How I Got $5 Billion In Preorders For A Supersonic Jet Company

- May 7, 2025 (11 months ago) • 01:08:59

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Blake Scholl	I look at 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 I don't have that." I don't think I could have sold a dollar bill for 50¢, and I didn't know jack about airplanes. So I'm like, "Okay — I need to become that person."
00:21	Shaan Puri	So how does a guy who's slaying coupons on the Internet become the founder of a supersonic jet company?
00:27	Sam Parr	Which, by the way, the one-liner of what you're making is: a commercial jet that flies 1,300 miles per hour versus 500 miles per hour, right?
00:34	Shaan Puri	It takes you from... It would take you from where to where, and how much time? Just take... </FormattedResponse>
00:38	Blake Scholl	Yeah, that's what actually matters, right? It takes you from New York to London in just over 3.5 hours. Tokyo to Seattle in 4.5 hours. L.A. to Sydney in about 8.5 hours. And that's version one — we want to go faster after that.
00:50	Shaan Puri	Amazing
00:51	Blake Scholl	So 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. I sort of fell in love with computers and the internet. My first job out of school was at Amazon in 2001. My parents didn't understand it; they were like, "We got you a computer science degree—why do you want to work at a bookstore?" It was an amazing time to be there. After that I was part of one of the very early mobile app companies. 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." Surely there'll be something there. We built this barcode-scanning game—which, if you ranked things from most to least important in the universe, would be near the bottom. I would get up in the morning working on that thing and I was super depressed. I would 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 really afraid of failure. I was looking at what we were building and thinking, "Wait a minute—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?" When we had a chance to kind of acquihire the company to Groupon, investors got a return, I got a little money, and I got my escape fantasy out of this business that I didn't love. It was a huge win. I spent a couple years at Groupon reflecting on that and thinking about what I learned. One thing I knew was that I definitely wanted to found again. I'd started my first company in my parents' basement in high school—the founder bug had bitten me. But I hated waking up in the morning thinking, "What am I doing?" and wishing I'd never started. I never wanted to feel that way again. One thing I knew about myself is that no matter what I was doing as a founder, I was going to push myself to my personal red line—the maximum I'm capable of—and it would feel the same no matter what I was doing. What wouldn't feel the same was what I was doing and how motivated I was by it. I wanted to pick a startup idea where I would never regret starting, no matter how hard the day was. That led me to organize all my ideas by how happy I would be if they worked. I'd had such a passion for flight.
03:24	Blake Scholl	I'd gotten my pilot's license. Now, that was kind of all I knew about airplanes—just how to fly a single-engine one for fun. I never understood why no one had picked up where Concorde left off. I felt like, "Okay, gotta look at that and get it out of my system, and then move on to the next thing."
03:40	Shaan Puri	Hey — let's take a quick break. Instead of an ad, I have a freebie for you: my pitch deck template. If you're a founder and you're ever looking to raise money from investors, the reality is most founders are pretty bad at telling their own story. Their decks are bad. I've seen thousands of decks, and I can tell you that most decks don't do the business justice. I actually made a template of what I use for my own companies. I've given this out before in my newsletter — thousands of people have downloaded it — and I get emails all the time saying, "Hey, thanks for that template; I used it, I raised my round." It's a freebie. If you want to raise money from investors, go grab it. There's a link in the description below. It tells you, slide by slide, "put this here, put this here, put this here," with a little commentary on why you're arranging the structure in that order. I think it will raise your odds of successfully raising a funding round. So go ahead and grab it — it's my free pitch deck template. What were the other ideas in that brainstorm? Making a list of possible things to go do? We asked Paul Merlucky this question before he started Andrew, and he was talking about, "Who's gonna make the food version of Diet Coke? He's just gonna make calories — things that taste good but have no calories." He was working on synthetic food and then said, "Actually, alright, never mind — I'm gonna make weapons."
04:51	Sam Parr	Well, yeah. His other idea was actually pretty amazing. It was a prison—a private prison—where you only get paid if the inmate gets out of prison and never comes back. Right? And so it was like...
05:03	Blake Scholl	"Oh, actually—good idea. I like that one."
05:05	Shaan Puri	It's like I just messed.
05:06	Blake Scholl	Up on.
05:06	Shaan Puri	The cutting-room floor is pretty good, too—yeah.
05:09	Sam Parr	So, it was three. The third one was Andrew, and all three were pretty epic.
05:14	Shaan Puri	And by the way, his brainstorming process: he said he had a house where he created a padded room to build things that would explode. He said, "These are just walls that can take explosions." I'd love to hear your process — it might not be quite as crazy — but what were the other ideas, and how did you actually brainstorm them? </FormattedResponse>
05:32	Blake Scholl	Well, looking back, I think the alternate ideas I had then are not as good as the alternate ideas I have now. I had something that was like a rental car company that would pick you up like an Uber. I still sort of wish that existed, but I don't. I don't think that thing has long legs, right? I don't think it's actually a good idea, even though the small number of times I want a rental car I really wish I had that. One of my general premises—especially as it reflected on the boom story—is that there are a lot of great unsolved problems hiding in plain sight that nobody's working on. I think it's an artifact of the bystander effect. If anyone doesn't know that term: the bystander effect is this. Let's say someone falls over having a heart attack on the street. If you're the only one around, you're highly likely to run over, call 911, take care of them, and be there until the ambulance comes. 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 that there can be a hundred people and the guy having a heart attack is completely ignored. I think this plays out in the business world—Silicon Valley. We tend to get told, "If your idea is any good, there are already several other good teams working on it. And if no one 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. Actually, the more compelling they are, the more likely they are to be ignored because everyone 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, so it must be impossible or a bad idea. There are other things in that category, like traffic. 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.
07:35	Shaan Puri	It's funny, because the only other person who comes to mind who I think attacks these problems hidden in plain sight is Elon. I was talking to an investor who knows him, 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." Very similar to what you described. He went on: a lot of us who grew up fascinated with space — the idea of rockets that go to Mars was not a secret. It wasn't that nobody had ever thought of it, but we all just sort of were blind to it. We assumed someone else must be doing it — you know, NASA must be doing it — or it's too hard, too expensive, or it can't be done. He said we all just ignored it. Right. Elon also has a sort of bone to pick with traffic — with what he's trying to do with The Boring Company.
08:26	Blake Scholl	Which, yeah.
08:26	Shaan Puri	"Sounds like you might disagree with the approach there. How would you approach the traffic problem?"
08:31	Blake Scholl	I think The Boring Company solves half the problem, but there's another half. 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, then we feel entitled to use them as much as we want, whenever we want. So they're always oversubscribed. What you need for roads is a price system, and you need a dynamic price system. There's a technology element to this too—about smart traffic lights and the ability to do smart routing. Imagine you open your phone and the Maps app and put in your destination. Not only are there different routes and different times, there are different times and different prices. You could have fast and expensive, or slow and cheap. I think what we've seen: New York did a small experiment with this. The simplest version was charging an $8 or $9 fee to go into Manhattan.
