Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, tells the story of how a high school dropout turned coupon-site entrepreneur taught himself aerodynamics from textbooks, crashed a Virgin Galactic rollout to get a meeting with Richard Branson, and walked onto YC demo day with $5 billion in letters of intent for a supersonic jet that hadn’t been built yet. Along the way he and the MFM hosts dig into first principles thinking, the bystander effect hiding trillion-dollar opportunities in plain sight, congestion pricing for roads, and what it takes to not give up over an 11-year startup.
Speakers: Blake Scholl (founder, Boom Supersonic), Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Opening Hook [00:00:00]
Blake: I look in the mirror and I’m like, fat and dumb. And I’m like, if I want to have any chance of doing this, I have to go to the startup CEO equivalent of the gym — because at that point I don’t think I could have sold a dollar bill for 50 cents. And I didn’t know jack about airplanes. So I’m like, okay, I need to become that person.
From Coupons to Supersonic Jets [00:00:20]
Shaan: So how does a guy who’s slaying coupons on the internet become the founder of a supersonic jet company? Which by the way, the one-liner of what you’re making is: a commercial jet that flies 1,300 miles an hour versus 500 miles an hour.
Blake: Right.
Shaan: It takes you from where to where, and how much time? Just give us the numbers.
Blake: That’s what actually matters, right? It takes you from New York to London in just over three and a half hours. Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half. LA to Sydney about eight and a half. And that’s version one. We want to go faster after that.
Shaan: Amazing. So walk us through the backstory.
Blake: My backstory was I’ve loved airplanes since I was a kid, but because there was basically no innovation happening in aerospace, it never occurred to me to have a career there. So I fell in love with computers and the internet. My first job out of school was Amazon in 2001. My parents didn’t understand it because they were like, “Hey, we got you a computer science degree. Why do you want to work at a bookstore?” But it was an amazing time to be there.
After that I was part of one of the very early mobile app companies. And then I wanted to do my own startup, so I looked at my resume and said, I know e-commerce and I know mobile, so I should work on mobile e-commerce. And we built this barcode scanning game — which, like, if you make a list of the most important things in the universe, least important, you have to dig a deeper hole to find where “barcode scanning game” goes.
I would get up in the morning working on that thing and I was super depressed. I’d think, I’m going to screw this thing up, all the investors are going to lose their money, no one’s ever going to hire me again. I was afraid of failure. And I’m looking at what we’re building and I’m like, wait — I’m building an app for people who shop in stores and I’m an e-commerce nerd. I don’t even like stores. What am I doing?
So when we had a chance to sort of aqui-hire the company to Groupon — our investors got a return, I got a little money, I got my escape fantasy out of a business I didn’t love — it was a huge win. And I spent my couple years at Groupon reflecting on that and thinking about what I’d learned.
One thing I knew was I definitely wanted to found again. I’d started my first company in my parents’ basement in high school. The founder bug had bit me. But I hated waking up in the morning thinking, what am I doing? And I never wanted to do that again.
And a thing I knew about myself is no matter what I was doing as a founder, I was going to push myself to my personal red line — the max I’m capable of. That’s going to feel the same no matter what I’m doing. But what won’t feel the same is what I’m doing and how motivated I am by it. And I wanted to pick a startup idea where I would never regret starting, no matter how hard the day was.
So I organized all my ideas by how happy I would be if they worked. I’d gotten my pilot’s license by then. And I never understood why no one had picked up where Concorde had left off. I felt like, okay, I’ve got to look at that, get it out of my system, and move on to the next thing.
The Brainstorm: What Else Was on the List? [00:05:00]
Shaan: What were the other ideas on that brainstorm? We asked Paul Buchheit this question before he started Airbnb — he was talking about how he was going to make the food version of Diet Coke, basically calories that tasted good but had no calories. And he was working on synthetic food. And then he’s like, actually, never mind, I’m going to make weapons.
Sam: His other idea was a private prison where you only get paid if the inmate gets out and never comes back, right? That’s actually a good idea.
Shaan: Yeah, on the cutting-room floor it’s pretty good too. So what was your brainstorm process? What were the other ideas?
Blake: Looking back, the alternate ideas I had then are not as good as the alternate ideas I have now. I think I had something like a rental car company that would pick you up like an Uber. I still kind of wish that existed, but I don’t think it has long legs. It’s not actually a good idea.
One of my general premises — especially reflected on in the Boom story — is there are a lot of great unsolved problems hiding in plain sight that nobody’s working on. And I think it’s an artifact of the bystander effect.
For anybody who doesn’t know that term: the bystander effect is the effect where if someone falls over having a heart attack on the street and you’re the only one around, you’re highly likely to run over, call 911, take care of them. But if the street’s crowded, everyone tends to think, I’m sure the people who need to know already know — and it gets ignored. The paradoxical effect is there can be a hundred people and the guy having a heart attack is completely ignored.
And I think this plays out in the business world. In the Valley we tend to get told, if your idea is any good there are already several other good teams working on it. And if nobody else is working on it, there’s probably something wrong with the idea. But if you really play that thinking out, what it means is unique things tend to get left hiding in plain sight. And actually the more compelling they are, the more likely they are to be ignored — because the more everybody assumes somebody else would already be doing it if it were possible.
Supersonic flight is like this. Supersonic flight would obviously be good. Nobody’s doing it. It must be impossible or a bad idea. And there are other things in that category — like traffic. I don’t think I’m unaware of anybody attacking traffic in the right way, and it’s a very solvable problem. It could be a trillion-dollar company.
