E153: Blake Scholl on Boom Supersonic: Learning from Elon Musk & SpaceX

A couple months ago, we did our

boomless announcement.

We announced that in the morning and tweeted about my least favorite regulation.

Elon responded and said, this administration will solve this and all the other dumb regulations that don't make sense.

And I flew to DC that night for a whole bunch of meetings.

By the time I landed, I had an invitation to come to the White House.

Since then, we've been making a full court press on getting that regulation repealed as quickly as possible.

You know, one of our employees that actually made both the machine that made the model and the model, we brought that painted of virgin colors, and we sort of explained to Richard what we were doing and why it made sense and why it was a step forward versus Concord.

He was copiously taking notes.

He kind of leans back in his chair and says, Gosh, guys, like, this is this is brilliant.

I love every part of it.

But I said, Richard, you know, let me be clear: we're not asking for your money.

We're asking

for you to say that you want the product.

We're asking if you want the first 10 of these to have a virgin logo on the tail.

Do you believe that the bigger the idea, the easier it becomes?

It's very counterintuitive.

Explain why you want it.

Boom, we have days where I look at a problem problem and it feels like the startup equivalent of a cancer diagnosis.

It's like, oh, I'm going to fight over and win against cancer.

We have just asked to the best people in the world working on this.

And they do it at the team level.

They do it at the board level.

They do it at the investor level.

They do it at the advisor level.

They're building a supersonic chat.

Like everybody wants to talk about it.

Everyone's excited.

I believe that there are second-order effects of being able to fly to London more often, flying from New York to LA.

What do you perceive to be the impact to business, to society?

how did boom become the most talked about company at yc demo day over a decade ago the the lead up to demo day was really painful i remember you know a few weeks into yc we were talking about what we'd actually bring to demo day and like all the other saaz companies are like bringing a product at a growth chart we are we're not going to have a product in demo day it'll take more like eight years not like eight weeks to ship a supersonic airliner.

I didn't believe we could have sales before it actually built a product.

The YC partner said, Blake, if you ship a Demo Day without sales, sales, your goose is cooked.

So

I looked at our product pipeline, our sales pipeline, and I was like, man, I'll be lucky to sell airplanes in eight years, let alone eight weeks.

It's certainly not going to be like a United or a Lufthansa that would be willing to pre-order a supersonic jet from a startup company.

It's going to have to be either a startup airline or somebody as bold as Virgin who would be willing to jump and lean in.

So

we focused kind of all of our sales efforts on those two categories.

It'd be a startup airline or it'd be Virgin.

And we managed to find a startup airline that was doing kind of an all-business class service in and out of London City airport, which is the closest you could do to a faster flight short of actually having a faster airplane.

It was going to be all business class, which was very much our model.

We managed to get them to give us an LOI for $3 billion worth of airplanes.

And this sounds great until you realize the startup airline actually hasn't started yet.

And they very much have a long road ahead of them.

And so this LOI is maybe worth the paper that it's not printed on.

So you got this LOI from an airline.

What did you do next?

I remember the

run-up to Demo Day.

We're doing our practice pitches.

Michael Siebel said, Blake, do you have anything that's real?

Because you sound like you're completely full of shit.

And I was like, oh, like, we are about to be like the

biggest laughingstock of Demo Day.

We're going to show up without a product and without sales.

And it's like, great, these Yahoos think they can build a supersonic jet.

Nobody even wants it.

We went on this huge sprint on one hand to just make what we had more tangible, to bring some actual starting points of hardware to Demo Day.

And

on the other hand, we just went after Virgin with everything we got.

And the backstory was that Richard Branson had a lifelong passion for not just for flight, but for faster flight.

And when British Airways kind of put a knife in the back of Concorde, he tried to buy the Concords out from BA and restart service and they wouldn't let him have them.

And that's how it ended up in a museum.

Around that time, Virgin was working on Virgin Galactic, and they're about to roll out their second spaceship out of the hangar in the Mojave Mojave Desert.

We thought, great, well, maybe we could find a way to meet Richard while he's there for that event.

What I found was

one of our advisors at that point was Mark Kelly, who's now Senator Mark Kelly.

If I wrote emails from Mark to Richard, Mark would send them.

And so we basically got a message to Richard that said something like, hey, I know you're going to be Mojave for the spaceship rollout.

The boom guys are going to be there too.

You should really meet them.

And so I figured we'd then get an invitation to the rollout.

Turns out we never actually got an invitation to the rollout.

I sort of crashed the rollout.

So you crashed the rollout.

Were you able to meet with Richard?

I got a 15-minute meeting with Richard and his mom, like kind of over breakfast, like before the before the rollout event.

We'd made a model of our airplane painted up in virgin colors.

This is a little wooden model that we've made on a CNC machine.

One of our employees had actually made both the machine that made the model and the model.

We brought that painted up in virgin colors and we sort of explained to Richard what we were doing and why it made sense and why it was a step forward versus Concord.

He was copiously taking notes.

He kind of leans back in his chair.

He says, gosh, guys, like, this is brilliant.

I love every part of it, but like, I'm already doing this spaceship thing and I don't know if I can do like two of these things of this scale.

And I said, Richard, you know, let me be clear, we're not asking for your money.

We're asking

for you to say that you want the product.

We're asking if you want the first 10 of these to have a virgin logo on the tail.

As if you're willing to raise your hand and say, I want this, then I'm going to get all the money I need somewhere else to get this done.

And you're going to get to have this before anybody else will.

And it turns out he loved that.

Asking the right question, offering the right thing was important.

And we kind of kept pushing on it and pushing on it.

And finally, the day before demo day, we got the email that said, okay, we're in for the first 10.

We'll sign the contract later, but you can go ahead and announce it.

