The ambitious company with 50 employees has just announced that former Cisco president Rob Lloyd will take the helm as the company’s first Chief Executive Officer.
Who is Rob Lloyd and the Hyperloop is real?
To call Rob Lloyd a Cisco veteran is to risk understatement. He joined Cisco in 1994 leaving the company in July as its president. Most believe his decision to leave was a result of being looked over when the company announced that Chuck Robbins would take over the CEO position from John Chambers and not Lloyd.
When Lloyd left Cisco he left those he worked with a departing letter that used a Wayne Gretzky quote, “We have learned how to skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is, or where we want it to be.” That alone could have gotten him his new job as the hyperloop looks to become a reality.
Hyperloop Technologies hopes to have a working test track by the end of 2016 or early 2017 at the latest. That’s going to cost money and involve a fair bit of “skating to where the puck is going.” Earlier this year, Hyperloop Technologies raised $11 million and is presently looking to find another $80 million in a second funding round.
Lloyd’s first letter as CEO
Hyperloop Tech believes that the transportation industry is worth $154 trillion over the next 20 years and this was addressed by Lloyd in a blog post today.
“Hyperloop is going to build partnerships with some of the largest engineering, construction and transportation companies in the world. We will embrace a design/build/transfer and operate business model, and will create a powerful ecosystem to quickly deliver the Hyperloop platform.,” he wrote. He added: “Hyperloop is a global company, and has been from day one. There are so many tangible opportunities to transform countries and economies.”
And his thoughts weren’t limited to a blog post.
“This will be an enterprise relationship business,” Lloyd told Re/code “We’ll be building partnerships with transportation systems. A large part of the success of Hyperloop’s technology is going to be maintaining a complex ecosystem.”
Hyperloop Tech knows a CEO isn’t enough
Hyperloop also announced that the company is adding Emily White to the board. White is the former Facebook and Google executive who left the COO position of Snapchat early this year. She will join a board full of experienced tech executives that includes Palantir founder Joe Londsdale and former PayPal COO David Sacks among others.