Sam: It’s funny, because the only person who comes to mind who attacks problems hidden in plain sight is Elon.
Blake: Yeah. I was talking to an investor who knows Elon and he said, the thing I always admired about Elon was that he just saw the trillion-dollar idea on the floor that the rest of us were walking by.
He goes, any of us who grew up fascinated with space — the idea of rockets that go to Mars was not a secret, it wasn’t something nobody had ever thought of. But we all just sort of were blind to it. We assumed either somebody else must be doing it, NASA must be doing it, or it’s too hard, too expensive, can’t be done. We all just ignored it.
The Traffic Problem [00:10:00]
Blake: Elon has a sort of bone to pick with traffic too — I think he’s doing it with the Boring Company. But I think Boring Company solves half the problem.
Imagine for a second if grocery stores worked like roads do — meaning you pay for them with your taxes, and once you’ve paid your taxes, you feel entitled to use them whenever you want, as much as you want. What would happen to grocery stores? There’d always be a line out the door and the shelves would always be empty. That’s what we’ve done with roads. We pay for them once with our taxes and then we feel entitled to use them as much as we want.
What you need for roads is a price system — a dynamic price system. Imagine you open up your maps app and put in your destination, and not only are there different routes and different times, there are different times and different prices. Fast and expensive, or slow and cheap.
New York did a baby experiment with this — they put a fee to go into Manhattan below 60th Street. Are you familiar with that, Shaan?
Shaan: I heard they were doing this. It was recent, right?
Sam: I’m here right now. It’s basically $12 — between the streets of 60th on down. And it actually shows up on Google Maps now. If you type in you’re on 70th Street and you’ve got to get somewhere on 50th Street, it shows you the threshold, and when you cross through, boom, $12. And I’m walking around here downtown and it is so much quieter than it ever was. So much quieter, so much less traffic. The other day I was downtown and I remember standing in the middle of the street going, “Where is everyone?” It’s so much better.
This would be so effective. But I would have guessed it’s really unpopular to implement. Once it’s implemented, maybe people see the benefits, but who got that through? And why is nobody talking about this really important experiment happening in New York?
Blake: Oh, it’s hugely controversial. Even Trump was like, you’re not going to do this. The governor got involved.
I think the reason it’s struggling is they solved half the problem but not the other half, and they did it in the most coarse-grained way possible. They put in place a usage fee, but they didn’t rebate the other taxes. So there’s a whole argument: “Hang on, I paid for the roads already. Why are you charging me twice? This is a tax increase.”
And especially as the world moves to EVs and some roads are paid for with licensing fees and some with gas taxes — now is the perfect time to fix this, to go to usage-based pricing. But you’ve got to get rid of the other taxes, otherwise you’ve given every populist in the world a good reason to say no.
The other thing is the go-to-market challenges are way bigger than the product challenges. There’ll be an envy element — “All the rich people are passing me.” But I think what you could do is basically rebate money from the people who are paying for fast to the people who want cheap. Think of it as: every time Elon cuts me off, he has to pay me. There’s cash flow from the people who are willing to pay for the highest access to the roads, to the people who actually value the cheapest access. And then there’s a technology layer, an operating layer, and whoever builds the system gets their 10% off the top. That ends up being an enormous business.
By the way, if somebody wants to start this, I will be your adviser. I will be your champion. I will help raise money for it. I desperately want someone to build this.
Why Wasn’t Anyone Doing Supersonic? [00:17:00]
Shaan: So Boom has raised $700 million. You guys had a flight in the past year where one of your engines broke the sound barrier. Huge deal. Take us back. What was the original question in your mind — why isn’t there supersonic?
Blake: The question was: why did Concorde fail, and what would you have to do for it not to have failed?
Shaan: Were you on Wikipedia and you just came across it, or were you already a flying fan?
Blake: I was a flying fan, and then yeah, I go to Wikipedia and read extensively. The facts make it obvious. Here’s a 100-seat airplane with 100 uncomfortable seats and — adjusted for inflation — a $20,000 fare. You can’t fill the seats, you can’t make any money. Obvious.
But the next question turned out to be the key question: why was Concorde so expensive? The answer: poor fuel economy. That kicked off a vicious cycle — poor fuel economy led to high fares, which led to low utilization, which led the fares to have to be even higher.
The next question was: how much would you have to beat Concorde’s 1960s technology by in order to match the fuel economy of a flatbed business class seat? Because eventually it’d be great to do this for everybody, but as a starting point, business class is huge. And you don’t need the bed if the flight’s not long — you can have a better bed at home.
And the answer was: less than 10%. You’d have to beat Concorde by less than 10% to match the total economics of a flatbed business class seat.
Shaan: What? Head explode. Give people a point of reference — how much did you know about planes when you started this?
Blake: I’m a high school dropout. I did graduate from college, but my degree is computer science. The closest thing I had to an aviation credential was a pilot’s license. But this stuff isn’t actually that complicated at this level. The fuel burn data is all on Wikipedia. You can calculate fuel burn per seat mile — that turns out to be the key metric. You pull seat configurations from SeatGuru, measure how much of the plane is business class, how many seats, allocate out the floor area. And you’d have to do about 10% better than Concorde to match the total economics.
