six months that we were working together, when we needed an office, all this crowd, let's say, also participated to what was the real start, kickstart of the first Hyperloop office of history. And that for me was magic because you have ⁓ Craig Hodgetts, the professor of UCSF that was a contributor, 83 years old, on a ladder to put signs of where his graphic department would be working together with the students from Oklahoma that took an airplane to actually help us. It was magic. was four days ⁓ of pure magic mounting IKEA drawers and cleaning the hangar. That is magic.

Niklas: I think there's magic in every beginning. So, and if it doesn't feel like magic, starting something new has to feel like magic. And then I think it really took off both on the fundraising side, but also scaling it globally. think you went to 40 countries, if I'm right.

Bibop Gresta: So yeah, the funny story was that we were starting to have a thousand curriculum a month. We set up a website that was collecting all this effort, but we was completely lacking of a juridical structure because imagine to have, to collect ⁓ people that was working for you for shares, but the contracts should have been of the local company that they were working for. So now you have a team of more than 500 people. After a couple of years, they were working from all over the world and they were basically, they needed to be... contractualized with the local contract of the nation they were working for. So it was becoming very complex. So we've had a giant law firm that helped us streamline this into something that was doable. In fact, after we did that, Harvard got interested about our story and they did two Harvard case study on us because we were able to transform this into an organization that was actually working as a company. that I don't, everyone, ⁓ if you read all the interviews that I did until now, everyone associated this idea to me. That's not true. I'm not the inventor of the crowdsourcing. I'm the one who created the structure for the crowdsourcing to happen. But the crowdsourcing was my business partner idea and was something that I absolutely thought it was a bad idea. So I have the opportunity to actually confirm every time I go into this topic that, you know, they say I'm the inventor of that, but I'm not. I absolutely was, was... ⁓ not convinced about it. But when then I was convinced, I found a way to do it.

Niklas: That's really nice. It's also really nice to say it, but I also think there are probably limits to what you can do with this crowdsourcing. would think that, for example, regarding operations or some topics, need to be more in-house. How did they change when the first project started to arise for Hyperloop? How far did you get with the contributor model? And when did you say we need to hire full-time people?

Bibop Gresta: So we started, as I told you, to have people from all over the world. I started to take flights around the world. ⁓ I created a small team. We were calling them Velociraptors. And our raptors were basically going all over the planet. We were in five different countries. I started to open offices because we started to receive also ⁓ investment from big groups. ⁓ First were industrial groups and then there were also some institutional. ⁓ We got money also from the Rockefellers and from other important families. So with this money we were scaling up very fast. We started to build the prototypes. In fact, we were the first one the first company to build a full-scale prototype in France of half a kilometer that was also followed by a full-scale capsule that we built that actually ⁓ sustained more than 10,000 full ⁓ outgassing cycle. So we did a lot of tests. were progressing, but we were realizing that, you know, there was a lot of countries where they were proposing feasibility studies. I was signing even contracts to actually have this feasibility study executed, but nobody was moving beyond the feasibility study. And we signed even two contracts where they were willing to go beyond, for example, UAE. ⁓ they obliged me to move to UAE because we partnered with Sheikh Falabi and Zayed Al-Nayan, the father of the ruler of the kingdom. But that was not enough to convince them to go in phase two to actually implement the technology. And there were different reasons. What I can say is that there's a big, let's say, pushed back by the legacy systems, they didn't realize at the beginning the opportunity that the iPhone can bring to the traditional rail. This is not diminishing the market of a rail system. It can amplify by 10 per. Imagine that worldwide the ⁓ rail systems are an average of 15, 20 % of goods and people ⁓ that are transported by the traditional rail. The rest is all by ⁓ road, cars, trucks, then boats and air. But so very few percentage of goods and people are moving by train. and the lines are completely saturated on the rail system. If we look at the transportation industry by road, it's even worse. The majority of the road system are already overflown. And if you add a lane to an highway, you are increasing by 1.7 % of traffic each lane you add. for a phenomenon called concentration. I'm not saying anything new. An average urban planner knows it since the first year of university. So roads are not a solution. Trains are a solution, but we have a very few possibility to grow. What we realized is that ⁓ hyperloop can be built on top, on a side, or on the bottom of a rail. So it can occupy the same space of the rail, but it can optimize it because every tube can transport up to 21 million people a year and can transport 7,000 TUM standard container. the capability, the throughput of an hyperloop can increase dramatically the flow of goods and people. The problem was that the legacy transportation were really reluctant. And it's only based on fear. There was nothing scientifically ⁓ against the Hyperloop. Every time you go into the science behind the Hyperloop, even an average engineer understands that is dramatically more efficient than a traditional ⁓ transportation system. you know, likely enough, we were able to prove it through different feasibility studies. But every time you look at skeptical people about the Hyperloop or, you know, people in the engineering side that talks bad about the Hyperloop, when you dip into this These are usually people that talks about the Elon Musk white paper. So nothing, the Elon Musk white paper was a suggestion that was lacking all the fundamentals to build an Hyperloop. And we identified that 14 years ago when he published it. Or someone that has the vested interest in the rail system. But to tell you the truth, right now, The Italian project that we are working on, he's now backed mainly by the rail system. So our biggest sustainer, our biggest sponsor in Italy is the rail industry now. Because after we did the feasibility study with them, that was the most complex feasibility study ever done in the history of Hyperloop. It involved 141 engineers. 11 companies, five universities, the biggest construction company in Italy, the biggest aerospace company in Italy, and the real system in Italy. So every time you study Hyperloop with the right player on the table in the consortium, then you realize that there's no game for the other transportation. And there's technical reason why it should not work. That doesn't mean that from day one we will hit 1,223 kilometers per hour. That's not the selling proposition of the Hyperloop. That's another thing that you read in the news. It's all about speed. It's all about scaring people with a missile that travels inside a small tube to scare people. But there's scientifically proven that can stop an hyperloop to being built because we are doing much more difficult science on, for example, an airplane. An airplane is 10 times more difficult than an hyperloop. There's a lot of things that can go wrong in an airplane. If I tell you how it works in an airplane, you will never fly on an airplane. If you tell me... create a pitch of 10 slides to sell me an airplane. You will never buy it. ⁓