And to me, it felt like we went from being on the verge of the biggest losers, the biggest laughing stock of demo day to the biggest winners.

So we went from $3 billion in LOIs, that didn't really mean anything, to an additional $2 billion from Virgin, from an actual well-respected airline.

We sort of relaunched the company

that Wednesday on demo day.

That week was just a surreal week.

It was like Monday.

We took the company out of stealth, and

we had gotten Ashley Vance to write the launch story.

And Ashley, of course, was like Elon's first biographer.

Tell me about your thinking about having Ashley Vance write the launch story.

In my head, this was going to be a brilliant coming out of stealth story.

So it's going to be like, hey, Boom is the next SpaceX.

Boom is the SpaceX of Airplanes.

That was the parallel we were going for.

I didn't realize back then just just how early we were and how early it looked.

And so Ashley's team, the Bloomberg team really, had taken pictures of like me on an orange plastic chair climbing into a cardboard mock-up.

Ashley wrote a very nice story, but then

his editor picked the image and the headline.

The headline said something like, this Colorado company thinks it can build supersonic jets.

And then there's a picture of me climbing into cardboard mock-up, and it's kind of laughable.

And that Monday, we're on the top of Hacker News, and the comments comments are just brutal.

It's like, don't these guys realize that the supersonic jets are not made out of cardboard and what idiot runs marketing that would name a jet company after the sound of an explosion.

So that was Monday.

Tuesday we get the email from Virgin and I'm like, I think we just, I think we just won.

And I called the YC press people and I'm like, I don't really know how to run a media cycle, but would you help us?

And we basically stayed up until midnight that light doing press interviews.

And we relaunched the company on Wednesday with a pre-order from Virgin.

And we're back up the top of Hacker News again.

And this time the comments are like, wow, the one-two punch.

What genius runs marketing at that company?

That's the way you launch a company.

And like Monday, colon, haha, what a dumb company.

Wednesday, colon, oh shit.

It was very nearly a catastrophe.

But

it turned into a pretty nice victory.

There's different things to unpack here.

First of all, the fact that you started a supersonic jet company after working at Groupon is

an incredible high-agency way to build a career.

But perhaps most interesting, most interesting is the story with Richard Branson's.

Not only did you find a way to him, which 99% of people couldn't do, you then assumptively assumed that you could get into this conference that you weren't invited.

Then you went there and you asked, I think, two really powerful things that any hardware entrepreneur or any entrepreneur on the planet could benefit from.

The old saying, if you ask for advice, you get money.

If you ask for money, you get advice.

The powerful question to a billionaire, I'm not here to ask you for money.

Very disarming.

Secondly, I'm not asking you to believe that we're going to build this, but if we did build this, would you want the Virgin logo on it?

I thought that's one of the best questions I've ever heard.

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There are a lot of lessons for hard tech founders in there.

And, you know, one of the things that, like if you're building a software company, it's relatively inexpensive to test whether you built a useful product.

You just go launch it.

You try to get people to use it.

And if they use it, okay, you built something useful.

And if they don't, then you didn't.

And it's relatively inexpensive to test that with like seed money.

But if your product is a supersonic airliner, you can't build it and then find out whether it was the right thing to build.

It just takes too long and costs way too much.

So it's really important to find demonstrable ways to demonstrate that the product is going to be useful

so that you don't have market risk and technology risk at the same time.

You take the market risk off the table and you have only the risk that you'll actually build the product.

That was a big piece of the idea of let's get customers on board early.

You developed the XB1, which is essentially a prototype.

Talk to me about your prototype and what did that development, what did the development of the prototype teach you?

Yeah, so it goes back again to how do you take something that is a massive effort, systematically decompose it, and then systematically take risk off the table.

And so if you start on day one, you can almost say like, what are all the ways this could fail?

Well, maybe

airlines don't want it.

Maybe passengers aren't willing to pay the required fare.

Maybe we can't make the engineering work.

Maybe there's a regulatory barrier.

Maybe we can't get the appropriate supply chain to work with us.

There are all these, you sort of imagine like all the biggest failure risks.

And then we try to try to make proof points against each one of those.

And so on the engineering, from an outside in as well as an inside out perspective, we thought it was foolish to try to go straight to building like a 400,000 pound safety critical supersonic airliner.

The odds that that would succeed the first time were just very low.

We wanted to do something very analogous to what SpaceX did.

Before they built the Falcon 9 rocket that is the workhorse today, they built a Falcon 1, which never really carried meaningful payloads, but proved to SpaceX and to their customers and to their investors that, hey, this startup company could build a rocket and put something in orbit.

And so that was the XB1.

We sort of took our initial idea of what the overture airliner would be, we shrank it down to one-third scale, and we said, let's go design, build, fly, learn.

But we were starting with a palette of technology that we knew we could use to build an airliner in success.

And we wanted to learn 100% of what we needed to learn to do that successfully.

And so

that was the origin of XB-1.

Initially, we called it Baby Boom.

It's got a lot of firsts on it.

It's the first supersonic jet developed outside of a nation state.

It's the first civil supersonic jet since Concorde in 1969.

It's the first one ever made in America.

And it's the first one to prove that you can do supersonic flight reliably, repeatedly, without an audible sonic boom.

I saw the Twitter post.

Basically, it's the sound, sound waves refracting back and into the atmosphere.

That's right.

It's actually not really the the airplane itself, but it's how you fly the airplane.

Fly at a sufficiently high altitude at the right speed given current weather conditions, and the boom just makes a U-turn in the sky.

It never reaches the ground.

This works up to about a 50% increase in speed over today's airplanes, up to about Mach 1.3, plus or minus a little bit based on weather.

But you don't have to do anything impractical with the airplane to make it work.