Then the next question was: how much better is Boeing’s latest airplane versus the one that came before it? And the answer was something like 20%. I’m like, wait — you can’t find 10% over 50 years? I don’t know anything about the details of the technology, but it seemed plausible.
Working Backwards from 2050 [00:22:00]
Blake: So at this point I was like, hang on, there’s a fact here that caught my attention. I’m going to spend a lot of days trying to get smart on it. This seems plausible in the face of it, but I’m on the far left side of the Dunning-Kruger curve. I don’t even know what I don’t know.
So I imagined myself in the future. It’s 2050. I’m retired. I’m sitting on the beach. I had nothing to do with supersonic flight, but I’m just reading the aviation history books. What do I think they say? Do they say we’re still flying subsonic? I really hope not. Hopefully they say we’re going supersonic now, and they tell the story of how it happened.
How do I think that story goes? Does it go — after 150 years of not building a supersonic jet, Boeing finally did it? No. Business history never goes like that. Big companies don’t suddenly get enlightened and build disruptive things. The more plausible history: it was a startup that did it. A startup founder who didn’t come from the entrenched industry where everybody believed it was impossible.
And what would that outsider have to look like? They’d have to have built a dream team — really good at attracting great people. A great storyteller, great at persuasion. Technically deep to be credible with all the relevant audiences.
And I look in the mirror and I’m like, is that me? I’ve got the outside-the-industry box, but the rest of it — no. And so I’m like, what would it take to attract this 10-out-of-10 smoke show team? They probably need to be good-looking, great personality, funny, nice teeth — that’s me, I could do that.
And so I look in the mirror and I’m like, fat and dumb, and if I want to have any chance of doing this, I have to go to the startup CEO equivalent of the gym. I didn’t think I could have sold a dollar bill for 50 cents. And I didn’t know jack about airplanes. So I need to become that person.
My mental model for myself: you’ve probably seen those how-it’s-made videos with pasta — there’s this big mound of dough and this giant press pushing it through a tiny little hole, and a noodle gets extruded out the other side. I’m the dough. There’s this hole. I need to extrude myself into the right shape to actually be able to do this.
So I went back and started taking remedial calculus and physics, because I hadn’t had any since high school. And I couldn’t get through an aerodynamics textbook without more math. So I read the aerodynamics textbooks and did the problem sets. If I couldn’t figure them out, I threw them out and got a different book.
The Family Setup: Basement, Textbooks, One Year [00:27:00]
Shaan: Were you not working at this point? You had left Groupon. How long was that not-working time, and how much money did you have? Were you like, rich-rich, or I-got-two-years-before-I-need-a-job?
Blake: I had one year where I didn’t have to have a job. In my mind, I had budgeted for like two failed startups before I would have to go get a big company job. I was like, let me give myself — I’ve got two shots on goal before I’m working for the man again.
I budgeted my salary replacement money and the seed money I’d put into the company myself. I had enough savings to do that twice before I needed a job. And at the time I was married, I had three young kids — three under 18 months.
Sam: Oh my god. You had some twins?
Blake: Yeah, I had twins.
Sam: And would you kiss your kids goodbye in the morning and then just go into the other room?
Blake: You say that tongue in cheek, but that’s kind of how it went. I had an office in the basement. I’d give them hugs and kisses and go downstairs, sit at my desk, and read and do problem sets all day.
Sam: And your friends for that year — they’re like, “What are you working on?” And you’re like, “I’m kind of toying with this idea of launching a commercial jet company.” And you could just watch the eyeballs roll back.
Blake: This was 2014. My wife said, “Okay honey, you’ve got a year to screw around with this, and then I expect you to get a job.”
Sam: This is like before startups were cool. Like now if you say you’re working on something like that, you post on Twitter and people are like, “Oh, that’s awesome.” In 2014 it was still a little — hard tech startups weren’t cool. There was SpaceX, and that was it. That was the era of Airbnb for blank, Uber for this.
Blake: The only thing out there as a reference point for anything like this was SpaceX. And it was still pretty early — SpaceX had gotten to orbit and was working on the Falcon 9. I remember thinking, that guy went from PayPal to rockets. Rockets sound harder than airplanes, so this must be possible.
Turns out I think actually airplanes are harder than rockets — because safety is an issue from day one, versus rockets where you can blow them up and iterate. You can’t do that to an airplane with a person on board.
And people often ask me, if I knew how hard it was going to be, would I still start? They assume the answer is no. The answer is definitely yes.
First Principles and Knowing When You’re Confused [00:33:00]
Shaan: So you talked about the pasta dough and the hole, and you talked about working backwards from the end — retired in 2050, reading the history books, what does it say. Do you have a frame or phrase for that way of thinking? Because it sounds simple but it’s very rare. I don’t do that and I want to do more of that.
Blake: It’s first principles thinking. And it’s the most — I think there are two mental skills that are really valuable. One is first principles thinking, and the other is knowing when you’re confused versus when you’re clear. If you have both of those, you can do anything.
Shaan: Explain both of them.
Blake: First principles thinking: are there a bunch of data points and I’m going to draw a line through them and extrapolate? Or am I going to understand the equation that led to those data points being where they are? Am I pattern matching or am I understanding causality?
Going to causality is really important and most people don’t do it. They operate on rules of thumb, which are fine so long as you’re doing things that have already been done before, or not too far from them. But if you want to do anything new or different, if you want to break from conventional wisdom, you have to understand what’s really happening.