09:43	Sam Parr	Are you—are you familiar with that, Sean?
09:45	Shaan Puri	I heard about it. I heard they were doing this recently.
09:48	Blake Scholl	Right — it's pretty recent. It was super controversial.
09:50	Sam Parr	I'm here right now. Basically, I think it's $12. I think it's between the streets of 60th on down, and it actually shows you the map on Google. If you type in—say you're on 70th Street and you have to get somewhere on 50th Street—it will show you the threshold. Right when you cross through, boom, you're billed $12. I'm walking around downtown right now. It is so much quieter than it's ever been—so much quieter—and there's far less traffic. The other day, the day after it happened, I was downtown and I remember standing in the middle of the street and thinking, "Where is everyone?"
10:24	Blake Scholl	Right, like... it's...
10:25	Shaan Puri	It's so.
10:25	Blake Scholl	Much better.
10:26	Shaan Puri	So, I feel like this would be so effective, but also—I would have guessed this is really unpopular to implement. Once it's implemented, maybe people will see the benefits of it. Was that who got that through? That's kind of amazing to me: nobody's talking about this really important experiment happening in New York—not some fringe, tier-five city. Was that unpopular?
10:45	Blake Scholl	Oh, it's—it's what's hugely controversial.
10:46	Sam Parr	Is he even here, dude? Even Trump was like, "You're not gonna do this." It was kinda like, "Dude, you're the president — you get it. You don't really... I don't know why you're getting involved in New York City." But Trump was like, "We're yanking this." The governor got involved in this. Yeah, it's a huge ordeal.
11:00	Blake Scholl	That's right. I think the reason it's struggling is because they solved half the problem but not the other half. They also 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 that says, "Hang on—I paid for the roads already. Why are you charging me twice? This is a tax increase." Especially as the world moves to EVs [electric vehicles], and as some roads are paid for with licensing fees while others are paid for with gas taxes, now is the perfect time to fix this and move to usage-based pricing. But you have to get rid of the other taxes; otherwise you've given every populace in the world a good reason to say no to it. The other mindset is: I did think a bit about how you would sell this. The go-to-market challenges are way bigger than the product challenges. There are some fun AI things about how you build AI traffic lights and how you optimize a network so you don't need a bunch of traffic engineers. That should be fun. I think it's way easier than self-driving and way more impactful. But the go-to-market matters, because there's an envy element—like, "Oh, all the rich people are passing me." What you could do is basically rebate money from the people who are paying for fast access to the people who want cheap access. So think of it like: "That asshole Elon cut me off, but every time he does it he has to pay me." Effectively, there's cash flow from the people willing to pay for the highest access to the people who value the cheapest access. Then there's a technology layer and an operating layer, and whoever builds the system should get their 10% off the top for building and running it. That ends up being an enormous business. By the way, if somebody wants to start this, I will be your advisor; I will be your champion; I will help raise money for it. I desperately want someone to build this.
13:00	Sam Parr	So, alright. So, Boom has raised $700,000,000. You guys are— I think you just had a flight in the past year where you built one of your engines and broke the sound barrier. Huge deal. So, you know, we've had a few people like you, but you're like a legend, potentially in the making.
13:18	Shaan Puri	Take us back — what was the original question in your mind? Like, "Why isn't there supersonic flight?" What was the actual initial question in the first couple weeks?
13:28	Blake Scholl	So, it was like, "Why did Concorde fail, and what would you have to do for it not to have failed?"
13:32	Sam Parr	But were you on Wikipedia and did you just come across that, or are you just a flying fan?
13:35	Blake Scholl	Well, if I was a flying fan... I go to Wikipedia and I read stuff extensively. The facts make it obvious: here's a 100-seat airplane with 100 uncomfortable seats, and adjusted for inflation a $20,000 fare—and you can't fill the seats. You can't make any money. That's obvious. So the next question was... This turned out to be the key question: why was Concorde so expensive? The answer is poor fuel economy, and that kicked off a vicious cycle that led to high fares, which led to low utilization. The lower the utilization, the higher the fares have to be. There's a whole vicious cycle to it, but the root of it was poor fuel economy. 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 flat‑bed in business class? The thought was: 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. So how much should Concorde be beaten by? It turned out the answer was less than 10% to match the total economics of a flat‑bed business class. And I was like, head-explode emoji. I don't really know anything about airplanes, but can we really not do 10% better than the 1960s [inaudible]?
14:54	Shaan Puri	People, as a point of reference: how much did you know about planes and calculating fuel economy and all of that when you started this idea?
15:02	Sam Parr	"Yeah, aren't you a high school dropout?"
15:05	Blake Scholl	Yeah, I'm a high school dropout. I did actually graduate from college, but my degree is in Computer Science, and the closest thing I had to an aviation credential is a pilot's license. But this stuff isn't actually that complicated at this level. The fuel burn data is all in Wikipedia, and you can calculate fuel burn per seat mile, which turns out to be the key metric. So, okay—what was Concorde's fuel burn per seat mile? What's the fuel burn per seat mile of a flatbed in business class? You can just pull SeatGuru: see the seat map, measure on your screen how much of it is business class, how many seats there are, how much floor area the whole airplane allocates, and then allocate it out. Then it's like, great—you'd have to do about 10% better than Concorde to match the total economics if you wanted to match the fuel burn per seat mile. It's a bit more than that, but there are all these other utilization benefits from speed. And then the next question was, well, how much better is Boeing's latest airplane versus the one that came before it? The answer was something like 20%. I'm like, wait a minute—you can't find 10% over 50 years? Like, don't you know... I don't know anything about the details of the technology at this.
16:12	Blake Scholl	But it seemed plausible in the face of it, and so at this was like, "Okay, hang on."
16:17	Sam Parr	You said there's a fact here that has caught my attention.
16:21	Blake Scholl	That's right.
16:21	Sam Parr	"I'm going to spend a bunch of sleepless nights questioning this."
16:25	Blake Scholl	Yeah — actually, I'm going to spend a lot of days trying to get smart on it. I thought this seems plausible on 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. I sort of imagined myself in the future: it's 2050, I'm retired, I'm sitting on the beach, sipping mai tais. 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? No — business history never goes like that. Big companies don't suddenly get enlightened and build disruptive things. What's the more plausible history? The more plausible history is that it was a startup that did it. The startup founder would not have come from the entrenched industry where everybody believed it was impossible or a bad idea. They have to be an outsider. What would that outsider have to look like in order to be successful? They'd have to have built a dream team — to be really good at attracting great people. They'd have to be a great storyteller, great at persuasion. They'd also have to be technically deep in order to be credible with all the audiences that would matter. I look in the mirror and ask, "Is that me?" I left the industry — I checked the "outsider" box — but the rest of it? No.
