Blake Scholl
Blake Scholl is a high school dropout who taught himself aerodynamics from textbooks in his basement, crashed a Virgin Galactic rollout to get a 15-minute 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.
The Question That Started Everything
Scholl had his pilot’s license but a career in tech. He’d worked at Amazon in 2001, done mobile apps, sold a barcode-scanning business to Groupon. Then he took time to think, and he couldn’t get past one question: why did Concorde fail, and what would you have to do for it not to have failed?
He went to Wikipedia. He ran the numbers. Concorde’s problem was fuel economy — poor fuel economy drove up fares, high fares caused low utilization, low utilization required even higher fares. A vicious cycle.
Then he asked the next question: how much would you have to beat Concorde’s 1960s technology by to match the economics of a business class flatbed seat? The answer he calculated: less than 10%. And Boeing’s latest planes were beating their predecessors by 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.”
That was 2014. His wife gave him one year to screw around with it, then expected him to get a job. He had three kids under 18 months, including twins. He went into the basement and started reading aerodynamics textbooks.
The Bystander Effect in Business
Scholl has a framework for why supersonic flight — obviously valuable, obviously possible — went unworked for fifty years: the bystander effect.
When someone collapses on a crowded street, everyone assumes someone else is calling 911. The paradox: the more people present, the less likely anyone helps. Scholl argues this plays out in the business world constantly.
“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.”
The result: unique, obvious opportunities get left in plain sight. Supersonic flight would obviously be good. Nobody was doing it. So everyone concluded it must be impossible. Scholl made a different inference.
He points to traffic as another example: “I don’t think I’m aware of anybody attacking traffic in the right way, and it’s a very solvable problem. It could be a trillion-dollar company.”
Don’t Accept a Qualitative Answer to a Quantitative Question
Scholl’s framework for thinking is what he calls first principles — going to causality rather than pattern matching. His operational version: don’t accept a qualitative answer to a quantitative question.
“People make all kinds of claims about issues that are measurable without measuring anything. Well, supersonic flight costs more — how much? What would the fares have to be? How many people are already paying those fares?”
He built a spreadsheet and wrote JavaScript to pull traffic data, calculate time savings, model fares. The actual answers weren’t what anyone claimed, “because nobody else had done the math.”
His interview question for every hire: “Teach me something.” When someone launches into jargon, he asks: “Hang on, slow down. What’s that? And why does it matter?” He once discovered that a star-studded aerodynamics expert couldn’t explain the basics of what he claimed to specialize in. “He had a sound bite that turned out to be true, but he didn’t actually understand it.”
$5 Billion in LOIs and the Virgin Gambit
Getting to YC demo day with credible sales for a supersonic jet company that had just moved out of a basement required creative thinking about what “sales” could mean.
Scholl got a meeting with Richard Branson by ghostwriting emails from astronaut Mark Kelly to Branson’s team, crashed the Virgin Galactic spaceship rollout event, and delivered a 15-minute pitch. When Branson said he didn’t have bandwidth for another big thing, Scholl pivoted instantly: “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.”
That reframing worked because Scholl had understood what Branson actually cared about: Virgin versus British Airways. Branson had tried to buy Concorde when BA shut it down and been refused. He wanted to win that fight.
Tuesday before demo day, an email arrived: “We’re in for the first 10 airplanes. You can announce it tomorrow.” A $2 billion LOI, signed on an email. Monday they’d been the laughingstock of Hacker News. Wednesday they were the one-two punch launch story. Combined with another startup airline’s letter, total LOIs at demo day: $5 billion. Sam Altman tweeted it was a record that probably wouldn’t be passed soon.
Pick Something You’d Be Proud to Fail At
Boom has had a life-and-death funding crisis every year for eleven years. The prototype XB1 eventually broke the sound barrier — the first startup to do so. Scholl’s advice for founders who want to go after hard things:
“Pick something you’d be proud to fail at. And don’t give up.”
He tells a story about his daughter. During one of the low moments, he took her out for ice cream and asked: “Adya, what would you think if I failed at Boom?”
She said: “I’d be proud of you for trying.”
That’s the Pixar rule Scholl keeps coming back to. Rule number one of Pixar’s storytelling principles: you admire the character more for trying than for their successes. The reason Elon Musk’s rocket story moves people isn’t the synchronized landings — it’s the three that blew up first, and that he pushed through anyway.
Boom’s timeline to carrying passengers: 2027-2029. The flight from New York to London in just over three and a half hours. The company Scholl believes it will become, if it works: bigger than Boeing.