So the pattern matching on supersonic is: Concorde failed, people weren’t willing to pay more for supersonic flight. Therefore it doesn’t work — it was an economic failure. You can find that in a zillion articles on the internet. But hang on — what was really going on? What were the actual economics? What’s the actual passenger preference?
Shaan: Don’t accept a qualitative answer to a quantitative question. I actually think that quote is more profound than the time you just gave it. What exactly does that mean?
Blake: People make all kinds of claims about issues that are measurable without measuring anything. To pull on this example: supersonic flight costs more, passengers prefer cheaper flights, you have to solve sonic boom to fly over land for the market to be big enough, therefore you can’t do any of this. And every single thing in there is a qualitative claim about something actually measurable.
Well, supersonic flight costs more — how much? What would the fares have to be? How many people are already paying those fares? Okay, people pay to save time — how much do they have to pay? How much time is saved? Can there even be a market without supersonic flight over land? I don’t know. Go get the traffic data, build a database, make some assumptions about cost and time savings, and look at how big the market is. That’s what I did in 2014. I had a spreadsheet and some JavaScript code that went and did all that. And the actual answers were not what anybody claimed, because nobody else had done the math.
How to Get Your Team to Think This Way [00:40:00]
Sam: It seems like — my dad taught me this thing. He likes to ask for discounts, and somebody would say no, and I’d be like, “They said no, Dad.” And he’d go, “Don’t take no from a person who didn’t have the power to say yes in the first place. She couldn’t have said yes. So why do I care if she said no? I’m going to keep asking until I get to the person who at least could say yes.”
What you’re saying is: don’t accept a qualitative answer, don’t take a narrative when numbers would be there. How do you get people to think like that?
Shaan: I’ll tell you how I do it, but I want to hear Blake, because he sounds like he’s a little further ahead on the curve. I just get very blunt about it. But go ahead.
Blake: I ask a lot of questions. If it’s an engineering thing and someone’s telling me something’s not possible and they can’t explain it in terms of Newtonian mechanics, I just don’t believe it.
Shaan: That was my answer too. I got a C in physics, by the way. Had to retake it during the summer at Duke. So I’ll give you two tips that have worked for me — I stole these from when I worked at Twitch. EMTT, the founder of Twitch, and Dan, the CEO, they both had great ways of doing this.
What they would do is say things like, “Hang on, I just want to make sure I understand this” — rather than “I don’t think you understand this,” which makes the person feel attacked. “Hang on, wait, sorry, I need to ask you this question because I want to make sure I understand. You said this — is that because blah blah blah?” That takes them off the defensive.
And Dan did this great thing: he’d say, “Oh, you said something interesting there” — when what he really meant was, you said something wrong. And then he’d say, “You said this didn’t work. Now explain it to me. It could be that this didn’t work because A, or we measured this and saw B. Is it A or B?” And people would have to walk through their logic and see where it had potholes — where they made huge leaps of assumption, or they’d say, “I’d have to go look that up.” And Dan would say, “Let’s see if we can get that data in the next two minutes, because if we keep talking without it then I guess the data didn’t really matter.” Or he’d say, “Let’s come back with that data — and here’s the logic chain I want you to go do.”
You do that two or three times, you undress people that way a couple of times, and they start to anticipate it. They come into the meeting now prepared, because they know he’s always going to pause me. I can’t just say something in here and get away with it.
Blake: We built it into our interview process. My favorite interview question is “teach me something” — and it starts exactly that kind of conversation. Like: hang on, I didn’t understand what you just said. Why is that? Can you walk me through it?
I once was interviewing for a head aerodynamicist — aerodynamics is the super-hard, very mathy, technically hardest part of aerospace. This guy shows up with a star-studded resume and claims to be an expert in hypersonic engine intakes. And I say, “Teach me something.” He goes, “What?” I say, “I don’t know. Your resume says you know about hypersonic intakes. I barely know what hypersonic is. Teach me.”
And he launches into it: “Oh, you really want to use a stream-trace design because that minimizes the cowl lip angle.” And I’m like, “Hang on, slow down. What’s the cowl lip? What angle? And why does any of that matter?” And it turned out the answer was: he didn’t know. He had a sound bite that turned out to be true, but he didn’t actually understand it.
The thing I love about that question is — even if you know it’s coming, you can’t cheat on it. You have to actually understand something well.
Sam Passes on Boom’s Seed Round [00:47:00]
Sam: Back when you were getting going in like ‘14, ‘16, ‘18 — I didn’t have a lot of money then, not enough to make angel investments. And for some reason I got sent your deal. It was almost as if I’m like, well, if I’m seeing this, then all the cool guys have passed on this. And I remember reading about Boom and I’m like, “This guy is insane. How is anyone taking this seriously?” Obviously that’s how a lot of great ideas start. But it didn’t seem like you had an easy going when it came to fundraising.
Blake: It was definitely not easy. And notice — unpack the thinking there. That’s an example of bystander thinking applied to investing. That’s part of why you didn’t invest in it, and that’s why a bunch of your really smart friends did.
Sam: Yeah. No, I mean the fundraising piece has been extremely difficult.
Blake: What didn’t work for us was going to VCs. The superficial reasons are: oh, the timelines are longer, it’s not a natural fit for fund life cycles where you want to show a mark quickly and then use that mark to raise the next fund. Anybody focused on that is going to run from a business like Boom.