17:52	Sam Parr	"You're... I'm like, 'What would it take to attract this — like a 10 out of 10, like this smokeshow?' They probably need to be good-looking, have personality, be funny, and they probably should have really nice teeth, right?" </FormattedResponse>
18:06	Shaan Puri	That's.
18:06	Sam Parr	Me, I could do that.
18:08	Blake Scholl	I mean, I look in the mirror and I'm like, "fat and dumb." I'm thinking, if I want to have any chance of doing this, I have to go to the startup CEO equivalent of the gym. I don't think I could have sold a dollar bill for $0.50, and I didn't know jack about airplanes. So I thought, "Okay, I need to become that person." My mental model for myself is this: we've probably seen those How It's Made videos with pasta—there's a pasta extruder, a big mound of dough in this gigantic press pushing the dough through a tiny hole, and the noodle gets extruded out the other side. I'm like, okay, I'm the dough; there's this hole, and 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. I didn't know how to get through an aerodynamics textbook without way more math and physics, so I read the aerodynamics textbooks and did the problem sets. If I couldn't figure them out, I threw them out, got a different book, and did those. [unclear phrase at end: "you work"]
19:07	Sam Parr	Were you not working at this? Is that right — you had left. How long was that period of not working, and how much money were you able to save up in order to do that? </FormattedResponse>
19:15	Shaan Puri	Were you, like, "rich, rich," or were you like, "I got two years where I don't have to have a job?"
19:18	Blake Scholl	I had one year where I didn't have to have a job.
19:20	Sam Parr	Okay, so you had, what, like $200,150,000?
19:23	Blake Scholl	It was a little bit better than that. I had, sort of in my mind, budgeted for two failed startups before I'd have to go get a big-company job. I was like, "Let me give... I got two shots on goal before I'm working for the man again."
19:36	Shaan Puri	You're like, "Cool — so I'll definitely fail on the plane thing, and then I'll try to do that mobile app, and then I'm gonna give up and go back into a job."</FormattedResponse>
19:43	Blake Scholl	So that was kind of the thought process. I budgeted, like: "Here's — you know — here's my salary-replacement money, and here's the seed money that I put in the company myself." I had... I had... I had enough savings to do that twice before I needed a job. And, you know, at the time I was married — I had three young kids, three under 18.
20:06	Sam Parr	Oh my God.
20:07	Blake Scholl	Yeah.
20:07	Shaan Puri	I gotta do some math. Some twins—what are they doing?
20:10	Blake Scholl	I had, yeah.
20:13	Sam Parr	Okay. And then—did you, what would you like? Kiss your kids goodbye in the morning and you're like, "Alright, I gotta go read," and you just go into your room and...
20:20	Shaan Puri	"Just go with them to school. You just go to the library with them, with their lunchbox. It's funny."
20:24	Blake Scholl	No, I mean—you say that tongue in cheek. That's kind of how it went. I had an office in the basement, and I'd give them hugs and kisses. Then I'd go downstairs, sit at my desk, and read and do problem sets all day... and drove.
20:38	Sam Parr	You were telling your friends that year, and they're like, "What are you working on?" And you're like, "I'm kinda toying with this idea of launching a commercial jet company."
20:46	Blake Scholl	Right, and you could just watch the eyeballs roll back. 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." Yeah.
20:57	Sam Parr	But this was, like, before startups were cool. Now, if you say you're working on that, you can just go on Twitter and post about it. People are like, "Oh, that's awesome." In 2014, it still was a little bit... startups were— [sentence trails off]
21:10	Blake Scholl	Cool, then — but not hard-tech startups. There were no hard-tech startups, to a first order. There was SpaceX, and that was it.
21:17	Sam Parr	That was, like, the era of "Airbnb for blank"... "Uber for this."
21:21	Blake Scholl	That's right, that's right. Yeah. The only thing that was out there as a reference for anything like this was SpaceX, and it was still pretty early. SpaceX had gotten to orbit, and they were working on the Falcon 9. I remember thinking, "Wow — that guy went from PayPal to rockets." Rockets sound harder than airplanes, so this must be possible. It turns out — I think — actually airplanes are harder than rockets because you have to have, I guess, safety as an issue from day one. Rockets can be blown up and iterated; you can't do that to an airplane with a person on board. But I didn't... I was, you know, what's that old phrase? "I'm not doing this because it was easy, but because I thought it would be easy when I started."
22:04	Shaan Puri	Yeah — the best motivational poster of all time.
22:08	Blake Scholl	Right — I didn't actually think it was going to be easy. 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: I still would have started even knowing how hard it turned out to be.
22:24	Shaan Puri	So how do you describe this way of thinking? You talked about the pasta dough and the hole — where you're like, “What kind of noodle do I need to be? I need to shove myself through that hole to make myself the noodle that I want to be.” You have that, and you talked about working backwards from the end. For example: “I'm retired; I'm reading a book about the history of flight.” What does that say? Does it say nobody invented fast planes? No. Does it say that Boeing invented the fast plane after showing no evidence of wanting to do so? No. What do you call this? Do you have a frame or a phrase — a way of thinking? Because it sounds simple, but it's very rare. I don't do that and I want to do more of it, so teach me about that.
23:05	Blake Scholl	It's first-principles thinking, and it's super, super important. 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.
23:21	Shaan Puri	Explain both of them. </FormattedResponse>
23:22	Blake Scholl	First-principles thinking is like this: are you pattern-matching — drawing a line through a bunch of data points and extrapolating — or are you trying to understand the equation that led to those data points being where they are? In other words, are you just matching patterns, or are you understanding causality? 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, or if you want to break from conventional wisdom, you have to understand what's really happening. For example, the pattern‑matching answer 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 narrative in a zillion articles on the internet. But hang on — what was really going on? What were the actual economics? What were passenger preferences? Don't accept a qualitative answer to a quantitative question. And so, as I was doing... </FormattedResponse>
24:30	Shaan Puri	This I.
24:30	Sam Parr	I saw you say that quote. By the way, I actually think that quote is kind of more profound than the time you just gave it. What exactly does that mean?
24:38	Blake Scholl	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 the sonic boom to be able to fly over land, and in order for the market to be big enough you can't do any of this. Every single thing in there is some qualitative claim about a thing that's actually measurable. Well, okay—supersonic flight costs more. How much? What would the fares have to be? How many people are already paying those fares? I mean, obviously people pay to save time, but how much do they have to pay and how much time is saved? Is there a market without supersonic flight over land? I don't know. Go get the traffic data, build a freaking database, start to 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 it turned out the actual answers were not what anybody claimed they were, because nobody else had done the math.
25:43	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it seems like, you know, my dad taught me this thing. He goes, "He's an Indian dad — he likes to ask for discounts." Somebody would say no, and he would ask again. I'd be like, "They said no, Dad," and he'd...
25:54	Sam Parr	But didn't your dad—didn't you say your dad just goes, "No, you're going to give me this"?