You just have to fly it high enough at the right speed for the day.

How did you come up with this scientific theory and tell me about how that came to you?

Well, we didn't come up with a scientific theory.

This is well-known physics.

It existed and was understood decades ago.

But if you look and say, well, why did Concorde not do this?

Well, to do this, you need decently good weather data.

You need a computer that can crunch the numbers and say, well, given today's weather, here's the right speed and altitude.

And then you need an engine that can fly that speed and that altitude efficiently.

And today we have three out of three.

Concorde had zero out of three.

So it's physics that have long since existed, have been well covered in academia, but had never been been turned into a practical product before.

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Something that I believe you and Elon both have in common in how you developed your products is you focused on what next action would be needed to unlock the next set of resources.

So you didn't, Elon's not focused on how do I populate Mars.

First, it was how do I show that SpaceX rocket works?

Then the biggest technical challenge at SpaceX historically was the reusable rocket.

That was the most difficult.

That was the most unproven.

Once he had that, then he could start creating the starships.

And then, you know, he's still not obviously on Mars, but creating these

bridges to the next set of resources needed.

to take on the next mission.

One of the things that a lot of people are inspired by what you've done is you went after this incredibly audacious goal and you've systematically executed across it over more than a decade.

So, talk to me about that, and how do you maintain the momentum?

Yeah, I'll just answer the second part first.

In ways, that's the easier part.

I deeply believe that it is far more important to work on what you love than what your resume says you can do.

And this is my second company.

My first company was a, we made a barcode scanning game that we ended up aqua hiring to group on.

Like, like any startup, it had the days where there were problems where we didn't know how we would solve them and that they felt existential life and death.

And, but, you know, I would constantly think, gee, this is really hard.

And like, what am I doing?

Like, am I here for a barcode scanning game?

Is that going to be my impact on the world?

And like, like, this, this is incredibly painful.

It's not worth it to me personally.

And so when we had a chance to aqua hire the company and everybody made a little bit of money, like, we did.

And, and yet I wanted that startup experience again, but I never wanted to wish I hadn't started.

And so I wanted to pick a mission that would be so compelling to me.

And I think for secondary reasons, so compelling to everybody else around us that we would never give up.

And And so I just, I put all my, you know, I ignored what my resume said I could do, and I focused on what I, what I would never give up on.

And, you know, I deeply believe that

we have this like historical injustice.

In 1969, we could land on the moon, we could fly supersonic, and fast forward to 2025, we can't do either of those things anymore.

And very grateful, you know, Elon and the SpaceX team, they're fixing the moon side of this and going well beyond it.

But nobody was serious, no one's making a serious effort on supersonic flight.

And it's not because it wouldn't be worth it.

It's just really nobody was trying.

And if you build flights that are faster and affordable and convenient and safe, everybody's going to want them.

And in fact, the market for supersonic flight is going to have to be larger than the market for subsonic because when flights are faster, people go more places.

It's like the Jevons law of aviation.

Speed things up, people will use it more.

That's what happened when we went from props to jets.

So it's like very valuable to the world to go create it.

Just the risk isn't, you know, can you actually create it?

And so that's the, and this created a substrate for me and the key people at Boom where we believe so much in fomenting fomenting the supersonic renaissance and what that would do for humanity and how it would inspire other people that we would just never give up on it, no matter how hard it got.

So that's kind of thing one.

And thing two, like the de-risking framework is very much what you described.

Step one, let's go prove that if we deliver what we're talking about, that airlines are going to actually want it and they're going to want it in quantity, not just supersonic fly it as an idea, but the very specific airplane that we're building, like how many seats and how much range and the fuel efficiency target and what the economics are going to be.

And so that's why it was a big deal to have Virgin raise their hand.

And then a few years later, United made a non-refundable deposit.

American made a non-refundable deposit.

And both of those things happened before we'd ever flown an airplane.

And so that was key to unlocking.

It's like, okay, they already came.

All we have to do is build it.

So then the next step is let's let's prove that we've got a good shot at building it.

So let's go do a simpler, scaled down, but still sufficiently representative and challenging prototype that we inspire belief that we can pull off the big airplanes.

It's step one, step one, market.

Step two, technology, proof of concept.

Step three, scale up.

And we're on step three now.

You believe that the bigger the idea, the easier it becomes.

It's very counterintuitive.

Explain why you believe that the bigger the idea becomes, the easier it becomes to execute.

The first is just for me as a founder.

Boom, we have days where I look at a problem and it feels like the startup equivalent of a cancer diagnosis.

It's like, oh, I don't know if we're getting through that one.

That one could be fatal.

And yet, because the idea is big and inspiring and important, you know,

I'm going to fight over and win against cancer.

That, that's true of me, but it's also true of the team.

Like we have just some of the best of the best people in the world working on this.

And we have incredible people on the board.

And if we were building something less interesting, we never could have gotten those people to want to be there or to work as hard as they do.

So the fact that inspiring missions attract great people and they do it at the team level.

They do it at the board level.

They do it at the investor level.

They do it at the advisor level.

It impacts how you can do media.

Like you go to media and you say I'm building a supersonic chat.

Like everybody wants to talk about it.

Everyone's excited.

And because of that, it solves what I think in some ways is really the biggest problem in any startup, which is how do you get great people and how do you get them motivated?

And a big, compelling mission is a magnet for great people.

And once you get some great people, then what other great people want to do?

They want to work with other great people on something that matters.

And so it just creates this sort of like talent flywheel that continues to gain momentum as it goes.

It's one thing to have a huge mission.

A lot of people have big mission, but it's another thing to corral the resources, the investors, the employees, to singularly focus on milestones.

How did you do that?

What were the early milestones?

And walk me through the first five, six, seven, eight years before there was really a substantial milestone that made this inevitable.

