Meanwhile, a group of Musk’s own Sp

Meanwhile, a group of Musk’s own SpaceX engineers have been agitating to get in on the action. So in January Musk announced cryptic plans to fund the construction of a hyperloop test track in Texas, with no date specified. Just as Musk “open-sourced” his initial hyperloop concept in 2013, he says he plans to make the track, which will be designed for scaled-down capsules, available to any group that wants to test a design.

The vision for the Texas test track is something out of Star Wars–pod racers flying through the air, would-be rebel forces facing off against the Empire. Which isn’t a bad analogy for this whole nascent business. “We’re peering into a process that hasn’t happened before,” says Pishevar. “It has risk, but this is an idea that can change the world.”

Sci-fi writers and other dreamers have long envisioned fast, tubular travel. Rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard in 1909 wrote a paper that wasn’t too far off from Musk’s proposal. In 1972 Robert Salter of the RAND Corp. conceived a supersonic transcontinental underground railway called the Vactrain. Shervin Pishevar was one of those dreamers. Back in the dot-com era he floated an idea called Pipex, a network of pneumatic tubes that would shuttle important documents around San Francisco. It didn’t go anywhere.

But Pishevar has. Mention his name around Silicon Valley and you might well get an eye roll. A big-hearted oversharer quick with hugs, tears and humble-brags, he drops the names of celebrity friends (Jay Z, Edward Norton, Sean Penn) likes dimes in a jukebox.

“He’s unquestionably a promoter,” says one Valley investor who’s done deals with him. “But there are many good things that come from being a promoter.” Ask anyone at Menlo Ventures, where Pishevar engineered one of the $4 billion venture firm’s greatest investments ever, in a then-small-but-growing taxi app called Uber.

Pishevar was initially turned down by Uber and its backers when it closed its second round of funding at the end of 2011. Pishevar was giving a talk in Algeria when he got a call from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, saying he was back in if he could come meet Kalanick in Dublin. Pishevar grabbed the next flight to Ireland. “I didn’t really know Shervin, [but] I was getting e-mails from him and intros from everybody he knows,” Kalanick told FORBES in 2012. “I met with him because I had to.” The two hit it off, walking the streets of Dublin for hours. They signed a term sheet in the wee hours of the morning. Menlo left with an estimated 8% of Uber, at a valuation of $290 million. The company is now worth $42 billion. “I always tell people: Lesson number one: Get on that plane,’” says Pishevar, whose Uber and other holdings are worth about $500 million.