Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic

29:27And so we had these like government spec projects with effectively unlimited budgets that had no incentive to create product market fit and they caused the entire supply base behind them to get used to unlimited money. So all the economics dropped out. And then the worst thing happened, which was now aerospace became a competition between nations. Oh, shit, now we've got politics and protectionism. And the American competitor to Concord, which was funded by taxpayers, spec'd by the FAA, was going to be worse at product market fit than Concord. That gets canceled. Nominally a good thing. But it wasn't yet obvious just how DOA Concord was.

30:14So now we try to block it. And in 1973, we put in place a regulation that extensively was about protecting the public from sonic boom. But it wasn't a noise limit. It was a speed limit. It was a ban on supersonic. And that regulation, which was... Judge by speed, not sound. Judge by speed, not by sound, right? It could suck noise out of the atmosphere. You could design a supersonic jet that cancels out Harleys, and it still wouldn't be allowed. So it's totally nuts. It's literally a ban on innovation. And what it did is it banned the actual correct minimum viable product. because the actual correct minimum viable product is a supersonic private jet that can carry five people and it can fly coast to coast in the U.S.

31:01That's the minimum viable product. Had that not been banned, we'd all be going Mach 5 by now. Oh my gosh. Okay. So let's go back to your story though because now that we have a little bit of the background, you are questioning things. You're crunching numbers and thinking, I can make this work. We left off. You said, I either give up. I'm not the right person or I go assemble a kick-ass team. You obviously went and assembled a kick-ass team, right? How'd you find these people? You didn't have contacts within the aerospace community. So it turns out that one of the key enabling technologies for super sonic flight is LinkedIn.

31:40I remember going to LinkedIn back in 14 in my basement in the Bay Area. And I'm going, you know, industry equals aerospace. Connection equals first degree. and it said no results. Like I literally didn't know. You didn't know anybody. I didn't know a single soul in the industry. Oh, man. So, okay, what could I do? It was like a second degree and there was this guy who worked at SpaceX who was connected through one of my direct reports at Groupon and I sort of emailed my Groupon friend and I'm like, hey, do you know, how well do you know Jamie? And he's like, well, we played hockey in college together.

32:17I could email him for you. Nice. And I'm like, okay. So I got that intro and I had no cred. And my only way to be semi-plausible in any of this is at least I could show up to a meeting in an airplane I'd flown myself. So I'd rent an airplane out of Palo Alto and I'd fly to wherever the talent was and have people meet me at the airport. so like in a small aircraft because you're flying out of palo alto you have to be small aircraft single engine propeller plane yeah i think back then i think i'd upgraded to i'd upgraded to a cirrus which was like okay a nicer it's like a nicer version of a cessna so i'd fly and i did a bunch of sorties from the bay area down to uh hawthorne where spacex was or kind of out to the mojave desert where all the like crazy experimental airplane people were and and they would like kind to take meetings with me uh and and there was this lore down there that they're always these internet guys with with uh airplane ideas and like all the airplane guys that have done anything they're all used to getting pitched by internet people who don't know what they're talking about um and in fact there's a term for it they call it fruitcake like oh yeah that's it's just good uh i don't know like that that idea is fruitcake it doesn't make any sense.

33:39Like, no one wants it. It's like benignly pejorative. Right. Like, no one actually likes it. No one actually likes it, but everyone, you know, people try to give it. Okay. So I remember, I remember the first meeting I was in where someone said, that's not fruitcake. Oh, compliment. And so I sort of explained what I was doing and why. And I sort of showed that at this point, I had a first principle spreadsheet model that I could show the engineers. and the usual reaction was, well, this kind of makes sense. And so I basically like searched my network recursively. So that first meeting with a SpaceX guy, the question I asked him was, if you could get anybody on the planet to come work with you on this, you wave a magic wand, forget whether they're available, forget where they live, forget whether they want to do this.

34:29Think only about, is this the person you want in the trenches with you on this problem? Who would you get? Can you give me five names? And I would get the five names and then I would talk to those five people and I'd ask them the same question. So it was sort of this recursive tree search of the social network. And pretty soon I was actually talking to the best people on the planet. Oh, wow. That's clever. So yeah, this technique works quite well. And were they keen to join forces with you? uh they were intrigued uh i remember the guy who ended up being our first chief engineer uh i remember talking to him and he you know he yeah we met like outside sfo at the subway in the airport um and i showed him the spreadsheet and he's like oh i didn't think you'd be this far along um and then we talked more and he's like i'm used to these airplane pitches but this would actually make sense it seems like actually practical and he's like i want you to hire me as a consultant and I'm like I'm not doing that either either you come and you work here uh or we're not doing this and he sort of grumbled about it he's like these things burn out chief engineers which by the way he was right about um and uh you know anybody couldn't help himself but to work on it so he's like he's like oh I built like a more sophisticated version of your spreadsheet and it like kind of gives the same answer and and so I got to a point where I had a half a dozen candidates for the first few jobs in the company.