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If I go back all the way, you know, I think about how I got the right

first engineer to come join.

Part of it was sort of recursively searching my network for talent.

The first meeting I got in the industry, because literally I didn't know anybody in the industry on day one, was this guy who now worked at SpaceX, but he'd played hockey in college with somebody who had worked for me at Groupon.

And so that was my first meeting.

And I said, hey, dude, if you could wave a magic wand and you could get anybody in the planet to come work with you on this, forget whether they're interested or available, but just who would you want if you could get anybody?

And he gave me five names.

And I met those people and I asked them the same question.

And pretty soon I was talking to actually some of the best people on the planet for like early stage airplane engineering.

And I remember that the guy who ended up being our first chief engineer, I met him,

met him at this random SFO airport restaurant and

I just showed him the models I built.

You know, I'd built a spreadsheet model of the market and I'd built a spreadsheet model of the airplane based on kind of first order design principles that I learned from just reading textbooks and taking an airplane design class.

I remember he looked at it and he's like, wow, I didn't expect you'd be that far along.

Also, he's like, he's like, I always get pinged by these internet guys that have airplane ideas, and they're always kind of like fruitcake.

But this isn't fruitcake.

This actually makes sense.

This seems feasible.

And it seems important.

And it seems practical.

And so it was that kind of a reaction that allowed me to put the early team together.

Here was a big inspiring mission.

Here was the actually pragmatic approach to a product and a thing where the founder had done enough technical work on it that it actually made some sense.

And so all of that, you know, all of that mattered

to getting that initial team together.

And once you got the engineers, they started to recruit their friends, and engineers like to work with each other.

That's right.

Great people are magnets for great people.

It reminds me of another Elon Musk story where there was a famous professor at Stanford and he wrote an article, or he said to the press, five of my top 10 students ever went to this company called SpaceX.

I don't know much about it.

And Elon reached out to him to take a meeting.

And the professor figured out that halfway through the meeting, he was just trying to figure out who the the other five students were the other five of the top ten that were not working at space it's this maniacal pursuit of getting the very top engineers working at your company there's the old jim collins you know get the right people on the bus then get them in the right seats and figure out where the bus is going and i think that probably undersells the importance of having an inspiring place for the bus to be going um but but it is it is very true you believe that there's this misconception that hardware companies require a lot of capital and are very capital intensive why do you believe this is a misconception Well, if you look at the numbers, it just tells a different story from what everyone claims.

One of my general principles is never accept a qualitative answer to a quantitative question.

And this is a microcosm of that.

Like if you look at how much money like Uber raised or Airbnb raised or Stripe raised and you compare it to like SpaceX and Andrew and Rocket Lab, it's just not factually true.

Like

the software companies many times consumed way more venture capital than the hardware companies.

The hardware companies can have some of the best return on invested capital stories.

It's not inherently worse for investors and it's not inherently more capital.

The difference is the complexity in demonstrating product market fit.

And one of the lessons that I hope the world and especially the investing world takes away from Boom is how do you decompose risk?

And how do you,

for a software company where market risk is eliminated relatively early on through demonstration, what does that playbook look like for a hardware company?

Such that you know

you can invest the development dollars with confidence that

the market will be there on the other end.

And if they do the development the right way, it doesn't actually have to be an insane amount of money at all.

Speaking of money, speaking of investors, the airline industry is historically just a terrible way to make investor money.

It's always being subsidized by the government.

How is Boom going to make money for investors in the space?

By building something very large and very profitable is the short answer.

But if I can put some color around that, today, if you look at the stalwards of commercial aviation, we've got Boeing and Airbus.

It's a duopoly.

Each product portfolio is basically a photocopy of the others.

Like the 737 is really the same as an A320.

A 787 is roughly the same as an A350.

And so we've got duopoly players with nearly identical

product lines.

What that means is market forces push it to very low gross margins.

You see roughly 8% margins out of Boeing or Airbus.

And because the product capability hasn't changed in decades, it's low growth.

So aviation grows like slightly faster than GDP.

And so it doesn't get big multiples and the fundamental margin structure there isn't awesome.

And so, okay, enter supersonic flight.

Here's the thing with actual differentiation.

Inherently, because people will fly more when flights are faster, the markets going for supersonic flight is going to be larger than for subsonic.

And because we have no near competitor and a multi-year head start, we're not competed down to

perfect competition level gross margins.

We can actually sell the airplane for what it's worth, which is way more than it costs to build.

So to give you one idea of this, just with our very first airplane, the very first airplane is all business class.

So it's taking the passengers that today are

20% of seats, but more like 80% of international airline profits, and giving them a product that they will switch for and pay more for.

Yet because the airplane is all business class, it's actually much smaller than a typical Boeing or Airbus.

But because it's faster, it can do twice the flights of the same airplane and crew.

So here you have a machine that is more profitable than a 787 that's much larger.

Literally, Literally, the time to payback on an overture is going to be about half or less the time to pay back on a large Boeing or Airbus airplane.

But yet, because it's a smaller airplane, it's physically smaller, there's less stuff in it, so it's cheaper to build.

So, okay, worth more, costs less to build.

This is like econ 101.

That's a great, that's a recipe for a great gross margin structure, so long as you're not in a highly competitive environment.

And here we are with a massive head start on something that's inherently takes a while to develop with great fundamental margins, with a market that will inherently get bigger than the current markets.

I think Boom has, it's a long-winded long-winded way of saying it.

I think we have a shot here at creating one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

And so what that means is from an investor perspective, you can deploy like growth-size levels of capital into the company, but get venture-like returns.

Now, this is not for the faint of heart, because there's also, it also has some element of venture-like risk in it.

We could totally fail.