25:58	Shaan Puri	Oh, well, yeah. Sometimes he'll just be like, "So we'll get a discount, right?" He'll do that kind of thing instead of even asking for the discount. But when somebody says no, he would ask again or he'd ask somebody else. He would tell me, "Don't take 'no' from a person who didn't have the power to say 'yes' in the first place," right?
26:12	Blake Scholl	He's like, "this person phrase."
26:14	Shaan Puri	She couldn't have said yes, so why do I care if she said no? She didn't have the authority to give you the discount. I'm just going to keep asking until I get to the person who at least could say yes. Let's start there. What you're saying is: "don't accept a qualitative answer; don't take a narrative when numbers would be there." I see this all the time in my companies. It's like, "Yeah, those didn't perform well," but how well? How bad was it? What does that compare to? Are we sure that— you know? Once you start to dig in, you realize people are not operating from a place of fact, and definitely the team is not operating from the same set of facts.
26:47	Sam Parr	But how do you get people, Sean, not to think like that, though?
26:50	Shaan Puri	Well, I'll tell you how I do it, but I'd like to hear maybe Blake do it, because it sounds like he's probably a little further ahead on the curve there. Go ahead. I'm... I just get very blunt about it, but go ahead.
26:59	Blake Scholl	Yeah, I mean, I ask a lot of questions. Like, if it's—if it's an engineering thing, if 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. The other... the other thing is...
27:10	Sam Parr	Was Sean's answer? That was his answer.
27:12	Shaan Puri	Too—I got a C in physics, by the way. I had to retake it during the summer at Duke. I'll give you two little tips that have worked for me. I stole these from when I worked at Twitch: Emmett [founder of Twitch] and, now, the CEO, Dan, both had great ways of doing this. Both of them wanted people to give more substantiated, dug-in, detailed answers that were based on fact rather than opinion, hearsay, or just company narratives. What they would do is use a disarming clarification instead of an attack. For example, rather than saying, "I don't think you understand this"—which would make the person feel defensive—they would say something like: > "Hang on. I just want to make sure I understand this." Then they'd ask a clarifying question: "Wait—sorry, need to ask you this because I want to make sure I understand. You said X; is that because Y?" That approach breaks the interaction down and takes people off the defensive. Dan did a great version of this. He would say, "You said something interesting there," which, bluntly, meant "you said some bullshit." Then he'd push: > "You said that this didn't work. Now explain this to me. It could be that this didn't work because A, or it could be that we measured this and saw B. Is it A or B?" Having people walk through their logic exposes where their reasoning has potholes or where they're making big leaps of assumption. If someone said, "I'd have to go look it up," he'd pause and say, "Let's see if we can get that data—do you think you can get it in the next two minutes?" His point was: if we keep talking without that data, then maybe the data doesn't matter. Or he'd say, "Let's come back with that data, and what I'd be really curious about is A, B, C, D, and E"—the logic chain he wanted them to follow. If you do that two or three times, you "undress" people—figuratively—so they start to anticipate it. They come into meetings prepared because they know he'll pause. They can't just get away with saying something vague or misleading. It's not enough to say, "Well, it doesn't matter"—what are you actually saying?
29:12	Blake Scholl	"Teach me something." That's my favorite interview question. It starts a conversation exactly like what you're describing. I like to say, "Hang on — I didn't understand what you said. Why is that? Can you walk me through that, like a story about this, at one point?" Once I was interviewing for a head aerodynamicist. Aerodynamics is the super hard, very mathy, very techy end of aerospace — technically the hardest part. This candidate shows up with a star‑studded resume and claims to be an expert in hypersonic engine intakes. I said, "Teach me something." He asked, "Oh, like what?" I said, "I don't know. Your resume says you know about hypersonic intakes — I barely know what hypersonic is. Teach me." He launched into this explanation: "Oh yeah, you really want to use a stream‑trace design because that minimizes the cowl‑lip angle." I said, "Hang on — slow down. You went way over my head. What's the cowl? What's the cowl‑lip? What angle are you talking about? Why does any of that matter?" It turned out his answer was basically, "I don't know." He had a sound bite that turned out to be true, and we had this whole conversation. By the end of it, I felt like I had actually been able to reverse‑engineer some understanding. It was very obvious he didn't have it. The thing I love about that question is you can't cheat on it. I don't mind sharing this on a podcast because, even if someone memorizes buzzwords, they have to actually understand something to teach it.
30:41	Sam Parr	Well, you know what's funny is back when you were getting going—like 14, 16, and 18—I don't know about Sean, but I was definitely up-and-coming and I didn't have a lot of money. I didn't have enough money to make angel investments. For some reason I got sent your deal. Not like, you know, I wasn't in anybody; it was just "this crazy guy has started this thing." It was almost as if I'm like, "Well, if I'm seeing this, then that must mean that all the cool guys have passed on this."
31:10	Blake Scholl	Right.
31:11	Sam Parr	I remember reading about this company—boom—and I'm like, "Oh, this person's insane. Like, why on earth? How is this... how is anyone taking this seriously?" Mhm. Obviously that's how a lot of great ideas start. It didn't seem like you had it easy when it came to this fundraising—like, if a guy like me was even able to come across the deck...
31:33	Blake Scholl	Oh, it was definitely not easy. But, by the way, notice—unpack the thinking there. That's an example of bystander thinking as applied to investing. </FormattedResponse>
31:40	Sam Parr	Sure. Right — that's part of why I'm not [investing]. That's why I didn't invest in it, which my really smart friends did.
31:46	Blake Scholl	Yeah, no. I mean, the fundraising piece of this has been extremely difficult. I think some people have said there's no venture in venture capital, and it's kind of true. What didn't work for us was going to VCs and trying to raise money. There are a bunch of reasons for that. The superficial reasons are like: the timelines for this 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 who's focused on that is going to run from a business like—boom—you know. But I think the bigger dynamic is a principal–agent type dynamic. It took me a long time to realize this because I sort of naively thought VCs are the people with money and their job is to invest it to make more money. That's actually not what VCs are. VCs are money managers. Remember that thing that would go around the Valley about ten years ago about Facebook being free, and people would say, "If the product is free, then you're the product"? By the way, if the product gives you money, then you are definitely the product, right? VCs are in the business of selling startups as an investment class to LPs. Who are the LPs? Many times, if you're lucky, those are wealthy people who have their own money. But many times 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 be able to raise the next fund and keep going on a relatively short [time horizon].
33:29	Blake Scholl	Relative to the investment payoff of most startups, what it does is drive an incentive to invest in things that look to LPs like smart investments quickly. And, boom, it might actually be an amazing investment. I think, you know, there's no guarantee of this. We've done enough stuff that impact is guaranteed, you know. I just really don't want it to be a crater. But, in success, this is going to be a trillion-dollar company because people are going to fly more on supersonic than subsonic flights. This has to be bigger than Boeing if it works. So, it could be a great return, but it will take a long time for it to be clear that it's going to be a great return. That 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 an oracle and whispered that to my ear in 2014 — I could have saved myself an enormous amount of pain.