But I think the bigger dynamic is a principal-agent type dynamic, and it took me a long time to realize this. I naively thought VCs are the people with money and their job is to invest it to make more money. But that’s actually not what VCs are. VCs are money managers. You remember that thing that would go around the Valley: “If the product is free, you’re the product.” But if the product gives you money, then you are definitely the product. VCs are in the business of selling startups as an asset class to LPs.
And who are the LPs? Many times they’re wealthy individuals with their own money. But often it’s the endowment fund of Harvard — and by the time you trace that dollar back to anybody who actually owns it, you have to go many levels back. The incentive dynamics in that chain of money managers is to keep going, to be able to raise the next fund, at a relatively short time period relative to the investment payoff of most startups. So it drives an incentive to go invest in things that look smart to LPs quickly.
Boom might actually be an amazing investment — we’re big enough at this point that impact is guaranteed. In success, this is going to be a trillion-dollar company, because people are going to fly more flights supersonic than subsonic. This has to be bigger than Boeing if it works. So it could be a great return, but it will take a long time to be clear that it will be. Which means anybody whose career is based on raising the next fund from their LPs isn’t going to like it.
I wish somebody had been oracle and whispered that in my ear in 2014. I could have saved myself an enormous amount of pain.
The $5 Billion Demo Day [00:56:00]
Blake: You did end up raising money, and I remember the first time I heard about you guys was YC demo day. Some guy got on stage and waved a piece of paper and basically said, we have billions in orders.
Sam: Five billion in LOIs.
Blake: Five billion in LOIs. I still remember Sam Altman’s tweet: “Boom had $5 billion in LOIs at demo day. A record that probably won’t be passed soon.” So how the heck does that happen?
So we do YC. Sam had been in our seed round and had been telling me I need to do YC. And I’m like, isn’t YC for mobile social? I don’t know that it’s for supersonic jets. He kept saying, “You have to do it.” And eventually I was like, okay, my biggest risk is I never raise enough money to actually build anything. YC claims they’ll help with that. I’d rather try it and find it wasn’t useful than not try it and fail.
So I did YC. And early on the group partner said, “You need to show up to demo day with sales.” And I’m like, this is a 10-person company that just moved out of my basement. I’d be lucky to sell airplanes in eight years, let alone eight weeks. What am I going to do?
So I was like, okay, there are two possibilities. One is a startup airline. But if I look at an established airline, the only one that could conceivably do this quickly is Virgin — and only if I get to Richard. So I went after both paths, and we actually got a startup airline to do it. There was a startup called Odyssey that was going to do an all-business-class service from New York to London City Airport. I’m like, these guys probably get speed. So I met with a guy and he was willing to give me an LOI on a different corporate entity’s letterhead. This LOI was for 15 airplanes at $200 million each — a $3 billion LOI.
Shaan: Explain what an LOI means in this context, because they can range from non-binding “hey, I’m interested” to a binding LOI with hard money.
Blake: This LOI was a piece of paper from a startup airline that hadn’t flown any airplanes yet. This was a PDF, and it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. This was the equivalent of “I have a girlfriend — she just goes to another school, trust me.”
So I’m doing practice demo day pitches, and Michael Seibel — bless his heart, that guy has the — one of the brilliant things about PG is he built a culture at YC where people just tell you what they really think. And so I’m doing practice demo day and Michael looks at my slides and my pitch and says, “Blake, do you have anything that’s real? Because you sound like you’re completely full of shit.”
Bitter medicine. But it’s what I needed. So I kept working on retooling the pitch to focus on what hardware we actually had, and also trying to fix this customer problem, because I knew that LOI was flimsy.
Getting to Richard Branson [01:03:00]
Shaan: And you were working on Virgin?
Blake: We’d been working on Virgin. There are a whole set of stories I could tell about how I got to Branson. But I did get to Branson.
Sam: Tell us — we like the hustle stories.
Blake: Mark Kelly — now Senator Mark Kelly, shuttle commander, astronaut — was on our advisory board and hung out with Richard. And I discovered I could ghostwrite emails from Mark Kelly to Richard Branson and he would send them.
This was February-March of 2016. Virgin Galactic was about to roll out their second-generation spaceship. Branson was going to be in the Mojave Desert for that event. My chief engineer had gotten invited because he was connected to those circles. I hadn’t been invited. The pitch to Branson from Mark was: “The Boom guys are going to be in Mojave for your spaceship rollout — you should meet with them while you’re there.” And Branson said okay.
So we got a 15-minute meeting. Me, my chief engineer, Richard, and Richard’s mom. Actually — I never got invited to the rollout. I had to crash it. But I managed to talk my way in.
I had this 15 minutes with Richard. He asked if we wanted anything to drink. I said no, I’ve already had lots of coffee. A couple minutes into the pitch I realized he’s drinking scotch. Very early in the morning.
Sam: You failed the cool-guy test.
Blake: Apparently. Anyway, he’s like, “Guys, this is brilliant. This all makes sense.” And then he leans back and says, “Oh, but I’m already doing Virgin Galactic, and that’s a lot. I don’t know if I’ve got two of these in me.”
And I said, “Richard, we’re not asking you for money. We’re asking if, when this works, you’d like the first few airplanes to be for Virgin. If you raise your hand and say you want these, the product makes sense — then I’ll go get all the money elsewhere.”
And that turned out to be the thing that worked.
Sam: How did you think to say that instead of “invest in us” or “advise us”?