35:58And I was still early enough in my own journey that I don't know how to interview these people. So what can I do? Well, maybe if I could get them all in the same room all at the same time and facilitate a conversation, maybe I could figure out who is what they're talking about just from listening to them talk to each other. So, okay, I'm going to fly them all out the same time. Okay, where are we going to have this meeting? Like, we have this meeting in my basement. Like, oh, that's not going to inspire any confidence. so I called a friend up at Sequoia and I was like can we borrow a conference room for a couple days bold move that's a big favor he's like sure of course a thing I've come to believe is one of the core jobs of founders is to solve chicken and egg problems and one of the ways you solve chicken and egg problems is to basically recruit the chickens and the eggs in parallel so the So the idea was we had these actually fairly impressive people in aviation that would be bopping around the Sequoia people.

37:00So that would be impressive to the investors. And the fact that I was able to get Sequoia to give me a conference room might make me plausibly sound like maybe I could raise money for this thing. Right. Because you hadn't raised any money at that point. Is that right? I hadn't raised any money. This is all funded off of my savings. Right. And you are by yourself. You don't have a co-founder in this venture. No. No. Okay. Yeah, we ended up hiring two people out of that room, and I ended up calling them co-founders. Okay. But they're really first employees, and I was paying them out of my savings.

37:31Oh, wow. So when did you meet Sam Altman? Because he was integral in your story as it relates to Y Combinator, right? Yeah, I mean, Sam's been integral in the story in many ways. But yeah, so I hired a couple people out of that room. I moved to Denver. It was like, where are we all going to go move to do this? And sort of the consensus in the room was Denver would be a good place. So I was like, okay, I'll move to Denver. And now we're actually working out of my basement in Denver. And we're hiring people out of this recursive network search thing. And I think we got up to like eight people or something.

38:10And I'm just funding all of this literally out of family savings. um and so when you say family savings were you married with kids at this point i was yeah my i had three kids under under 18 months when i started there's some twins yes yes yes okay the functional triplets um wow uh wow oh my gosh and you decide to do this okay yeah i just kind of i don't know set everything to 11 uh and i didn't didn't totally realize that's what I was doing yeah the most supportive thing my wife ever did was be willing to move to Denver but I remember when I told her I was doing this she was like she rolled her eyes and uh and she was like okay you've got a year to screw around with this thing and then I expect you get a job um okay fair yeah it's pretty fair yeah so uh like nobody nobody actually believed back then I remember when I was first talking to my friends about it, I would tell people I'm going to go work on supersonic jets, and I could just watch their eyes roll back.

39:18And some people would say, call me back when you've got something less pie in the sky. And one guy told me to go for it. It was actually Avichel Garg, who I'd gone to high school with, and he sold a couple companies, and he's out in the valley. So he told me to go for it. And by the way, years later, he said, yeah, I thought you were crazy, but I could tell you were really passionate, so I couldn't tell you not to do it. So it was actually zero people believed. But we get to the point where I've collected enough people with good resumes that I'm paying out of savings. And I'm like, okay, I got to quit playing chicken in my bank account.

39:51I got to go raise money for this thing. And so I called the people who had made money in my first company. And some of them had said, we really respect how you handled that. Obviously, we'll invest in anything you ever do. And then they'd say, but we didn't think you'd do this. We were looking for some sass. Yeah. So there's about 50 % conversion rate from investors in my first company to seed investors in Boom. And then I tried to find other people who are - I was just going to say, that's higher percentage than I thought. Really? I don't know. I expected it to be like 100 % or 200%. You're an optimist, obviously.

40:24Yeah, I think you have to be an optimist to go do this. But then I was like, okay, I got to just find other people who are excited about this. And one of them was Sam. Because he was into playing - like he was yeah did he does sam have his pilot's license he does yeah okay okay i remember talking to sam on the phone and we'd like met each other uh when he was doing looped because i was working at like the kleiner funded competitor to looped back then oh wow okay yeah so we'd sort of bumped into each other you know around the time he was like got the pop collars on stage so it was like the startup i was at was supposed to have that stage slot and he had scooped it oh wow no way a piece of lore.

41:05Oh, yeah. It is. What do you mean he scooped it? So there were two companies with approximately the same elevator pitch, one funded by Sequoia, one funded by Kleiner. And Sam was running Loop that was the Sequoia company. And Jeff Holden was running Pelago, which is funded by Kleiner. And I'd been first employee at Pelago. And Pelago, it was virtually identical timing. And the Pelago was like slow to realize how important the iPhone was. And so, but we'd gotten through John Doerr. We'd gotten the like, we'd been like walked around to the back door. Like, okay, when the app store launches, they're going to be like three featured apps and we were going to be one of them.

41:54And long story short, we did a crappy job of the project. And the app was not in good shape. It was not ready to launch. And it was, it was like basically Pelago's to lose and we lost it. Oh. And there were a bunch of organizational dynamic lessons learned and co-founder dynamics that I think were part of that story. The CTO kind of went off and ran the project in a silo, not successfully, with the CEO kind of like, okay, okay, I'll let you take it. And then it was like, I remember going to the CEO's office like three weeks before the WWDC. And I'm like, this app isn't ready. We're going to get screwed.