Niklas: Yeah, I generally think that. So what I also often underestimate is the reluctance of systems to change. There are oftentimes just too many people who have something to lose. And for me, when it's obvious that something should happen, because it seems to be obvious if you just think about it without the existing system, ⁓ then it should happen today. But systems are just very reluctant to change. And I think that especially people who who build stuff or build companies. At least me, I am often on the side of thinking it should happen, but it doesn't happen because the system is just reluctant to adapt in a certain way at a certain point in time. regarding the Hyperloop, I think it's very interesting because the promise is we travel. at the speed of an airplane or the speed of sound in a tube, ⁓ which connects cities by ⁓ transportation that is not an airplane. Hamburg Munich, for example, I would say an hour roughly distance if you're in Germany or other big metropolitan areas. And commute time is something that most people would love to. Optimize for if you can shave off an hour of airport time or an hour of transport time in general. think that is a really nice value proposition for people.

Bibop Gresta: It's not the only proposition because you are doing it consuming one fourth of the energy and you're doing it profitably. So profitably. So it means that not profitably because you need to reach the IPOLF company, but because these systems are run usually by the government and the government pays this system by our taxes. So you don't... tell the people if you're a high-speed rail operator that in reality the capex of the entire system has been paid by the taxpayers' money. And when they say that these systems are profitable, they're lying because they're subsidizing at least half of the ticket by taxpayers' money. So if you... If you're an inhabitant of Europe or Germany or even China, if they don't protest, you need to know that ⁓ every passenger that is traveling right now from Monaco to Berlin, you're paying half of the ticket. Germany is not the worst country where the high-speed rail has been built. Germany actually has a, let's say, average to low cost per kilometer. It depends where you go. The high-speed rail cost differently. From Spain, that is the lowest, to Japan, that is the highest. There's an incredible range from 17 million per kilometer to 250, we think. because that's the actual number that you can assume from the balance sheet of the government. But you don't know how many costs are being spread all over the value chain. But these are the costs. So to have a system that is actually bringing you from point A to point B at the speed of sound in the future, now we are certifying it for an average of 600 kilometers per hour. Average means There are moments where it goes faster, moments that it goes lower, but that's the certification that we will obtain with the Italian project. And then, know, theoretically, if you have a straight line, straight enough, for example, underground, you can go three, four times faster than the speed of sound without feeling it, you know, because you're accelerating and decelerating slow enough, you don't feel the speed. So there is no limit of the speed, but the most interesting part is not speed, it's efficiency. So you do that by spending few money to build and less money to ⁓ operate. And that's the selling proposition of the Hyperloop.

