If you have been fol­low­ing any major trends you’ll know that Elon Musk is in route to rule the world. Well, that may be an exag­ger­a­tion, per­haps at least Mars, but on a Earth like note, last year he pro­posed an idea of a trans­porta­tion method so futur­is­tic that only some­one crazy or super moti­vat­ed would con­tem­plate it. It turns out some­one may be both and that orga­ni­za­tion goes by the name For­ma­tion 8.   So what is this futur­is­tic idea and who is For­ma­tion 8? Read on!

For­ma­tion 8 is an invest­ment firm found­ed by Joe Lons­dale, Bri­an Koo and Jim Kim, back in 2011. So far they’ve done a supe­ri­or job of pick­ing some major mon­ey gen­er­at­ing enter­pris­es with its first fund. They just so hap­pen to include RelateIQ, which Sales­force bought for $390 mil­lion, and Ocu­lus, which Face­book bought for $2 bil­lion last year. When they start­ed they had eight employ­ees at launch, and now close to 30 peo­ple wan­der about the office give or take. Let’s not for­get the invest­ments made in com­pa­nies Wish, Radius, Learn­Sprout, Leeo, and Yel­lo Mobile.

For­ma­tion 8 is look­ing for “indus­try-trans­form­ing com­pa­nies” no mat­ter what their sit­u­a­tion is. So in order to offer more than cash to their prospects they plan on hook­ing up their poten­tials with the right over­seas man­u­fac­tur­ers, name­ly part­ners in Asia; where they just so hap­pen to have a “in”. They also plan on bang­ing out their busi­ness-devel­op­ment team in in Seoul, Sin­ga­pore, Shang­hai and Beijing.

The whole idea is that they use their con­nec­tion in Asia so the com­pa­nies it invests in can find part­ners for man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. The firm was found­ed on the premise of con­nect­ing Sil­i­con Val­ley entre­pre­neurs with Asian part­ners. To do so they’ve opened offices in Korea, Sin­ga­pore, Bei­jing and Shang­hai. Jim Kee says “We want to iden­ti­fy the best poten­tial part­ners to help these com­pa­nies grow,.. Not only can we iden­ti­fy these com­pa­nies, but… we can link those com­pa­nies to the very best dis­tri­b­u­tion part­ners and man­u­fac­tur­ing partners.”

For­ma­tion 8 is devel­op­ing their sec­ond fund and in doing so is bring­ing in some new blood. Not to men­tion $550 mil­lion dol­lars in new invest­ments. The firm recent­ly added for­mer Matrix and Khosla Ven­tures part­ner Shirish Sathaye to its invest­ment team, as well as bring­ing on vet­er­an Sil­i­con Val­ley investor Pierre Lam­ond as an advi­sor. Sathaye has been in the tech scene for near­ly 30 years, he moved his way up the ranks of var­i­ous tech firms until he became VP of engi­neer­ing at Alteon Web­Sys­tems, which was acquired by Nor­tel a while back.

It turns out that Sathaye enjoyed work­ing with a team, Sathaye will be reunit­ed with some peo­ple he had known from his days at Khosla — most notably Kim, Gideon Yu and new For­ma­tion 8 advi­sor Pierre Lam­ond. This is what made him join the squad. On top of this Lior Susan will be join­ing the firm to help lead its invest­ments in the hard­ware sec­tor. Suasan is from from Flex­tron­ics, a com­pa­ny that made invest­ments in 28 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, but their con­tri­bu­tion was more about help­ing those star­tups get their prod­ucts made.

Susan’s role will be to iden­ti­fy, invest in, and advis­ing emerg­ing hard­ware star­tups for the firm.
Susan will be look­ing to help sta­trups get through the BS of get­ting in to the mar­ket; “hard­ware is grow­ing fast and there’s a short­age of smart investors in the space,” Susan said. “We believe that to write a check is a com­mod­i­ty.” By con­trast, Susan believes he can help star­tups fig­ure out those process­es. Don’t think for one sec­ond there is any exper­i­men­tal ground to cov­er, For­ma­tion 8 is no ama­teur — after all, it was one of the investors in Ocu­lus VR before that com­pa­ny was acquired by Facebook.

But it will be look­ing to ramp up its invest­ments in the fast-grow­ing seg­ment. So why should you give any con­sid­er­a­tion about all this non­sense I’ve been spout­ing!? Right here, Elon Musk gave the world the designs to build trans­porta­tion that could one day trav­el the Hyper­loop at speeds of up to 760 mph (1,220 km/h). Musk stat­ed that it could get pas­sen­gers from Los Ange­les to San Fran­cis­co in just 30 min­utes, accord­ing to Musk, who out­lined the basic design of the sys­tem in a paper post­ed to the SpaceX web­site in August 2013.

On For­mu­la 8’s Web­site: Hyperloop

We will move peo­ple and car­go at speeds nev­er thought pos­si­ble. We will make the world small­er, clean­er and more efficient.

We are devel­op­ing the tech­nol­o­gy and hard­ware to make hyper­loop a real­i­ty. We design, build and test every aspect of the world’s next trans­porta­tion sys­tem — Hyper­loop. We are grow­ing a world class team to solve and exe­cute every aspect of this bold vision. We are led by a dis­tin­guished board of direc­tors and are finan­cial­ly backed by lead­ing investors For­ma­tion 8, Sher­pa Ven­tures, Zhen Cap­i­tal, David O. Sacks and others.

Well there you have it. For­mu­la 8, who has done great busi­ness entre­pre­neur­ial pics one after the oth­er is about to invest whole­heart­ed­ly in an Elon Musk idea, WHAT!!!! You know if you’re look­ing for work you bet­ter be send­ing resumes to For­mu­la 8, because guess what, they are hir­ing like crazy right now. Send your resume!