42:30And then we tried to fix it in three weeks. It just wasn't enough time. And so did they choose looped at the last minute? They chose looped at the last minute. So it was, you know, if Pelago... Sam told that story on this podcast and he's like, I thought I did a really bad job when I was trying out for this. And then they called me the next day and say, no, no, we liked you. So maybe there's more to this story. Well, I mean, I think, you know, if Pelago had shown up well, what would have happened? I don't know. I kind of think John Doerr had the influence to make it happen but I think what happened is our app just sucked sorry for the digression these little tidbits are so interesting there are all kinds of lessons learned there when you get these big shots at important moments can't miss and also there's a founder mode lesson in there this whole trust your team thing is often mistaken.

43:36Like if Jeff had micromanaged that project, history might have gone differently. So back to Sam before we digressed. You met Sam and was he interested and did he offer to invest or did he say you should do YC? He offered to invest. He didn't like the valuation. So he was like, I'm only going to give you like 20 of a K or something. as he thought we were overpricing it. And, you know, but then he invested. And so we scraped together. It turned out to be almost exactly the same dollar amount I'd raised in the seed round for my first company. It was 770K. And then Sam kept saying, you should do YC.

44:15And, you know, I kept thinking, like, I don't get that. Like, this seems to be, you know, for mobile social apps, like not for supersonic jets. Like, what am I going to learn? and he must have told me five or six times to do it. And what I realized, and we tried to raise an A round, failed. And I was like, the most likely outcome for this company is like we come and go, never having raised money, never having done anything. Like it'll like be born and die at the idea stage. And so my single biggest risk is capital and I should just do anything, anything to try and solve that. And I'm like, okay, I will, if I do YC and it's not helpful, I won't really care about the percentage on the cap table.

45:00But if I don't try it and then we die, I'll think, why didn't I do everything I could? So I sort of went into it with that premise. And then it turned out to be the most important thing we ever did. Tell us why. What happened in that three months? It forced me to learn how to tell the story in a way that made sense to investors and how to think about de-risking it. I was very much in a like engineer mindset. Like I sort of hoped that we'd find somebody who would just give us a bunch of money and they would like quietly develop the supersonic airliner. And like what, you know, and then my like fantasy was we would tell the world with a press conference that would be conducted on a three and a half hour flight from New York to London.

45:47And that would be the reveal. This is wildly unrealistic. uh i remember you know a couple weeks into yc it was like okay what are we going to do in demo day i'm like well we're not gonna have an airplane you know and it was also like you have to you have to have sales i'm like i've got eight weeks and my sales pipeline is like united liftonza delta like i'll be lucky to sell to these guys in eight years let alone in eight weeks like what am i gonna do and and so i the the meta lesson there's tons of detail lessons in there Like, I think Jared Friedman saved us by just coaching me to be more aggressive with Richard Branson.

46:28There's a story with Richard Branson. Oh, yeah. Yes. Do you want to tell that story? Sure. Why not? Okay. So, okay. So the group partners were like, you know, come to demo day with sales or your goose is cooked. And I'm like, what am I going to do? uh so like who who is possibly going to do a deal with a supersonic jet startup in my basement uh in eight weeks okay it would have to be a startup airline uh or or maybe virgin would do it because i knew the virgin story richard branson had actually tried to buy concords and british airways were shutting them down they wouldn't let him have it and he would always talk about his version his vision for virgin galactic is that one day it would do high-speed passenger travel so I knew he cared and so I pursued Virgin in parallel with Startup Airline and at first so at first we got so it's like okay what Startup Airlines would do this it would have to be anybody who'd done all business class because they would understand the economics so I found everybody who was either doing or had done all business class airlines and I were flying to this conference and like at the hotel bar meeting this founder of an all business class subsonic uh airline and uh and i convinced him to like give me an loi uh and i remember going to the practice demo day pitch and like my you know my slides were not good and like uh you know i'm like and we've got a two billion dollar loi and michael siebel bless his heart is is like who is it from and i'm like well this thing you've never heard of okay well how many airplanes do they have actually none yet how much money have they raised uh actually I sort of had to write the guy a check in his seed round to convince him to work with me.

48:19So Michael says, Blake, do you have anything that's real? Because you sound like you're completely full of shit. And one of the many things that I think is wonderful about the culture that you've created at YC is just this culture of telling the unvarnished truth. And even if it's unpleasant, You know, like PG at one point told me I needed to lose weight. He was right. Oh, boy. Yeah. He was right. He's like, you don't look intimidating enough. You need to be formidable. Like, go to the gym. He was right. That's funny. So I realized, okay, we have to solve this somehow. We completely changed the pitch.

48:58We got rid of almost all the renders and only showed pictures of the hardware that we had. And I kept going after Virgin. And so the Virgin story was, I think Ron Conway's group had introduced me to Mark Kelly, who back then was astronaut Mark Kelly, now he's Senator Mark Kelly. And Mark would hang out with Richard. And so if I wrote emails from Mark Kelly to Richard Branson, Mark would send them. And so at this time, Virgin Galactic was about to roll out their second – they'd had their catastrophic crash. and they're about to roll out the replacement airplane in the Mojave Desert, and Richard was going to be there for the ceremony.