But you could put very large sums of capital to work here with it with a venture-like return profile.

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Demonstrated XB1 on X, and then 24 or 48 hours later, you were at the White House.

Talk to me about the regulatory landscape, and how is that changing?

And how do you see that changing in the next few years?

The first thing to know is that, and this goes back to kind of constructing the optimal risk profile for the company from day zero.

We designed around 20-year-old proven 787-level technology, like our first airplane.

It's not new materials, it's not new science, it's not new technology.

It's just taking 787, cutting it down, making it long and skinny, putting twice as many engines so it can go twice as fast.

And what that means is, from a regulatory perspective, everything we're doing is pre-approved.

We need to go demonstrate that our design is safe and that our manufacturing is reliable, but we don't need to prove anything fundamental that hasn't been proven before.

So every single thing on the airplane has a regulatory precedent on it.

And that means from an FAA perspective, we're skating downhill.

And this will be much easier to do than a new subsonic airplane with a bunch of new technology on it that's never been done before.

That said, there's kind of one, I'll call it nice to have exception, which is was not part of the original business plan.

The original business plan was we'll fly supersonic over water, we'll fly subsonic over land, but we don't need to repeal this, the speed limit over land, we don't need to fly supersonic over land to have a gigantic market, at least not for version one.

And but it turned out along the way, we did actually find a solution for sonic boom.

And of course, when you say, you know, you can go to New York to London in three and a half hours, the next question is, well, how long is it New York to LA?

And, you know, and it's kind of a downer of an answer: like, well, we're not really allowed to do that, and maybe the rules will change one day.

But we proved in February, we proved in February that we can fly supersonic without an audible sonic boom and that we can do do that reliably.

Obviously, we should repeal this really stupid regulation that says thou shalt not fly supersonic and change it to something far more reasonable, like thou shalt not make bad noises.

And if there's no sonic boom, that should definitely be okay.

So we're working really hard to get that regulation changed to legalize supersonic flight so that everybody can fly coast-to-coast supersonic.

And I'm actually quite optimistic that will happen.

Maybe it'll even happen quickly.

One of Doja's mandate, most people only know about the cost cutting.

It's actually a regulatory cutting.

There's a lot of these regulations that were written in the 60s, 70s that don't even have context.

It's like one of these things that gets passed down with no first principles thinking and no incentive to change.

It's really stifling a lot of different industries, especially startups.

Yeah, it really is.

My least favorite one is Federal Aviation Regulation Part 91, 817 that says, thou shalt not fly a supersonic.

So

a couple months ago when we did our

boomless announcement, we announced that in the morning.

I think that afternoon I tweeted about my least favorite regulation.

Elon responded and said, this administration will solve this and all the other dumb regulations that don't make sense.

And I flew to D.C.

that night for a whole bunch of meetings.

And by the time I landed, I had an invitation to come to the White House.

And since then, we've been making a full court press on

getting that regulation repealed as quickly as possible.

Because what can happen here is if we repeal that regulation,

the already large market gets even larger, and it creates dynamics where we'll be able to accelerate a lot of our development.

And so, the goal is to have the first full-scale airplane flying within four years.

You alluded to this earlier, but you believe that there are second-order effects of being able to fly to London more often, flying from New York to LA.

What do you perceive to be the impact to business, to society?

The best clue of this is to kind of look back for historical precedence.

And one of my favorite things to ask people is when Uber first launched in San Francisco and they were in the black car market, what percentage of the black car market did they actually take?

David, do you know the answer or do you have a guess?

Percentage of the black car market that they took in the first year.

10%?

It turns out the answer is 300%,

right?

Because they made it so much easier to access this desirable product that people used it way more.

So it was a massive like, grow the pie, not steal a piece of the pie.

And if you look back at the closest aviation precedent for that, it's in the 1960s when we went from props to jets.

And say West Coast to Hawaii went from, you know, call it 15 hours to more like the seven that it is today.

But travel to Hawaii went up like sixfold in the first 10 years of the jet age.

And it kept on growing because

we broke really the time barrier to travel.

If it takes, if you've got a long weekend and Hawaii is 15 hours away, you go to Napa instead.

But when Hawaii is six or seven hours away, you say, oh, we could take a long weekend and have an island vacation.

And so it's incredibly demand stimulative.

And you can look across other, so Hawaii was not a tourist destination before jets.

Nike got their start in the 1960s after jets when the founder fell in love with Japanese-style running shoes and wanted to bring them to America.

The Beatles took the first world tour in the 1960s after the speed of the jet.

They could not have done it earlier.

And so the second and third-order effects of

more world travel, whether it's for personal things or business, I think are gigantic.

And history shows that when you speed up travel at a price point that a market market can afford, demand skyrockets.

It's like this compounding force.

If you think about how many more deals could get done in person versus on a Zoom, the incremental trip that gets done, you do the business deal, you start the company, that company has an innovation, and it goes out to the entire ecosystem.

So you have this magnifying force.

It's almost impossible to predict.

I think that's right.

You know, people have predicted for a long time that various forms of telecom were going to obviate the need for travel.

Like it was the story around email.

If If we can remember back that far, email was going to kill business travel and it didn't.

And I think actually the reality is the exact opposite.

The better the ability to maintain some kind of a relationship at distance,

the more feasible it becomes to have that relationship and the more important it is to show up in person.

So when flights to Australia take as long as flights to Hawaii do today, now all of a sudden it makes it a lot more feasible to maybe put a remote office in Australia than it is today.

Stay in touch over Zoom for part of it, but sometimes it's going to be really important to get together.

And all of that's going to be new travel demand.

Another evolutionary purpose for in-person meetings: one is nonverbal communication.

93% of communication is nonverbal, so it dramatically increases communication in person.