Blake: Because of what Richard cares about. It was really Virgin versus BA. He hates BA. When he tried to buy Concorde — he actually did try to buy BA’s Concorde when they were shutting it down — and they wouldn’t sell it to him because they didn’t want to be embarrassed. And he had waged this whole campaign in the ’90s and early 2000s where BA was trying to shut down Virgin. He tried to beat BA with supersonic and he lost. So he wants to do this, he cares about PR, and he cares about his brand.
So I was like, why don’t I let you stick it to BA?
The One-Two Punch at YC Demo Day [01:10:00]
Blake: So the meeting ends and there’s no deal yet. I’m working it through my friends at Virgin Galactic trying to get something done.
Now, YC demo day was spread across two days. The company might not exist if we hadn’t been on day two, because of what happened that week.
Wednesday is demo day two. Monday, we were launching the company out of stealth mode. We’d gotten Ashley Vance — Elon’s first biographer — to write the launch article for Bloomberg. We’d let him and the Bloomberg team come out to Denver, interview me, take all the pictures they wanted. In my head this is brilliant because the story is going to be “Boom is the SpaceX of airplanes.” But I had no self-awareness about how early we were. And I let the photographers take a picture of me on a plastic orange chair climbing into a cardboard mockup of an airplane.
Ashley actually wrote a nice story, but his editor picked the picture and wrote the headline. The headline said something like, “This Colorado company thinks it can build a supersonic jet.” And there’s my fat ass climbing into a cardboard mockup.
Sam: I know. So bad.
Blake: It’s the top of Hacker News, and the comments are like photoshopped helmets on my head. The comments: “What an idiotic company, don’t they know airplanes aren’t made out of cardboard?” And “What idiot runs marketing at that company — who would name a supersonic jet company Boom?” It’s brutal. I’m like, we are so screwed. We’re going to be the laughingstock at demo day.
That’s Monday. Tuesday, I’m sitting at my desk working on slides. And up pops this email from Virgin that says: “We’re in for the first 10 airplanes. You can announce it tomorrow.”
I read the email three times because I’m like, there is no way this says what I think it says. And I think I just went from the biggest loser to the biggest winner.
I called up the team at YC and I’m like, I need to relaunch my startup. How do I do this? I stayed up until midnight redoing press pitches under embargo. We relaunched the morning of demo day with a $2 billion LOI from Virgin — done on an email. Back at the top of Hacker News, and my favorite comments: “What genius runs marketing at Boom — the one-two punch, that’s how you launch a company.” And another one: “Monday: haha. Wednesday: oh.”
By the grace of Richard Branson, we would have died that week.
High Agency: The Governor-Free Founder [01:18:00]
Sam: You seem to have a lot of these stories that our buddy George Mack calls “high agency.” You were a high school dropout yet got into college. You high-agencied your way into Amazon in an interesting way. You kicked ass there. This whole idea of not taking at face value why Concorde failed and teaching yourself the physics and calculus needed to diligence the idea. It seems like you removed your governor — you’re willing to go further than the average person when the default answer is no.
Blake: I think the most important thing is I want to understand things for myself. I don’t just accept what I’m told.
Funny side story: I was going through a divorce and a custody fight and had to go through this psychological exam. These multiple-choice questions — and I could tell they were testing for delusions of grandeur. They’d ask things like, “I think the experts are wrong and I know better.” And I’m like, I’m not going to answer this one honestly — but that’s actually what I think. I think the experts are wrong all the time, and anybody who bothers to think about it can figure out differently.
And I have a complicated relationship with my own ego on this. It was a really weird decision for me psychologically to start this company. I look in the mirror and I’m like, totally don’t look like the guy to do this. It was very bizarre to tell my friends I’m going to go build supersonic jets. I didn’t look like the person. I didn’t actually believe on the inside I was going to succeed. I just didn’t want to not try.
I thought about who my business heroes were. Especially Bill Gates. Gates had said in the ’70s that his goal for Microsoft was to put a personal computer in every home and on every desk running Microsoft software. He said that in the ’70s. And then he actually went and did it.
What was it like to be Bill when Bill said that? He didn’t have a resume for it either. He could have flamed out. Because he didn’t flame out, we know who Bill Gates is and we have those computers. But if he had — he’d be dark matter.
So I’m like, okay, there must be a couple categories of entrepreneurs. The people who go after big missions and succeed — we all know their names, the Edisons, the Jobs, the Gates, the greats. And then there’s probably the dark matter of founders — the people who go for big things, who set big goals, but it doesn’t work. And I made the conscious decision: I’d rather be dark matter than have never tried.
Shaan: Basically, you were willing to lose.
Blake: I had to be willing to lose. Let me tell this through the story of my daughter.
When she turned 10, a few years ago, I took her out to ice cream. It was one of those low moments where I didn’t know how the company was going to survive. We have one of those every year — with regularity, there’s a life-and-death crisis every year. I was feeling pretty down. I had this self-talk like, my daughter, for her entire conscious life, all her dad has been doing is saying he’s going to build supersonic jets. The first prototype might never fly. What’s my identity to my children?
So she’s in the back of the car. We’ve just had ice cream. And I said, “Adya, what would you think if I failed at Boom?”
She didn’t miss a beat. She said, “I’d be proud of you for trying.”
That speaks to me very deeply. That’s the view I try to have for myself: do things I’d be proud to try. Do things I’d be proud to fail at. I’ve always told the team — there’s no guarantee of success here. We might fail. But if we fail, we’re going to fail honestly, and we’re going to fail having given it our all.