49:37And my chief engineer was actually invited because he was in all these circles, and I wasn't invited. I figured I'd solve that somehow. And so Mark Kelly said to Branson, like, hey, the boom guys are going to be in Mojave for your event. You should really meet them while you're there. And so Branson said, okay. And so we got a 15-minute kind of a breakfast meeting. and truth be told, I never got on the invite list for the rollout. I had to, I had to like talk my way into the rollout, not being on the list. Oh, poor thing. You must've felt like such a loser. Oh, I mean, it was, it was, uh, it was such a like random set of like, you know, persistent effort combined with, with, you know, every little bit lucky break we could, we could make, but we got the 15 minute meeting and it was me and my CTO and Richard and like richard's mom and richard richard's like do you guys want anything to drink and i'm like no no i've got plenty of coffee and then i realized shortly after that he's drinking scotch um this is a breakfast meeting we had like one model of our airplane at this point there's this wooden model that my cto had made in his garage and we'd we'd found a model maker who would who had like painted it in virgin's colors and we were like like we deeply prized this thing so he brought with us and we showed it to him and and richard said oh this is this is brilliant like i love it it's actually it makes sense but he sort of leans back in his chair he's like guys i'm already doing one of these crazy things like i don't have it in me to do two and i said well we're not asking that you give us any money um we're asking whether you want the product because if you'd be willing to raise your hand and say when this flies i want the first few to be a virgin then we'll get all the money somewhere else right and he said oh and uh and then so we left that meeting and then it was that was like four weeks the demo day and we were sort of working this deal through our friends at virgin galactic and uh and like you know richard like would not reply to the email and like the galactic guys would like not reply to the email and jared jared saved the company is he basically I remember he said in group office hours, if you're not being so persistent that you're worried about being annoying, you're not being persistent enough.

51:58And I was like, okay, I'll just email him again. And we were on, so the week of demo day, we sort of planned to come out of stealth mode on Monday. And we were on the second demo day. So demo day was Tuesday and Wednesday. And we had nothing. like we had a we had an old engine we had like a model of the airplane a 3d model of our model of our engine uh engine system and we had this loi from something that basically didn't exist um and and and so we but we got ashley vance who had been elon's first biographer to write the like coming out of stealth mode story for bloomberg and in my head this was going to be brilliant because the narrative would be boom, it's the SpaceX of airplanes.

52:47And we had no self-awareness for just how early we were. So Ashley had come out to Denver and he'd brought the like Bloomberg photographers with him. And we just let him take a picture of anything he wanted to. So he, but the lesson, don't ever let anybody take a picture that you're not okay being the headline picture. Yeah, good lesson. Yes. Was there something in the background? Oh, there was something in the foreground. Oh. So Ashley wrote a very nice story. But then the editor picked the picture and wrote the headline. And the headline was something like, this Colorado company thinks it can build a supersonic jet.

53:26And the picture, all we had was this cardboard mock-up. And so there was like me awkwardly standing. This is before PG had told me to lose weight. So I was not the smallest guy. like me awkwardly standing on this like orange chair this orange plastic chair like stepping into this cardboard mock-up and it's like a joke and it ends up so that wait can we find that on oh yeah it's still out there and by the way boom our internal slack has like an orange chair emoji so like this this joke has gone a decade so this story ends up being on monday at the top of hacker news and the comments are like sounding good yeah this doesn't sound bad oh but but it's so not credible it's brutal it's like haha what a stupid company don't they know the airplanes aren't made of cardboard what idiot runs marketing and would name a supersonic jet company boom uh and so we're just like we're just shredded so that's monday tuesday is demo day one uh thank Thank God we're not in it.

54:28And I'm like in the Airbnb in San Jose, like, you know, tweaking the slides, practicing. And up pops this email from Virgin.

54:40And it said, we're in. You can announce it tomorrow. Oh my God. No way. Right? I don't think I knew this story. Yeah. You know, but for the grace of Richard Branson, we would not exist today. At the 11th hour, Virgin says we're in essentially an LOI, not probably legally, but you can claim it. You can claim it. Literally, this is done on an email. There's nothing but an email. Yeah. We didn't actually have any legal paperwork for months afterwards. But I remember calling, oh man, who was it who was running press stuff at YC then? Cat? Cat. Yeah, it was Cat. I called Cat and I was like, I think I've got some news here.

55:25And I want to relaunch the company. Would you help me do this? And so this was the like, so we ended up, I think I was up to midnight that night, like doing embargoed press interviews, sort of relaunching, like, by the way, there's a$2 billion deal of Virgin from this email. And we had the, I think we had the good wisdom to actually, Virgin said you could put a picture of the airplane with their logo on it. And we actually deliberately didn't do that because we knew our own brand would get lost if we put Virgin's brand on it. So we let Virgin be in the story, but we didn't put their logo on it in the story.