Two is social bonding.

When you're in person, it releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which promotes trust and cooperation.

Three is increased creativity.

Face-to-face interactions spark more ideas.

13.36 per session compared to virtual meetings, which is about 10 percent.

And trust building, 85%

more trust building and in-person meetings.

So that's just my quick perplexity search, but I'm sure there's other side effects as well.

All of that sounds right.

I mean, you know, if you're falling in love with somebody, you don't want to zoom, you want to go, right?

Do you ever plan to make Boom a retail product and something that every man could could access, or is it always going to be business travel?

The roadmap here looks a lot like Tesla's roadmap.

The XB1 was sort of like the Tesla Roadster.

Here's a proof that the Tesla Roadster is let's take a cell phone battery and a Lotus Elise body and prove you can make a compelling electric car.

But it wasn't for very many people.

And the Overture One is sort of like the Model S.

There are tens of millions of people.

Anybody who's flying business today will be able to afford to fly Supersonic.

And that's tens of millions of people a year, but it's not quite everybody.

And I want to get to the point where everybody from the president to every family can benefit from faster flight.

I want a universe in which, I mean, talk about second order effects.

What happens when our kids grow up with friends from other continents that they actually know and spend time with?

And to do that, you need speed and you need affordability.

And so there's ultimately going to be a whole family of products here.

We'll go from the Model S to the Model 3.

There will be second generation airplanes.

There'll be some that are bigger.

and thereby can reduce the cost per seat.

And there'll be some that are smaller that are for more private use cases.

And so just like the way Boeing has an entire family of subsonic products, we're going to have an entire family of supersonic products.

And the art is really to just pick the right first things to to build.

The XB1, then the Overture, and then there's a whole roadmap behind that.

You have over a decade of experience, which I like to call mistakes, building something.

And you've built this world-class company.

What do you wish you knew before starting Boom?

And how would you counsel the next generation of hardware entrepreneurs?

What lessons would you give them to make it easier for them to build the next boom?

The single biggest lesson learned out of XB1 was how to be more pragmatic.

We

set the original design goals for XB1 and Overture quite high.

We wanted to be faster than Concorde.

We wanted the very first prototype to be able to carry at least one passenger.

That drove us into technical challenges that were far more

challenging than they really needed to be.

Like at Mach 2.2, 10% faster than Concorde, it drove us to a really skinny wing and a very long, slender fuselage.

And that meant, well, with a long, skinny fuselage, tiny wing, all the low-speed handling becomes much harder to make it work.

The landing gear becomes harder to design because it has to fit in this really tiny space.

And so, we made the engineering challenge for XB1 dramatically higher than it really needed to be.

As we went along the way and we found those challenges, we sort of backed off on some of what the initial targets had been, but we were still sort of stuck with the legacy of those decisions.

Like, once we started building the airplane, well, it was going to be long and skinny, and we had to solve all the long and skinny problems, even if we'd convinced ourselves they didn't actually need to go Mach 2.2 anymore.

And so, the single biggest lesson learned out of XB1 was really how to build a pragmatic supersonic jet.

And we changed a lot of what what Overture was going to be.

We backed off on speed from 2.2 Mach to 1.7, which is really about a 15-minute difference in a flight time across the Atlantic, but a dramatic difference in the challenge of the airplane, dramatic difference in the development cost.

And so I'm really glad.

I'm really glad we did XB1 because otherwise we would have set out to build actually what would have been the wrong Overture.

Overture needed to be actually bigger because the passenger demand was higher, but it needed to be simpler so it'd be easier to birth.

And so

my put to hardware founders is constantly challenge what you think you have to do.

And what you, what you want to be is on the happy side of a lot of market demand and also on the happy side of where the really hard technical problems are.

And so always challenge.

Always challenge the requirements.

Always challenge what you're setting out to do and ruthlessly try to

simplify the mission.

I put the speed.

I was very afraid the team would compromise on speed.

And so I put it on my license tag.

My license tag was Mach 2.2 and the Wi-Fi password was Mach 2.2 or bust.

But it was a design parameter, and it was really the wrong one.

And it made it much slower to get pragmatic.

So don't get wedded to design parameters and constantly challenge them.

Try to find a thing that's really important and valuable to customers, but it's as dead simple as it possibly can be.

You know, you don't, you don't start SpaceX by building Starship first.

You start it by building Falcon 1 and then Falcon 9, and then you make Falcon 9 reusable, right?

And that is, I think that is the arc of pragmatic hardware development.

Keep the early things as dead simple as you can.

Just like first principles thinking.

You also want first principles

goals.

What are you actually trying to achieve?

Or else you start to get into these arbitrary constraints.

What made you evolve from the 2.2 to 1.7?

We ran the math and we looked at what the challenges were.

And we knew it up front because we've been fighting it all on XB1.

At 2.2, we were going to be 15, 20 minutes

faster across the Atlantic, but we were going to burn something like 40% more fuel.

And we were going to have to qualify an entirely new material system that was different from what was already proven on the 787.

And it was a very sad day for me.

Mach 2.2 just was, I just like the number, but it was the right pragmatic decision.

And

you had to make these decisions on the fact base.

You were willing to cut off the arm to let the body survive.

Yeah, but also there's another mindset here.

Like, so the development, like short cycles beget short cycles and long cycles beget long cycles.

And the like the extreme example of this is like where things are at Boeing and Airbus now.

It's literally been 20 years

since either of those guys has launched an all-new product.

So if you're an engineer at Boeing and there is actually a new airplane coming, who knows when they'll ever do another one, but eventually, hopefully they will.

And you've got an idea you're excited about, you're going to fight really hard to get it on that airplane.

Because if you don't, who knows when there's another one coming?

It might not happen in your career.