34:22	Shaan Puri	You did end up raising money. I remember the first time I heard about you guys: it was at a YC Demo Day [Y Combinator demo day]. Some guy got on stage, waved a piece of paper, and basically said, "We have $100,000,000 or so of preorders for our supersonic airplanes that we're going to build," from, I think, Virgin and one other company.
34:44	Blake Scholl	Yeah, it was actually 5 billion in Lois.
34:47	Sam Parr	$5,000,000,005.05
34:48	Blake Scholl	I still remember Sam Altman's tweet: "Know Boom had $5 billion at Lois at demo day," a record that probably won't be passed soon. [Note: The phrases "Know Boom" and "Lois" are unclear in the original transcription.]
34:57	Shaan Puri	Well, exactly. So how the hell does that... yeah?
35:00	Blake Scholl	No, I— I mean, I’ll tell you the story, and it involves a story about bullshit. So we do YC [Y Combinator], and Sam had been in our seed round. This is back when Sam was running YC, and he had been telling me, "You need to do YC." I was like, "Isn't YC for, like, mobile social? I don't know that it's for supersonic jets." They kept saying, "You have to do it, you have to do it," and eventually I was like, okay — my biggest risk is I never raised enough money to actually build anything. YC claims they'll help with that. I'd rather try it and have it not be useful than not try it and fail without having given it every chance to succeed. So I did YC. Early on, the group partners were like, "Well, just show up with demo day sales," and I'm like, this is a ten-person company that just moved out of my basement. I'd be lucky — my customer pipeline is Lufthansa, United. I'd be lucky to sell airplanes in eight years, let alone eight weeks. What am I going to do? There were two possible paths. One possibility was 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. 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. That was great — flying into London City, the little airport in the center of London, is the best thing you can do for being supersonic. These guys probably get the speed. I met with a guy, and he was willing to give me an LOI [letter of intent] on a different corporate-entity letterhead. I was like, "Woo-hoo!" This LOI was for 15 airplanes at $200 million each, so it's a $3 billion LOI.
36:50	Shaan Puri	Explain what an LOI means in this context. LOIs can range from nonbinding—"Hey, sure, sure, I'm interested in taking a look"—to a binding LOI with hard money. Right? You know, there's a range. That's what I...
37:03	Sam Parr	Was saying with...
37:04	Shaan Puri	Your LOI? What are you—what were you talking about at this time?
37:06	Blake Scholl	So, this LOI [letter of intent] was a piece of paper. You start asking questions about it. It's from a startup airline which, by the way, hasn't flown any airplanes yet. This was a PDF, and it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.
37:19	Shaan Puri	This is the equivalent of: "I have a girlfriend. She just goes to another school. Trust me."
37:24	Blake Scholl	It's basically like this: I'm doing the practice Demo Day pitches. Michael Seibel—bless his heart—that guy's got... I think one of the brilliant things about PG is he's built a culture at YC where people just tell you what they really think. It's one of the best things about YC. So I'm doing practice Demo Day, and Michael Seibel looks at my slides and my pitch and he's like, "Blake, do you have anything that's real? Because you sound like you're completely full of shit." It was bitter-tasting medicine, but it was what I needed. I kept working on retooling the pitch to be focused on what hardware we really had at that time, and also trying to figure out this customer thing because I knew that the LOI was flimsy. So we've been working on Virgin, and there's a whole other set of stories I could tell at length about how I got to Branson. But I did get to Branson.
38:13	Shaan Puri	"Well, tell us — we like the hustle stories. Give us one."
38:16	Blake Scholl	So, Mark Kelly, who is now Senator Mark Kelly, is a shuttle commander — you know, a human extraordinaire in a bunch of ways, yeah.
38:25	Sam Parr	Astronaut Mark Kelly.
38:26	Blake Scholl	Astronaut Mark Kelly was on our advisory board, and he hung out with Richard. I sort of discovered I could ghostwrite emails from Mark Kelly to Richard Branson, and he would send them. So I did. This was February–March 2016, so 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 actually been invited to go because he was connected to those circles. I hadn't been invited. The pitch to Branson from Mark was: "Hey, the Boom guys are going to be in Mojave for your spaceship rollout. You should really meet with them while you're there." He said okay, and so we got a 15‑minute meeting. It was me and my chief engineer, and Richard and Richard's mom. I actually never got invited to the rollout; I had to crash the rollout, but I managed to talk my way into it. I had those 15 minutes with Richard. He kind of asked us if we wanted anything to drink, and I said no — I'd already had lots of coffee. I realized a couple minutes into the pitch that he was drinking Scotch. It was very early in the morning. I love Richard.
39:43	Sam Parr	"You failed the cool guy test."
39:46	Blake Scholl	Apparently, maybe the pitch would have gotten better if I had more scotch. But at any rate, he said, "Guys, this is brilliant. I love what you're doing—this all makes sense." Then he kind of leans back in his chair and says, "Oh, but I'm already doing Virgin Galactic and that's a lot, and I don't know if I've got two of these things in me." I replied, "Richard, we're not asking you for money. We're asking that, when this works, if you'd like the first few airplanes to be for Virgin—if you want them. Because if you'll raise your hand and say, 'I want these,' the product makes sense, then I'll go get all the money elsewhere." That turned out to be the thing that worked.
40:25	Sam Parr	How did...</FormattedResponse>
40:26	Shaan Puri	"You think to say, instead of saying 'you know, invest in us or advise us or whatever,' just say: 'Do you want the first ones to say "Virgin" on the tail, or do you want them to say "Lufthansa," because the world is...'" </FormattedResponse>
40:37	Blake Scholl	A lot cooler places. We write for John. It was really Virgin versus BA. And, if you know him, with a history of Virgin...
40:42	Sam Parr	You know, Richard Ba...
40:43	Blake Scholl	He hates BA, right? What is Richard—Richard cares about PR, and he hates BA. When he tried to buy the Concordes, which he did, he tried to buy BA's Concordes, but they were shutting it down and they wouldn't sell them to him because they didn't want to get embarrassed. So, what does this look like?
40:56	Sam Parr	Basically, Sean, I don't know if you ever read his book or The Listener. BA and Virgin—[British Airways]—they had a battle in the 1990s and early 2000s, where BA was trying to shut down Virgin. So he went on this whole campaign. I think he brought a tank through London and rolled over a fake model plane. It was like a whole PR campaign of the "little guy" — Virgin — versus the "big guy" — BA.