When XB1 — that’s our prototype airplane, the first startup to ever break the sound barrier — when it landed earlier this year for the last time, I was standing outside with the team of 50 people that had built it and flown it. And I said to the team: the reason we get to be here today is we didn’t give up. We got here because we’re the team that did not give up. Other reasonable people would have given up. A bunch of reasonable people did give up. And to get our airliner flying, that’s going to require a lot more not giving up.
So: pick something you’d be proud to fail at, and don’t give up.
What Gets Built in a Decade [01:29:00]
Sam: I remember seeing an Elon Musk video where the rocket did something — got to space, some threshold they’d never accomplished before — and you see him looking up, and he looks like he’s about to cry. The whole crew is freaking out. And I remember thinking, I don’t want something like that because it takes 15-20 years to get there. But then you see that video and you’re like, wow, that’s totally worth it.
And I’m a little envious. It’s sort of like someone running a marathon and at the end their family is there. You had something like that recently — that moment. What was it like?
Blake: Three months ago. And it was — I mean, yeah. It was everything.
Sam: I remember having a sense of pride just watching it, and I have nothing to do with you. I saw Paul Graham — who doesn’t seem like a very excitable person — and he seemed very excited. It almost felt patriotic.
I think there’s a part of all of us that wonders: what’s the version of me if I did the most ambitious thing? If I did my version of supersonic jets? And when I was little I wasn’t a flight enthusiast. I didn’t have my pilot’s license. But I think everybody has a little version of that — some version of the most ambitious thing, the most you thing you could possibly do. And you’d probably fail and it’d probably be super hard. And you could probably — if you’re smart — choose a lot of easier options.
It could be small — be a stand-up comedian, do a show — all the way to going to space. It’s the biggest ambition relative to someone’s actual frame and their actual values. What makes that five-year-old self just tickled pink.
Blake: Have you ever read the Pixar rules of storytelling? They have 22 rules. Rule number one — and this is Pixar, who if anybody knows how to move people emotionally, they know — rule number one: you admire the character more for trying than for their successes.
The hallmark of every Pixar movie is not the happy ending. It’s how the character approached the obstacles. And that’s also what moves founders, what inspires people — not the success. Yes, Elon’s story with the rockets landing synchronized in the middle of the ocean is amazing. But it’s 10 times more amazing when you know the first three rockets blew up, and that he went all in, and that nobody was going to do this if he didn’t push forward in the face of almost certain failure.
That’s one of the most important rules for founders — because it’s what will inspire your team, inspire customers, inspire investors. You admire the character for how they try, not for their success.
Blake: One of our OG Boom people has a metaphor I found really useful. He calls it the emotional piggy bank. Every time you’re struggling with a problem and you push through, you’re putting a quarter in the piggy bank. When you finally succeed, you get to break open the emotional piggy bank. And the harder it was to get there, the more joyous the victory. This guy has been at Boom for nine years — one of the few early people who stuck it out. He runs our engine program now.
The Path to Passengers: 2027-2029 [01:38:00]
Sam: When do you think you guys are going to be mainstream? When are people going to be flying?
Blake: We’ll turn 11 on paper in September. And 11 years ago I was in my basement reading textbooks.
One way to look at this is: progressive overturning of the skeptics. The skeptics said a startup could never sell airplanes to airlines. Oh — United bought them and made a deposit. American did. Japan Airlines did a pre-order. Okay, that happened. A startup can never build a supersonic jet — oh, we did that.
The next thing skeptics say is we’re never going to succeed at building our own jet engine. There’s a whole class of people convinced that only big companies can build jet engines. We’re going to find out pretty soon who’s right. At the end of this year, our full-scale jet engine prototype should be running. Then next year we’ll start building the first airplane. Our goal is to roll the first one off the line in ‘27, fly it in ‘28, and be ready for passengers in ‘29.
There’s a good chance it could take longer than that. But those are the goals. And my conclusion is: ambitious schedules result in the fastest actual execution.
Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and Being the Youngest Manager [01:43:00]
Blake: By the way, I read that you reported directly to Jeff Bezos.
Sam: I can’t let you leave without asking. Do you have any good Bezos stories?
Blake: I’ve got a bunch. And I did not report directly to Bezos — that’s one of the annoying things about these journeys, little bits of bio get turned into better sound bites. People claim I was an executive at Amazon and I was not. “Oh, he worked at Amazon. Oh, so he worked for Jeff Bezos.” Yeah — so did every hourly worker in the warehouse.
But I did get to work on something Jeff cared about, so I got to work with him a bit. I was updating him once a quarter, and if I screwed up badly, Jeff would hand my ass to me. There’s no better early-career experience than to be 22, working on something Jeff happens to care about, and when you screw up, he tells you.
I found out later I was the youngest-ever manager at Amazon. The thing I got to do was basically Amazon’s first ad buy from Google — and building the system that I think was the first automated ad-buying system on the internet. This was before AdWords had an API. We were buying AdWords with screen scrapers that were automatically clicking buttons in the background with Perl scripts.
At some point this thing was driving 7% of Amazon’s sales and 7% of Google’s sales at the same time. My experience of it was: I was standing next to a rocket and the rocket took off, and somehow my jacket caught on it and I was along for the ride. I felt like I was on the precipice of failing, and they were about to fire me and replace me with somebody who actually knew what they were doing — and it was right at that line and never quite crossed it.