56:02I think that turned out to be really important. But at any rate, so Kat helped me step to midnight doing all these embargoed press briefs. And we relaunched the company the next day. And now we're back on top of Hacker News for a second time. Wow. And you presented a demo day that day. That day, right? And how was your investor response? Because let's just face it, investors think that they're bold and rational, but they must have been scared by a super sonic airline. Oh, they were totally scared. 10 years on, they're still scared. Yeah. Yeah, I was very nervous about it. I remember standing in line to pitch, and people told me, oh, the signal you need is the group partners write checks.

56:50and like nobody, none of the partners. Oh, God. I hate that. I know. This breaks my heart. This was the lore. Nobody at YC said that, but none of the group partners had asked to invest. And so I remember standing there thinking, I'm a loser, I'm a loser, I'm a loser. Like this is going to be a disaster. Well, Sam invested, so you had. Pre-YC. Yeah. Can I also just say, Carolyn, didn't we used to have a rule that partners like shouldn't invest because we did not want to send signals to the investment community? Yes, 100%. Right. Yes. Right, so the partners all behaved. Yeah. And the, but I, you know, I was internalizing this very negatively.

57:35And I remember it was like nervously behind stage, like hitting refresh on email on my phone as this like nervous tick. And then up popped an email from PG who I'd never met at this point. and the subject line was he had retired by this point right and the subject line was can I invest this is a story of 11th hour saved totally and he said can I invest I'm crying I'm about to go downstairs and give him a huge hug later please do give him a big hug because that was like the confidence boost they needed to actually show up well on stage the whole thing I felt like we went from being the biggest loser to the biggest winners, but in the blink of an eye.

58:20So you were literally backstage and hit refresh, and you get this inbound offer to Angel Invest from Paul. And I have to say, I'm really surprised he didn't meet you, because even though he had retired, he always sort of met companies that he'd be interested in. And let me just tell you, airplanes he's interested in. Well, and also, but you had changed your demo day presentation, I'm assuming, to add a slide about virgins. So you had that going for you, but you were still sort of like a little bit feeling sad about not other investors coming in. Yeah. I mean, I just – and Virgin had given us no dollars, right?

58:56This was an email. Right. That's true. So the – I sort of had a sense that actually this is going to go well, but I was still feeling very, you know, one down. Fragile. Yeah, and fragile about it. But then, you know, after Demo Day, I think we raised money – we raised money as quickly as I could reply to emails. Okay. And did you raise a good amount? Single digit millions. Yeah. Okay. Like not like build an airplane money, excuse me, but enough to like live another day and kind of figure out how we were going to do what was next. And I remember that my favorite thing was the Hacker News comments that day.

59:36One was like, this is how you launch a company, like the one-two punch. Like whoever runs marketing at Boom is a genius. Oh, those Hacker News users are so brutal. And there was another one that was like, Monday colon, ha ha, Wednesday colon, oh shit. So I enjoyed that. It just goes to show you how quickly things can change at a startup, and the highs and lows are so high and so low. That's right. They're so high and so low, and they're like milliseconds apart. Okay. So, Blake, you've raised around from YC. You're feeling focused. Just tell us what happened next. Yeah. So long story short, we embarked on a effort to build a prototype airplane that would really only have like a test pilot on it that would show the world that we could actually do this.

1:00:30And for us, learn how to do it because you couldn't go hire a supersonic airplane design team off the street like they didn't exist. You know, the Concorde team, if they were even alive, was retired. and the military supersonic guys were used to unlimited budgets. So we had to create the team, and the only way to create the team was to find the best people we could and just put them through supersonic airplane 101 by just doing it. So that was really the genesis of XB-1. And in parallel with that, we are working on the big airplane that we ended up calling Overture. That's the one that we'll all get to fly on.

1:01:10Can't wait. And in the early days, like at the moment of founding, my assumption was that we would, just like SpaceX built their own engines, so would we. And one of our first hires was an engine guy. And then we sort of got lost for years on this path that, oh, actually Rolls has an engine that could be modified and shoehorned in. Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce. and it would be so much more credible if rolls-royce was building us an engine and like during covid we like we got them to like announce that they were working with us and so the world's expectation was um this is going to be a rolls-royce powered airplane that was a big part of our credibility and the um some of the some of the worst decisions i ever made along the way were these like fighting for cred through traditional eyes um approaches and that That was basically always wrong.

1:02:06But so we did this thing with Rolls-Royce, and then we sort of get further down path with them. The engine sort of works. It could have done the boomless cruise thing. It had a lot of economic issues because it came with legacy business models. They wanted us to pay for all the development, but the engine wasn't going to be exclusive to us. It was going to be a disaster of a deal. And then we were still trying to get them to do it because we didn't think there was any alternative. you know and then the ceo got fired and then it got political within roles you want to be associated with this or not and we're like crap we got to figure out a plan b um and this is this is like i think 2022 now um and and like boom is on a tear like we've rolled out xb-1 we're getting it ready to fly uh united has put an order in remarkably that went huge a year later american puts an order in and we announced that like right after the paris air show the press is amazing all the suppliers we have that were previously not call us are like wanting to work with us and we we had sort of known in parallel with this that things are falling apart with roles and we're like working on our alt plan and i sort of had a handshake agreement with a senior guy over there like look we'll stay friends to the end of this year boom is going to go another way and I'm incubating that now.