41:18	Blake Scholl	Oh, it's great—the stories are great, right? He very specifically 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. I'm like, why don't I let you stick it to BA? It turned out that way, you know. But then the meeting ends and there's no deal. I'm sort of working it through my friends at Virgin Galactic, trying to get something done. YC—the way YC was structured is demo day was spread across two days, and the company might not exist if we hadn't been on day two. What happened that week was: Wednesday was our demo day (demo day two). On Monday we were launching the company out of stealth mode, and we'd gotten Ashlee Vance to write the launch article for Bloomberg. If you don't know Ashlee, he was like Elon's first biographer. We let him and the Bloomberg team come out to Denver to interview me and take all the pictures they wanted to take. In my head this is brilliant because the story is going to be—boom—the SpaceX of airplanes. But I had no self-awareness about how darn early we were, and I let the photographers take a picture of me on a plastic orange chair climbing into a cardboard mock-up of an airplane. Ashlee actually wrote a nice story, but his editor picked the picture and wrote the headline. The headline said something like, "Colorado company thinks it can build a supersonic jet." And then there's my, like, "fat ass" climbing into a cardboard mock-up. So that's Monday. I know—it's so bad. So bad. Then it's the top of Hacker News and the comments... and the comments then...
43:00	Sam Parr	"Like photoshopped—like a helmet on your head."
43:03	Blake Scholl	Ugh... I mean.
43:04	Sam Parr	It was so.
43:04	Blake Scholl	It was so awful. The comments were brutal: > "What an idiotic company. Don't they know airplanes aren't made out of cardboard? > What idiot runs marketing at that company? Who would name a supersonic jet company 'Boom'?" I kept thinking, we are so screwed. We're going to be the laughing stock at demo day. On Monday and Tuesday I was sitting at my desk working on the slides when up pops this email from Virgin: "We're in for the first 10 airplanes. You can announce it tomorrow." I read the email three times because I couldn't believe it said what I thought it said. I felt like I had just gone from the biggest loser to the biggest winner. I called up the team at YC [Y Combinator] and said, "I need to relaunch my startup—how do I do this?" I stayed up until midnight that night redoing press pitches under embargo. We relaunched the morning of demo day with a $2,000,000,000 LOI from Virgin—done on an email—and then we were back at the top of Hacker News again. The comments flipped. My favorite ones were like, "What genius runs marketing at Boom? They're the one-two punch—that's how you launch a company." Another comment summarized it as: "Monday: [laughs]. Wednesday: oh shit." By the grace of Richard Branson, we would have died that week otherwise.
44:35	Shaan Puri	You seem to have a lot of these stories that are what our buddy George Mac likes to call "high agency." You were a high school dropout, yet you got into college — I think you high-agency'd your way into college. I don't think you just worked at Amazon; I think you kicked ass at Amazon, and you got the job in an interesting way. I think you kicked ass in an interesting way. This whole idea of, like, "I didn't take [unclear] at face value," and I kind of taught myself the physics and calculus I needed to, like, diligence the idea initially... It seems like you have a lot of these. What's your favorite version of those stories? I think your meter might be: you don't have the — what's it called — the thing that stops a car from going at a certain speed? Like a governor. Yeah — you removed your governor. So you're willing to go further than the average person would when the default answer looks like "no."
45:36	Blake Scholl	Yeah, well, I want to understand, I guess, a couple things. One is I want to understand things for myself, and maybe that's the most important thing. Funny side story: as I was going through a divorce and fighting with my ex-wife over custody, I had to go through this weird psychological exam. I was answering these multiple-choice questions where they ask all these random things. I could tell there were questions like—I think the experts are wrong and I know better—and I thought they were testing for delusions of grandeur, so I wasn't going to answer that 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. So I have that premise. I also have a complicated relationship with my own ego. It was a really weird decision for me psychologically to start this company. I would look in the mirror and think I 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 to do it, and I didn't actually believe on the inside that I was going to succeed. I just didn't want to not try, and I really struggled with that. I remember thinking about who my business heroes were. I especially thought of Bill Gates because Gates said, I think during 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—and then some. 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. So I'm like, okay: there must be a couple categories of entrepreneurs. There are the people who go after these big missions and succeed—we all know their names: it's Bill, it's Steve, back in the day it's Thomas Edison and the greats. And then there's probably the dark matter of founders. The dark matter of founders are the people who go for big things and set big goals but it doesn't work. Would I rather be in the dark matter of founders, or would I rather be in the "I didn't try" category—someone who just had a job or started another mobile apps company? I made the conscious decision that I'd rather be a dark matter founder.
48:13	Sam Parr	"That's pretty badass."
48:15	Shaan Puri	Basically, you were willing to lose.</FormattedResponse>
48:17	Blake Scholl	I had to be willing to lose. Another turn of phrase here is—I'll tell this through the story of my daughter. When she turned 10, which is a few years ago now, 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. By the way, we have one of those every year with regularity—there's a life-and-death crisis every year. I didn't know how we were going to get through this particular one. I was feeling pretty down about it. I had this self-talk that was 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 the hell is my identity to my children? It's not a great question, but I had that question. So she's in the back of the car. We've just had ice cream, and I said, "Ada, what would you think if I failed at Boom?" I'm going to tear up as I say this. She didn't miss a beat and 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. We're going to fail having given it our all, and we're not going to give up. When the XB-1 [our prototype airplane]—the first startup to ever break the sound barrier with that airplane—landed earlier this year for the last time, I was standing outside the airplane with the team of 50 people that had built and flown it. 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. It took a whole lot of not giving up. Other reasonable people would have given up; a bunch of reasonable people did give up. To get over to our airliner flying, that's going to require a lot more not giving up. Pick something you'd be proud to fail at—and don't give up.
50:37	Sam Parr	That's a great story. I also think that, you know, I'm not in your industry at all, Sean — I make internet stuff. I remember seeing this Elon Musk video where the rocket... I don't remember exactly what it did, but it was some threshold they had never accomplished before — it reached space or something like that. You see him looking up, and you hear launch control freaking out. He actually, I think, looks like he's about to cry. He's looking up and it almost feels like he's in awe, impressed, saying, "I can't believe it — it worked." The whole crew, like 1,000 employees, are just freaking out. I remember thinking, "Man, something like that seems so challenging. I couldn't do it." It took 15 years, 20 years to get there. Then you see that video and you're like, "Wow — that's totally worth it." It's sort of like someone running a marathon whose family is there at the end, freaking out. Or doing some crazy physical task that takes decades or years of work, and then you have this moment where there's a clear beginning, middle, and end to the journey. I'm very envious — it's really cool that you had that. It happened recently, like six months ago; I forget that you guys had your first flight.
51:56	Blake Scholl	Yeah. It was three... it was like three months ago. It was recent, yeah.
51:58	Sam Parr	Three months ago, I remember thinking—I have nothing to do with you, but I have this sense of pride just for you. I remember seeing Paul Graham, who doesn't seem like a very excitable person, and he seemed very excited about this. I was like, "This is amazing." It almost felt—felt very patriotic, you know. They had nothing to... I don't know if there was no, like, it's...