Sam: What’s he like, and what did you pick up from him?
Blake: I really admire Jeff. The stories that get told about CEOs tend to be about how they lose their cool — fire people in elevators, yell at people. And I did watch Jeff lose it with people a couple of times. But what I found is he never lost it with me so long as I took accountability.
The very first time I was presenting to Jeff, we’d just launched the MVP. I’m telling Jeff how we built it and why. I’m nervous as hell — I’m 22 or 23 presenting to this god. We get partway through and it’s going well, and he says, “Well, why didn’t you do X?” I said, “We didn’t think of that.” And he starts laughing — the big famous Jeff Bezos laugh — and says, “That’s a great answer. It’s true all the time, but nobody’s willing to say it.”
Whenever I just told Jeff the truth and took accountability, things were fine. Another time I was in front of the old executive team and the temperature in the room was rising — “Why did we do this when this other thing was a higher priority?” And I just spoke up and said, “That was my call. I got it wrong. I misprioritized. I won’t do it again.” And the tone of the room was okay, and the conversation moved on.
Jeff rewarded straight shooters. He rewarded accountability. He rewarded knowing your business like the back of your hand. And he was tremendously forgiving for learning on the job.
And I’d go in to talk to him once a quarter, and he would hand me a novel insight in five minutes on the thing that I did every day. That’s what first principles thinking gets you — you can get to novel insights in any domain.
Shaan: That’s exactly what EMTT said. Amazon bought Twitch for like a billion dollars, so he reported to Jeff. He said the same thing — Jeff would give me one thing I thought was kind of impossible, one angle or perspective or idea I didn’t have, and I think about this business 24/7.
Blake: Super smart and very first principles — put those two things together, that’s what makes that experience possible. And it enables other leaders to do the same thing.
A thing I try to challenge myself to do: at any given management review, I try to ask myself, what’s the most important question? And many times what I find is nobody’s asked the most important question. It’s actually not that hard to find it, and not hard to ask it.
Sam: Could you give us an example — a situation where you asked that question and it shifted the conversation?
Blake: I’ve got one from yesterday. I called the Overture leadership team together on a Sunday. My spidey sense was firing that we weren’t aligned about development philosophy. The conversation in the room started off as, “Oh, vertical integration is a goal, so we’ll eventually do all these things.” And I tried to get the conversation to: no — what we need is the winning strategy. What we need to decide is when do we want suppliers and when do we want to do things ourselves, and what are the principles by which we make those decisions?
So I went to the whiteboard, and the room started trying to answer those questions — how do we know whether we should do something ourselves or outsource it? I don’t think we completely cracked the nut on that, but we at least brought the team’s focus not to “what are the answers” but “what are the principles by which we make those decisions.” And I think we’ll keep pulling on that thread. The answer to that question will be part of our success story, because we’ve understood how to think about it — and the team will understand the principles and be able to make great independent decisions without needing to bring every supplier decision to me.
Closing: Work on the Most Ambitious Thing [01:55:00]
Sam: You’re a very unique founder. I’ve met a lot of founders. And I appreciate you coming on. Best episodes, Blake — you’ll see Shaan and I do two things. Either we’re like this, gazing, or we just lean back, cross our arms, and classes are in session.
Blake: I had a lot of fun. Yeah.
Sam: Where should people follow you or follow the journey?
Blake: I’m pretty active on X. I’m @bscholl — B-S-C-H-O-L-L. That’s probably the best place to follow along. I try to give people an inside view on what’s going on at Boom, and then I mouth off about other random things in the world.
Shaan: I like this quote of yours: “If every founder worked on the most ambitious thing they could get their head around, everyone would be happier and more great things would get built.” Somewhere between half a million and a million people are going to listen to this episode. What’s your case for that?
Blake: Can’t lose. If you win, obviously it’s great. But I think it’s a mistake to start from your resume and a mistake to start from what you think you can do — because the only way to find out what you can do is to pick the most motivating thing in the world and run at it. Something so motivating that the goal matters more than your own insecurities. That’s the only way you find your limits.
And I’ll close with this. I was really young when I was reading Atlas Shrugged in college. My favorite character is Hank Rearden — this sort of combination business-technology hero who invented a new kind of metal. And I remember crying thinking, man, I don’t have it to be somebody like him. I always wanted to be, but I didn’t think I could be.
Along the way, someone told me: the things we admire in other people are actually our own strengths. At first that made no sense. But when I started to pattern match — my own weaknesses are the things that annoy me most in other people, and my own strengths are the things I admire most in other people. It’s very paradoxical, but it seems to actually be true.
So there’s this weird thing where I think we could actually become our heroes. And of all the random things said about me after we broke the sound barrier, the one that spoke to me most was where someone I’d never met compared me to Hank Rearden.
Shaan: That’s awesome. I always say, if you spot it, you got it. Both ways — if something bothers you about other people, there’s a part of you that recognizes that behavior. And if something inspires you, there’s a part of you that identifies with it. You are what you admire. And once you realize that, you start paying attention to what you choose to admire — because you’re pointing your compass in that direction.
Blake: That’s right. And the happy side of it is you realize your heroes are actually accessible. And then the unhappy side is the things that drive me crazy in other people — holy hell, I need to have a talk with myself, because I’m probably doing it too.
Sam: All right, man. I look forward to flying everywhere in half the time. Thank you for coming on.
Blake: Thank you for doing that.
Sam: All right, that’s it. That’s the podcast.