1:03:28And at the end of the year, like we'll announce what we're doing and maybe you guys will be a part of it. Like we'll like license something from you. And so we can like smile and hug and it's all sort of fine. But we announced American Airlines and then Rolls freaked out. Why? Why? Well, you know, just one airline is doing this crazy thing. Maybe they did it for PR, but United and American are ordering supersonic jets. Like, wait a minute, maybe this is actually happening. and then and then after the world thought they were rolls-royce powered now they're not going to be rolls-royce powered then this is all happening during a ceo transition where the old guy's been fired but the new one's not been picked yet so so uh rolls freaked out i was like out to dinner with a supplier that we were recording and my phone starts blowing up because rolls has gone to the press and told them they're not working with us without telling you without telling me i found out when my phone blew up you know at a at a supplier dinner oh my word so weird you know basically they shivved us and so we weren't ready yet to announce what we were actually doing and in the company went from being high flying to like instantly not credible uh because it doesn't have an engine basically doesn't have an engine like boom's building a glider like roll says the supersonic market's not interesting uh and and then they would call and the press would call pratt whitney and ge and say are you guys doing it and they'd say like no but that's so weird this is on the heels of american and united like giving you a vote of confidence so did american and united freak out too oh yeah everybody freaked out the employees freaked out i freaked out press freaked out and it was you know it was one of these like oh this company is in a big high so now it's more interesting to tear down i remember giving a talk and like getting off the stage and it was like a paparazzi moment where like the industry press was like shoving microphones in my face.

1:05:19They're like, who's building your engine? You don't have an engine, do you? And I remember going around this time period to a talk that Brian Chesky gave where he was telling the story about how he had led Airbnb through COVID. And he said a line that was something like, in a crisis, what you need to do is become more deeply who you've always been. And I felt like he was speaking very directly to me because what that meant is we need to go all in on the own engine thing. because I'd known sort of in my heart of hearts that that was the right path, that it did not make sense to outsource the most important thing.

1:05:54So we figured out how to do it and we found a way to sort of bootstrap it with a contract engineering team that we were able to kind of scoop up with like, you got the entire like former Pratt & Whitney supersonic team on this. And then we announced that at the end of 22, like semi-credibly. and then we've sort of been fighting our way back from then. And it turns out this is the most important thing we ever did. And for doing this the way we're doing it now, it's a quarter of the development cost and we get a fully custom engine that's actually optimized. So it makes the product better in two really meaningful ways.

1:06:34Number one is it can do boomless crews when the Rolls engine never was going to. Oh my God. Right? So that's a complete game. We didn't even do it for that reason, but it turned out to be the case. The other is that it enabled a breakthrough in passenger experience. Along the way, one of the things I've come to believe is you want designers to think like engineers, engineers to think like designers. And we had this breakthrough in passenger cabin that I can't share yet that is radically better than anything ever done in a narrow-body jet before. But it cost 1 ,000 miles of range, and we knew we couldn't afford a loss of 1 ,000 miles of range.

1:07:09We had to re-optimize back 1 ,000 miles. and long story short we did it by jointly optimizing airplane and engine and i remember there was a key meeting where the head of arrow and the head of engine were like hugging each other and they're like we can only do this because we work together in a way we never could have if the engine was made by a different company oh my gosh i have a question what kinds of things can you do if you're designing both the engines and the planes check well you get the check yes uh And by the way, there's another thing you can do that I also can't talk about yet that's more important than anything I just said by a factor of 10.

1:07:46Can you give us a little hint?

1:07:51It solves the biggest remaining problem that Boom has. And we could not do it if we did not own the engine. Oh, my gosh. This is so exciting. We're going to have to have a part two with you after this. But this is really interesting. So this situation that was like a bowl full of lemons that you were handed by Rolls-Rice, getting, as you said, like shivved, all of a sudden turns out to be the most important thing you've done and has these three stupendous benefits. That's right. I love that you said a bowl full of lemons because the effort at Boom to solve this was called Project Lemonade. No way.

1:08:35no way wow that's extraordinary i want to talk lastly about the mojave desert flight of the xb1 when you broke the sound barrier for the first time with a privately funded supersonic airliner can you just tell us that story because i carolyn and i both remember it was all over twitter everyone was talking about it. I watched it. It was like a great excuse to just... I watched it live. Remind me, what was the test pilot? I want to call him Jackal, but that's not his name. Geppetto! Geppetto, I knew it was something like that. Geppetto's a hell of a human. He seems great. He is better than he looks on TV in every conceivable way.

1:09:23As a human, as a pilot, he's just a really remarkable... He's humble. You know, don't think Maverick. You know, he's got the courage of Maverick, but, you know, the skill of Maverick, but in balanced, you know, and then no one's more invested in this than the test pilot, right? Oh, sure. Right? So at any rate, so we built XP-1. You know, the purpose of it was really to learn 100 % of the lessons that you need to build a supersonic jet out of airliner technology. And after 11 subsonic flights, the next test point was supersonic and we decided to live stream it this was also like a relatively like last minute decision and we called our friends at SpaceX and we're like will Starlink work supersonic?