52:20	Shaan Puri	"Team Ambition instead of Team America, right? It's..."
52:22	Sam Parr	Yeah.
52:22	Shaan Puri	"It's... 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, right?' When I was little, I wasn't a flight enthusiast. I didn't have my pilots [phrase unclear]. Your thing is your thing. But I think everybody has a little version of that in them. There's some version of that in you — the most ambitious thing, the most 'you' thing you could possibly do."
52:47	Sam Parr	And you.
52:48	Shaan Puri	It would probably fail, and it'd probably be super hard. If you're smart, you have a lot of easier options you could choose. </FormattedResponse>
52:54	Blake Scholl	And could.
52:54	Sam Parr	Be small, even.
52:55	Blake Scholl	Like, that's right.</FormattedResponse>
52:56	Sam Parr	Be a stand-up comedian or do a show, right?
52:58	Shaan Puri	All the...
52:58	Sam Parr	Way to go to space.
53:00	Blake Scholl	It's the biggest ambition relative to someone's actual frame and their actual values. Imagine going back to your five-year-old self and saying, "Let me tell you—let me tell you what you're going to get to do here. Here it is." What makes that five-year-old self just tickled pink is thinking, "Wait a minute—I get to do that."
53:19	Shaan Puri	Blake, have you ever read the Pixar rules of storytelling? They have this thing called the "22 Rules." Pixar—who, if anybody, knows how to move people emotionally—lists rule number one as the most important. Rule number one is: > "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 approaches the obstacles. This sounds obvious, but the reality is that's also what moves founders and inspires people. It's not the success itself. Yes, it's amazing that, like, Elon’s story with the rockets landing—wow, that's so cool. The rockets landing, synchronized in the middle of the ocean, is amazing. But it's ten times more amazing when you know the first three rockets blew up, that he went all in, and that nobody was going to do this if he didn't.
54:16	Blake Scholl	That's right.
54:16	Shaan Puri	If he didn't push forward and continue on in the face of almost certain failure, I think that's one of the most important rules for founders. It's what will inspire your team; it'll inspire customers, the audience, and investors. In the end, you admire the character—how the character tries, rather.
54:35	Blake Scholl	I think that's right. One of our OG Boom people has a metaphor for this that I found really useful. He calls it the "emotional piggy bank," and the idea is that 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.
55:00	Shaan Puri	Right.
55:00	Blake Scholl	And I think—this guy's been a boon for nine years. He's one of the few early people who stuck it out. Now he runs our engine program, and I think he was using that with himself a lot. But I've, you know, tried to broadcast it to the team because I think it's really—I think it's really true.
55:18	Sam Parr	"When do you think you guys are going to be mainstream? When are you going to be—when are people going to be flying? Right now you're at this point in the company where it's like, 'All right, you've raised $700,000,000, so obviously you're a big deal,' but you're not to the point where it's like, 'This is a thing; this is going...'" </FormattedResponse>
55:34	Shaan Puri	To work.
55:35	Sam Parr	When do you think it's going to cross this? I guess it's been 15 years, or 12 years. </FormattedResponse>
55:41	Blake Scholl	Yeah, we'll turn 11 on paper in September. Eleven years ago I was in my basement reading textbooks.
55:49	Sam Parr	Wow. So not that long ago... and now—what's the next chapter of the story? You got through a bunch of chapters. You got through the crazy guy in his bedroom, too, right? Oh—okay, this is kind of interesting. "Oh my God, he made a prototype." This is actually potentially serious. Now, the next chapter—what's that going to be, and when is it going to be? Are we going to read it?
56:09	Blake Scholl	One way to look at this is the progressive overturning of the skeptics. That's not how I see it on the inside, but it's one way to look at it. The skeptics said, "a startup could never sell airplanes to airlines." We did. United bought them and made a deposit; American did as well; Japan Airlines placed a pre-order. That happened. A startup could never build a supersonic jet. We did that, too. 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. By 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 2027, fly it in 2028, and be ready for passengers in 2029. There's a good chance it could take longer than that, but those are the goals. I've got a lot of learnings along the way about how you set goals and how you set schedules, which I could talk about. My conclusion is: ambitious schedules result in the fastest actual execution. So those are our targets.
57:28	Sam Parr	You know, it's a cliché that I say at the end of the podcast. It gets to the point where someone says something amazing and I go, "Man, you're the man." I've overused that phrase, but I think that of the people who I look up to — you're potentially going to be an American hero. I think we're honored to talk to you, and I hope that you are, because it would be really fun to have you win. It would give us all a huge sense of pride to watch you win. And I think the jet thing is cool, but the cooler thing is that you've had — you had — a crazy vision, and it might actually come to fruition.
58:09	Blake Scholl	You know, I appreciate you saying that. It's weird — I have a weird relationship with my ego on this. I think back to my days in college when I was reading my favorite book, Atlas Shrugged. My favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is this guy Hank Reardon, who is this sort of combination business–technology hero who invented a new kind of metal. I remember crying and thinking, "Man, I don't have it to be somebody like him." I always wanted to be, but I didn't think I could. Along the way, someone told me that the things we admire in other people are actually our own strengths. At first that made no sense to me, but as I started to pattern-match it, my own weaknesses are the things that annoy me the 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. Of all the various random things that were said about me after he broke the sound barrier, the one that spoke to me the most was when someone I'd never met, never heard of, compared me to Hank Reardon.
59:25	Sam Parr	Oh, that's awesome.
59:26	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, that's amazing. I always say, 'If you spot it, you got it' — both the good and the bad. If something bothers you about other people, it's because there's a part of you that recognizes that behavior. And the same thing: if something inspires you, there's a part of you that identifies with that behavior. You are what you admire, and once you realize that, you actually start to pay attention to what you're choosing to admire because you're pointing your little compass in that direction... And then there's just a question: are you going to remove the governor, or are you going to leave it in and not actually go chase it all the way? I love this. That's right."
59:59	Blake Scholl	That's the — that's the happy side of it. And then the unhappy side is the things that drive me crazy in other people. Holy shit, I'd have a zalk of myself because I'm probably doing it too. [zalk unclear — original word uncertain]
01:00:06	Shaan Puri	Right. I like this quote that you have. You said: > "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." You know, there's probably going to be somewhere between half a million and a million people who listen to this episode. I guess—if you were going to leave here making your case for that, for why founders should work on the most ambitious thing, what's your case?
01:00:30	Blake Scholl	"Can't lose if you win. Obviously it's great, but I think it's a mistake to start from your resume, and it's a mistake to start from what you think you can do. I think 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 that's so motivating that the goal matters more than your own insecurities. That way you can do the thing where you extrude yourself into the noodle of the right shape. That's the only way you find your limits."
01:01:06	Shaan Puri	By the way, you were really young, and I think I read that you reported directly to Jeff Bezos. I can't let you leave without asking: "Do you have any good Bezos stories?"