Niklas: It's really interesting and you're already making the transition to a topic I would love to hear the status of and that is the Italian project that you're working on. What is the route and what is the current state?

Bibop Gresta: You see how I age, I'm aging fast, white hair, because it's so complicated. I'm happy to say ⁓ that we finished phase one. We are going to publish the results of the phase one, that was the feasibility study, as to remember ⁓ to your viewers what was all about. ⁓ I was able to actually convince the government to create a public tender of 800 million euro to build ⁓ at least 10 kilometers of a certification line between Venice and Padua. And the goal is to build a working hyperloop of at least 10 kilometers that can certify people and passenger movement. to start to build the biggest, the longest ⁓ Hyperloop network ⁓ existing. So this is the project. We want the tender that we participated with the consortium ⁓ with WeBuild, Leonardo and Hyperloop TT and Rina, the certification agency. We want this tender. And we completed phase one. The phase two that is going to start this year is about detail designing the line to actually go into construction. So we have 18 months maximum to design the line and then 36 months to build it. So the good news is that we are by tender four years away to actually have a working Hyperloop ready. The bad news is that, you know, only to pass from phase one to phase two, the Italian government is taking one year because, of course, in the meantime, the government changed, the governor of Venice changed, and the CEO of the Ferrovia changed. it's all, and every time these people change, you have to restart from scratch. you, sometimes the new person. doesn't like what the old person did and they need to change something because it has to become his project instead of the previous project and so on and so forth. don't know if it's only Italy, but Europe, I would say Europe is, the problem that we have in Europe is mainly of this kind, bureaucracy, politics, we are still... too much ingrained. And this is a big opportunity, I think, because in the case of the Hyperloop, it would be very complicated right now to start an Hyperloop project in US. Or you are in a monarchy or dictatorship like in China. China has put two billion in an Hyperloop. They built two kilometers of work in Hyperloop. They beat the world record of speed on the ground, 1,000 kilometers rich. They're building now 20 kilometers, but their goal is to build the biggest network in Asia. And I have to admit, this is the first time I publicly say that they are more advanced than us in terms of levitation and propulsion development. They did it very inefficiently. but it works and they have it. We're still in the detailed design phase. Probably they don't, if someone dies there, they have a lot of people. We, in the contrary, we need to be very careful. But honestly, in China, they are now innovating a lot, by my calculation. They created a pod that has at least 15 gigawatts on board. And it's impressive. We don't have that. Two linear motor of 15 gigawatts to reach that speed. So, chapeau to the Chinese. We have only to learn. And slowly but steadily, this is happening also in Europe. We have several startups. ⁓ in the hyperloop space because in the meantime there are other companies that work on the same project and we are working together actually with the other European startups that are trying to do the same and hopefully we will join in the effort in Europe.

Niklas: I think we just need to be competitive on these things. think that is just very important to not give up, to stay in the competition and try to win the race. think we have a lot of opportunity in Europe. We have a lot of great engineering, technical talent. We are very large market. It's just really important that we focus on moving forward and winning because we generally have a good foundation. That's what I would say.

Bibop Gresta: Listen, in Germany, there is a state that actually has, I spoke with the senator and I was there at the meeting that they organized. They are going to put a hundred million of state government money on an Hyperloop project. And it will be an open tender and we want to participate together with the German Hyperloop. to actually bring this project to success. I don't think we need to disperse all this money. And to the people, always like here, every time there's a government that actually is trying to do innovation, there's always someone that says, ⁓ but we don't have, the tram are bad in my country. Why don't we fix the tram and the underground system instead of throwing money at the hyperloop? You need to understand that Look in at the future like this, you will never have any innovation, ever. Because you are stuck in the past, and I'm sure they're allocating as much money as they can to fix the tram system. But this is nothing to do with that. We should have a budget allocation that involves fixing the old shit that doesn't work. And this is, you know, holly. Nobody should touch it. But also, deserve some part of it. There is a super small tiny piece of budget to invest in innovation. And this is crucial because if we don't do that, we will not stop. We will go back. It's impossible to stop. The future is moving. So if you stop, in reality, you are going back. And this is ⁓ a message to everyone that doesn't believe in innovation. ⁓ Wake up. Wake up.

Niklas: Yeah, I think these are really nice final words. And I think we all have to believe that the future is better than today. To wake up and be happy in the morning, which is really important. Bebop, was so nice to have you on this podcast. Have a nice day.

Bibop Gresta: It's pleasure.