1:10:17and they're like well we'll give you a unit that you can unlock for that and so we got this like Starlink mini that the team figured out how to install in a T-38 which is like so when you do a test flight you have the airplane you're testing then there's another airplane that will fly in formation with it called a chase and and for the first super sonic flight we actually had two chase planes we had one that was a t-38 uh and then we had a mirage f1 uh that had like an imax camera on it uh but the the the the t-38 was kind of our our chase for you know flight test safety purposes and we got in the we got the starlink mini with this like 3d printed bracket installed in the t-38 and then we had one of our engineers in the back seat with an iPhone.

1:11:03And so the supersonic flight was live streamed from an iPhone camera over Starlink. Oh my gosh. And the internet just lit up in a way that was well beyond what I had expected. My personal experience of it was, so flight test is not very predictable. This is not like an all-weather operation. like you're doing something for the very first time in a new airplane like you are rationally very conservative about the conditions under which you will do it and so you have to have good weather um and we had to call the shot like two weeks ahead of time based on an imperfect weather forecast when we were going to tell everybody to show up in mojave knowing that if the weather changed like we'd have to disappoint everybody right i remember waking up that morning and of course the first thing first thing i did was you know check my uh aviation weather app and it was like, it's cloudy.

1:11:55I was like, oh, like, are the clouds going to clear? Like, literally, are the clouds going to clear? And I'm driving to Mojave, and it's still kind of like cloudy, like, oh, man, what's going to happen? And one of the hallmarks of our safety culture is the go-no-go decisions are made by the flight test team in a closed room with no senior leadership in the room. It's really important that they can make that decision and that we We trust them to make that decision and we don't second guess it. Yeah. Their lives at stake after all. Their lives at stake. Right. So I'm standing in the hangar kind of looking out thinking, oh, it looks like it's getting a little bit better.

1:12:33I'm not sure. And then the team comes out of the brief and I could tell from the way they were walking that it was a go. Oh. Like it was there in the body language and the crew chief was like walking over the airplane. and he's like hooking up the tow bar so we can pull it out of the hangar. And I'm going to tear up as I tell this story because the, you know, it was a couple hours later that we broke the sound barrier and my friends were jumping up and down. The internet is jumping up and down and everyone's hugging me. And that moment I was like, of course. Like, you know, but for me, for me, the moment happened when the tow bar got hooked up to the airplane because that's when I knew it was a go.

1:13:10And I knew if we flew that day, we were going to go supersonic. You're going to make me cry. Aww. So that was one of the better days of my life. Well, it all came through on screen. You could tell how awesome it was. It was, I think, visceral for most people watching. We had an amazing co-host for the live stream, this guy, Mike Bannister, who had been chief Concorde pilot for British Airways. And Mike is, in one human, at the intersection of supersonic jet pilot and sportscaster. uh like you would think this was like world cup the way he talks about it um so he was really really incredible and i think a lot of a lot of people told me like oh we thought we tuned in for the live stream for like a minute but like mike was so awesome we had to watch the whole thing yeah it was good those guys were good i remember you gave geppetto big hug when he got off i mean You just must have been so happy.

1:14:14Gosh. It was a really happy day. One of the things that I've struggled with as a startup founder is just by the time something happens, I've sort of priced in the success in my own emotions. And then I'm on to the next big problem emotionally. And I find it really difficult to actually enjoy the successes. And I told myself, make sure you slow down. make sure you really enjoy this one. And I think I succeeded in that. Good. Good. I have one last question for you. Back to the sonic boom thing and supersonic flights being banned over America. Did you guys have something to do with getting, didn't the ban on supersonic flights get reversed?

1:15:07Did we have anything to do with it? Yes. That was like entirely a boom effort. So 52 years of bad regulation was reversed in 115 days, which to me felt long, but probably set some kind of record for regulatory speed of regulatory change. So February 10th, we flew supersonic for the second time. We announced boomless cruise. And I was flying to DC that night on this awful flight that would be way better for supersonic. It was like this four and a half hour, like overnight flight, which is just miserable. And by the time I landed in D.C., I had an invitation to the West Wing. And I sort of tweeted about this terrible regulation.

1:15:46Elon had responded and said, obviously, this administration will fix it. And so I had meetings at the White House the next day. um and the uh that week thursday that week um i was having um breakfast with the secretary of energy who is a uh uh is a friend of the owner of the building i'm standing in uh we'd met him through our landlord it turns out like we're like neighbors in denver um so so uh and i'm having coffee with him and he's you know telling the story he's an entrepreneur so he's like totally one of us and he was like this is great you should you should get a uh airplane model made in the president's you know new air force one colors i said well we did how do we get it to him and he's like well i'm seeing him later today i'll give it to him i'm like well hang on like by the way we're now 45 minutes into a 30 minute meeting with a cabinet member yeah yeah and i'm like well do you have it's in my hotel room like do you have five minutes i'll run and get it by the way the airplane model was key to getting richard branson and the airplane model was key to getting this regulation reversed so i like sprinted to my room like grabbed it brought it back gave it to him and then i like flew to new york that night for other meetings and up pops this text from secretary right that's a picture of uh uh potus with the airplane model in the oval office.