01:01:13	Blake Scholl	Oh, I've got a bunch. I did not report directly to Bezos. One of the most annoying things that happens as you go through these journeys is that little bits of bio get turned into better sound bites, and then I feel embarrassed because people claim I was an executive at Amazon — and I was not. Someone was like, "What actually?"
01:01:30	Sam Parr	Oh, he worked at Amazon. Oh—so he worked for Jeff Bezos? Yeah, he worked for Jeff Bezos. Oh, he worked for Jeff Bezos, right?
01:01:37	Blake Scholl	So, sort of every hourly worker in the warehouse... No — I did get to do something that Jeff cared about, so I got to work with him a bit. That meant I was updating him once a quarter, and if I screwed up really badly, Jeff would hand my ass to me. By the way, there's no better early-career experience than being 22 and working on something that Jeff happens to care about. When I screwed it up, he told me. I found out later that I was the youngest ever manager at Amazon. I don't think I knew that at the time, but I got to build—what I got to do was basically Amazon's first ad buy from Google, and build the system that was, I think, the first automated ad-buying system on the Internet. This was before we were buying AdWords, before there was an AdWords API. We had screen scrapers that were automatically clicking buttons in the background with Perl scripts. My experience of it was like standing next to a rocket, and then the rocket took off and my jacket got caught on the rocket, and I kind of was along for the ride...
01:02:39	Blake Scholl	This thing was driving 7% of Amazon sales and 7% of Google sales all at the same time. Somehow, my experience of it was that I felt like I was on the precipice of failing. They were about to fire me and replace me with somebody who actually knew what they were doing. I was right at that line — it never quite crossed it. It was a great first "build something from scratch" gig, and I got to learn a lot from that experience. I also got to know Jeff a little bit, but I didn't work directly with him; I was like...
01:03:10	Shaan Puri	"What—what's he like, and what did you pick up from him?" </FormattedResponse>
01:03:13	Blake Scholl	I really admire Jeff. The stories you hear about CEOs tend to be the ones about how they lose their cool, yell at people, fire people in elevators, and whatnot. One of my favorite things — and I would watch Jeff lose it with other people a couple of times — was that he never lost it with me so long as I took accountability. I remember the very first time I was presenting to Jeff. We had just launched, like, the MVP of this thing I was describing, and I was telling Jeff how we built it and why. I was nervous af because I was, like, 22 or 23, presenting to, like, this god. We get partway through the presentation and it's going well. Then he says, "Well, why didn't you do X?" He had this idea, and I said, "Well, we didn't think of that." He starts laughing.
01:03:57	Sam Parr	Exactly a reason.
01:03:58	Blake Scholl	Right. He starts laughing—the big, famous Jeff Bezos laugh—and he says, "That's a great answer. It's true all the time, but nobody's willing to say it." What I found was that whenever I just told Jeff the truth and took accountability... it worked. There was another time I was in front of the executive team and the temperature was rising in the room. I was thinking, "Why did we do this when this other thing was a higher priority?" Everyone was getting progressively more pissed off that we'd misprioritized. I just spoke up and said, "That was my call. I got it wrong. I misprioritized. I won't do it again." The tone of the room shifted, and the conversation moved on. Obviously, I couldn't do that every single time on every single thing, but Jeff rewarded straight shooters. Jeff rewarded accountability. He rewarded knowing your own business like the back of your hand, and he was tremendously forgiving when you were learning on the job. I have huge respect for that. The other thing is, I'd go in to talk to him once a quarter and... I felt like I knew my stuff, and he would hand me a novel insight in five minutes on the thing I did every day. I think that speaks to being really smart, but also to the first-principles approach: as you go to first principles, you can actually get to novel insights quickly.
01:05:10	Shaan Puri	That's exactly what Emmett said. Amazon bought Twitch for $1 billion, so he reported to Jeff. He would go, I think, twice or three times a year to meet him. He said the same thing: "He wants you to know your business." But then, within five minutes of reading the document, without fail he would give me one thing that I thought was kind of impossible. "I think about this business 24/7," I said, and he gives me an idea or an angle or perspective — like a novel perspective or a novel idea — that I didn't have. He's like, "That's amazing." That, you know, shows the level that that guy's at.
01:05:45	Blake Scholl	He's super smart, and he's very first-principles. If you put those two things together, that's what I think makes my experience and Emmett's experience possible. It's the thing that enables other leaders to do the same. What I try to challenge myself to do is, at any given management review or when working with a team, ask myself, "What's the most important question?" Many, many times I find that no one's asked the most important question. It's actually not hard to find or to ask it. </FormattedResponse>
01:06:11	Shaan Puri	That's pretty brilliant. What's an example? Could you just give us an example of that — a situation where you asked that question and it shifted the conversation?
01:06:18	Blake Scholl	I got one from yesterday that's sort of an example. I called the Overture leadership team together on a Sunday. My spidey sense was firing — I thought we weren't aligned about development philosophy. We started talking about when to insource and when to vertically integrate. The conversation in the room began with, "vertical integration is the goal, so we'll eventually do all these things." I tried to steer the discussion away from that. I said, "No — it's not about doing everything ourselves. What we need is the winning strategy. We need to decide when we want suppliers and when we want to do things ourselves, and what the principles are by which we make those decisions." So I went to the whiteboard, and the room tried to answer those questions: how do we know whether we should do something ourselves or outsource it? I don't think we've completely cracked the nut yet, but we at least brought the team's focus away from specific answers and toward the principles for making those decisions. I think we'll keep pulling on that thread. Ultimately, the answer to this question will be part of our company's success story — because we'll have understood how to think about it, and we'll have the team aligned on a set of principles. They won't need to bring every supplier decision to me; they'll understand the principles and make great independent decisions.
01:07:32	Shaan Puri	"Hey, Blake — you're awesome, man. You're a very unique founder. I've met a lot of founders, and you're a very unique guy. What you're doing is awesome. I really appreciate you coming on, and I hope my keyboard wasn't making too much noise, because I kept writing down these little quotables that I thought were pretty great for me."
01:07:48	Sam Parr	The best episodes, Blake — the best episodes you'll see: Sean and I do two things. First, you'll see us do this, and we're like... gazing. The other thing we do is this: you see us just lean back and cross our arms, like "class is in session."
01:08:03	Blake Scholl	Well, thank you. I had a lot of fun.
01:08:06	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, where should people follow you, or follow the journey? Where do you want to direct people who want to stay in touch here?"
01:08:12	Blake Scholl	I'm pretty active on X, so 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 of what's going on at Boom, and then I mouth off about other random things in the world.
01:08:26	Shaan Puri	Alright, man. Well, I look forward to flying everywhere in half the time. Thank you for coming on and thank you for doing that. Alright — that's it; that's the pod.

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How I Got $5 Billion In Preorders For A Supersonic Jet Company

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