My Mom suggested I start a coin where each coin is backed/tethered to one of the thousands of Beanie Babies in her closet. I told her the majority of cryptocurrency traders are too young to get the joke so it wouldn't get much traction. Then again Dogecoin started as an obscure joke and it now has $300Million+ market cap.

There is no ICO. Coin goes directly to competing data scientists. And that coin can be used to increase earnings of the data scientist depending on the consistency of their model.

How is the coin value jumpstarted, then? Who do the scientists sell the tokens to for real money?

People have been going to the slack asking for data scientist to sell them their tokens. Bidding was up to around $20/coin.

The main point, though, is that data scientists don't have to sell the coin. They can stake coin against their models to earn additional USD. If their model performs better than chance, then they get their NMR back to stake the next round. If they are also competitive wrt confidence in their consistency then they also get some additional prize money that is only available to staking participants.

If they are overconfident and do not do better than chance then the coin they staked is destroyed.

But there was an initial sale of the coins right?

All these cryto ico things are premined or centrally allocated in a way where they get a cut. If you have access to the printing press, then you make all the money, no matter what happens with the currency.

Sure, maybe they gave away some of the coins to datascientists, but I am sure they kept a healthly cut for themselves.

No initial ICO. Only way NMR is earned is competing.