Think of it like catching a train.

If the trains come every five minutes and you miss one, it doesn't matter.

You get on the next one.

But if the trains come every like 20 years, you're really, really sad if you don't make that train.

And so, and so it leads to this sort of

overburdening of every product with features.

But instead of you operating the assumption that we're going to develop new airplanes much faster and we're going to have new products that come out frequently, then it allows each step to be a smaller step and therefore far more tractable.

You had this huge goal and this visionary goal.

Talk to me about how you take a really big goal and chunk it down into a way to build momentum in the product cycle.

So So

one way that looks internally is something we call mission success events.

And I'll tell you the story of how we got to that.

Mission success event is like an incremental milestone on the road to success.

The way we got to is

we were building XB1 and we'd thrown down the gauntlet and we'd said we're going to roll it out.

in October.

And we hadn't finished building it yet.

And the team committed to the goal.

We went to like seven-day work weeks.

People were working long hours.

They're working incredibly hard

to finish this product in a way that we'd be be really proud to show the world.

Literally down to like scrubbing the airframe, polishing it, giving it the most incredible paint job.

When we rolled that thing out, we put it the most unforgiving lighting environment you could possibly imagine with these light bars.

Like you could see an imperfection on it if it was there.

And the team just busted their asses to get that done.

After the milestone,

I said, okay, we're going to give the whole company a week off.

And then we're going to come back.

We're going to run again.

And the next goal is to fly the airplane.

The team came back and everyone was like whining about being burned out.

At first, I was like, What are you talking about?

Like, I just gave you a week off.

Like, what do you mean you're burned out?

Eventually, what I realized was burnout isn't what everyone says it is.

Burnout is not like, I'm working too hard for too long.

Burnout is I'm working, but the emotional payoff is too far out in the future and not tangible enough.

I think each of us kind of has like a, I call it a gratification window, which is like, you know, how long out in the future can a goal be before it like loses its ability to inspire us?

What I learned was that most of the team probably had about a, it was healthy to plan for kind of a one-month gratification cycle.

And so instead of saying our goal is to go fly the airplane, we chunked down the work such that there was one major milestone about every month.

And we'd work really hard for that milestone.

And then the whole company would celebrate it.

And we do this now across the entire entire company.

And by the way, the entire company celebrates a mission success event from any team.

Like if we close a government contract, the whole company has a party.

If we release a big part of the airplane out of engineering and into manufacturing, the whole company has a party.

And so scheduling those with regularity, engineering emotional payoffs

is a big deal because otherwise the goal just feels intractable to too much of the team and the pace slows down, the motivation drops, and burnout sets in.

And so teams can actually work at insanely high intensities for long periods of time without feeling burned out

so long as there is engineered emotional payoff along the way.

It's a difference between invigoration and burnout.

Both could be working really hard, working 100-hour weeks.

One is actually accelerating and more motivated.

The other one is actually burning out.

I looked up, there's a famous study, Harvard Business School study by Teresa Amabil and Stephen Kramer on the benefits of celebrating small wins.

I looked up some of the outputs.

Recognizing small accomplishments can boost mood and confidence, improve motivation, help form good habits, enhance skills like focus, goal setting, create a sense of purpose, inspire and motivate others.

So there is actually a study on this from academia.

Science and practice, absolutely 100% lined up there.

Break a big goal down into regular payoffs and have like a relatively low bar for celebrating victories is important.

And it relates to another thing, which kind of goes to scheduling philosophy.

And we went in a bunch of different directions on this before.

I think we really cracked the nut on it.

For long projects, you tend to create a schedule.

And schedules are, schedules, you'd think they would be, ah, this is the thing that tells us when everything is going to happen.

No, it's not.

Nothing ever goes according to schedule.

And if you try to make everything go according to schedule, now everything in the schedule is sandbagged because nobody wants to miss a date.

Now the schedule is bloated.

There's no chance to, there's no overachieve.

And inevitably, something is still challenging, and you miss even the bloated schedule.

And so eventually we threw that out.

We said, actually, it's not a schedule, it's a work plan.

And it tells you the interdependencies of tasks.

And it is the tool that you use to adjust when something doesn't go according to expectation.

We sort of build our schedules with everything is kind of 15% optimistic.

We assume we don't run into any major roadblocks.

So it's kind of like assuming you don't get any traffic lights on red, there's no traffic jam, and you speed by 15 miles an hour.

And now, do you ever hit those dates?

No.

But sometimes you do at elements.

And when you find a challenge, now you go into them with energy and you find a way to overcome them.

And then that feeds back into the culture of you celebrate all the victories, and this creates a reward cycle versus like, well, we had this time-based goal.

It was too optimistic.

We missed it.

And now we feel like we lost when what actually busted our asses.

And we want to feel like we won.

When building something so ambitious, you really have to look after your psyche and what goes in your environment.

Talk to me about your information diet and what would you read?

Who inspired you as you were building Boom?

If I go back to day zero,

the Apple Think Different campaign from 1997 was a huge influence.

And that was the one that Steve did when he came back to Apple, and they were like 90 days from bankruptcy.

And he did the most, I think, unintuitive thing, which is, let's launch a brand marketing campaign.

And I think the real audience for that was actually the employees, not the external audience.

And the refrain was the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

I think that's what gave him the internal permission to go off and do iPhone and before that, do iPod and redefine what Apple was when it was busy getting its ass kicked by the Wintel PC domain that you're going to build supersonic jets was a very like heady thing for me.

It was a very weird thing for my ego.

It's like almost sort of declaring to my friends or anybody I'm going to talk to about this that I'm going to be in that club because if it worked, it's historic.

And yet, like, there's absolutely no guarantee it would work.

And, you know, it's most likely to fail.

And I remember thinking about the people like Steve who laid those goals out, the people like Bill Gates, who said he was going to put a computer in every home and on every desk running his software like in the 1970s when that was laughable.

The people who set audacious goals and then achieve them.

Like we know who they are.

History remembers their names.

But I have to believe there's also a dark matter of entrepreneurship.

The people who set lofty goals and don't get there for whatever reason.

I made a very conscious choice.

I'd rather be in the dark matter of entrepreneurs than the wantrepreneur.

I didn't want to ever be like 80 looking backwards, having taken a whole series of safe, big company jobs with guaranteed big pay and wondering, what if I'd ever had the courage to pursue my dream?

You know, and thinking like it probably wouldn't have worked, but what if it had?

It's become almost fashionable to talk about egotism and how egotism is bad.

But sometimes you have to actually say something that sounds absurd or that sounds egotistical.

I'm going to do this thing that nobody has ever done.

And the only difference that separates an egotist from an inspirational figure is whether they actually execute.

So it's not the goal.

It's not thinking that you're better than or that you have a chance to do something remarkable.

It's that you're willing to do the hard work after making these kind of statements.

Yeah, you know, before we do the hard work before and after.

And it's not a, you know, it's not a blind jump.

Like I had a spreadsheet model that said supersonic flight should exist and it was practical.

Do I want to have then the courage to go make a run at it or not?

And I think the ego thing is interesting.

I think a lot of what we, our cultural vocabulary around ego is like reversed.

And, you know, talk about somebody's got a big ego and they run around bragging.

I think that's actually the hallmark of a really small self, a really small ego.

So a lot of our terminology on this is backwards.

And I think there's some still figuring out to be done there, almost at a cultural level.

Yeah, healthy ego is kind of like good plastic surgery or good sales.

It's hard to see because you don't cringe at it when you look at it.

That's right.

And it's quiet.

It's not braggadachio.

When you're successful, when could we see the fruits of your labor?

When could I take either an international or domestic flight as a civilian living in the United States?

Our goal is a little over four years.

We want to be ready for passengers by the end of 2029.

To put that in a bit of context and why I believe in that, although there's certainly no guarantee.

Today we are about where the 777 was five years before before it carried passengers.

Meaning we just had a design freeze.

The outer lines of the airplane are frozen.

We've got the high-level design, the high-level schematics are all done, and we're proceeding into more detailed development.

And so if we execute as well as the old good Boeing of the 90s did on the 777 program, we'll be ready for passengers in about five years from where we are today.

And of course,

our goal will be to do better than Boeing of the 90s did because we've got a whole lot of tools that didn't exist back then.

The Triple Seven was actually the first airplane that was built in CAD, to put that in context.

And today we have all kinds of digital tools on one hand.

On the other hand, we're also building a company as we build an airplane.

And that brings with it all kinds of new challenges.

When you build your investor base, you've had to really curate it towards people that aligned with your vision and your mission.

Tell me about how you get to somebody's core mission as an investor.

How do you vet the right investors to go alongside your journey at Boom?

The early days was a lot of trial and error.

And we got a lot of no's from VC.

And it took me a long time to understand why.

And I thought, well, VCs are in the money, in the business of making money, making investments.

And

I could show a plan where this was going to be a great IRR and a huge multiple uninvested capital.

Like, why are people saying no?

Well, it turned out to be a bunch of things, but one of them was just that the timelines didn't make, were an impedance mismatch for fund dynamics.

So, you know, if the,

you know, if you've got a 10-year fund, you're going to raise a new fund every 12 to 24 months, you need things that are going to exit in a reasonable timeframe.

Important to show good marks along the way.

Full-fit pattern matches for LPs and other things that have been successful.

And like none of those things were part of our business.

And so pretty quickly we realized, you know, VCs aren't, you know, it's easy to think as an entrepreneur, VCs are the people with money, but they're not really.

Like, they're actually money managers.

And their customers are LPs.

And the startups are the product getting sold.

And like, you think back at what used to be said about Facebook, like, you know, if the product's free, you're the product.

Well, if the product pays you, you are definitely the product.

right?

And so

the fund dynamics that made a lot of sense for software companies did not make a lot of sense for what we were doing.

And so what we ended up doing is skipping the VCs and going straight to the LPs.

And that turned out to be tremendously successful because it removed this sort of mismatch layer of the fund dynamics that were fundamentally just not a good fit for Boom.

And so as an example, Sequoia never invested in Boom, but Michael Moritz did, and he wrote a Sequoia-sized check.

Greylock never invested in Boom, but Reid Hoffman did.

And he wrote a Greylock-sized check.

And I could keep going like that.

Many of our, a whole lot of the boom funding is direct relationships with LPs or SPVs that were created outside of the fund dynamic ecosystem that fundamentally wasn't a fit.

And that's kind of how we got XB1 done.

But now we sit here and we are under five years from flying a full-scale airplane.

We're hopefully five years from carrying passengers and earning like billions in revenue.

And I think all of a sudden now that we're inside that envelope where it's no longer, the fund dynamics are no longer a mismatch.

How should people follow you on this journey?

Where could they learn more about Boom and anything else you'd like to share?

We are extraordinarily open.

I tell the team, like if we took everything we had in our CAD database and just published on the internet, probably our odds of success would actually go up because people don't realize all the stuff we have that we really have.

And so we are, we're super open.

Follow me on X at B School.

Follow the company at Boomero, A-E-R-O.

And we try to try to sort of cut a hole in the side of the building and just let people peek in because we're on a pretty fun journey and I want others people to come along and follow along and enjoy it along with us.

Thank you, Blake.

Thank you for sharing your time and thank you for being an inspiration to so many.

Well, thank you, David.

I really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to my conversation with Blake.

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