1:17:14And I was like, can I use this? And he's like, well, let me ask the president. I'll get back to you. Uh, cause I'm like, the last thing I want to do is like post a picture that I'm not allowed to post of the president. Uh, he's like, okay, you can use it. And so I posted it and of course it went huge. And then it went viral a second time cause people zoomed in on it. And if you look at that picture very carefully, there's a mirror behind, uh, uh, the president and in the mirror in the reflection is elon oh interesting no way right uh so it got viral once for the picture and once for the photo bomb uh and uh you know and then we so then we went to the hill and we got a bipartisan bill introduced to repeal the speed limit and we've been working on this in the uh in the white house uh and the you know but then it was like congress is actually going to do this quickly.

1:18:08And the White House was like, well, we can't be scooped by Congress. We can't like the slowest thing in the world do supersonic. So then I think it was something like 10 days before the executive order was signed. And I think we're still going to get the bill through Congress because everyone wants to be associated with this. Yeah. Amazing. Everybody wants it. Everybody wants it. Supersonic flight with no boom, forward compatibility, sustainable fuel, no net new noise. Everybody wants this. When are we going to be hopefully riding on it? If all goes according to plan, about four and a half years, we'll be ready for first passengers.

1:18:44And then it'll be a race to see how quickly we can build enough airplanes. See, Levy, let's have a girls trip. Definitely. Where do we want to go? Somewhere fun and far away. The nice thing is when flights are faster, you can just decide on the fly. You don't have to pre-plan it. I love it. I want to thank you, Blake, for coming on our show and sharing all these great stories about your journey and Boom's journey. It's so interesting. I wish you the best of luck over the next four and a half years. And I can't wait to take a flight on the supersonic airliner. I'm just looking forward to the next test flight that we can watch online.

1:19:25Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm very grateful to YC, who in a whole bunch of ways this company would not exist without. So I'm grateful to both of you and to Paul because without you, there would be no YC. Without YC, there would be no boom. Aw. Thank you. That's so nice. And I know our listeners are going to love this episode. So thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you. All right. Bye. Bye. Wow, Carolyn, this is one of those episodes where I feel like my mind is just sort of blown and I need time to recover from all the stuff that we learned. Yeah, no, it's such a good story. I wonder if people will go back and listen to the portion of the Sam podcast where he talks about getting that slot at the Apple Developer Conference.

1:20:17Oh, yes. You know, that was like such a funny like full circle moment. I love when stuff like that happens, when we can reference an old podcast with Sam where he said, oh, gosh, I thought I, you know, muffed the presentation and they called us back and said, we'd love to have you. And then we found out from Blake that it's because the other company shot themselves in the foot and blew it. Yeah, that's so funny. One of the things I thought when Blake was telling his story was how he went back to his barcode hero investors, right? And asked, thought that 100 % of them would want to invest in boom and we were all like god the fact that 50 of them wanted to do it is great but i think actually the the takeaway from there is that he kind of went the sounds like he went the extra mile to make sure that they got treated well and so sort of like the obvious lesson from that is like do not ever burn bridges like don't ever burn bridges um because you just never know what you're going to do next or how like so just such a good lesson there is to always like be really you know good to people as good that's like lesson number one in silicon valley always treat people the right way but it just doesn't happen i see on a daily basis like it doesn't always happen and a lot of times no one can do anything about it like you can only do what you can do but um i just i that stuck out to me i wish we were able to have more time to talk a little bit about his experience with investors and maybe that's something that he Talks about, you know, five, 10 years from now.

1:21:48Maybe it's, but I think, you know, raising money for a supersonic airliner is hard. I think raising money for any like moonshot type of idea, you have to, it's probably just so different than raising for, you know, a SaaS company or right now an AI company. You're doing something really unusual and people are going to have like a really like, that's so cool. I wish I could. but like their the practical side of them is going to be like I can't put money in this like it's just not it's just too much of a moonshot right so that's just like a whole other thing for people for entrepreneurs let's agree though that supersonic flights are inevitable this is going to happen it's just a matter of time and it's just a matter of can boom execute which they clearly are um and I just so many things blew my mind in that conversation the biggest one was how they were sort of forced to make their own engine, which they didn't want to do, which was a big PR problem for them at first and shook everyone's confidence.

1:22:53And it was one of those things where you're like, oh, shoot, how are we going to handle this? And it's turned out to have, you know, resulted in three incredible innovations for Boom. Like, that is so cool. Yeah, that's, I feel like we've heard versions of this story from our other guests before too. Like it ends up being this thing where if you just bite the bullet or take the plunge and do the really hard thing yourself, it has all these benefits. And by the way, there's probably tons of stories where the reverse is true too, like, you know, obviously. But that is a thing. I feel like that's a theme here.

1:23:29Well, I think that that is going to be such a good episode. And I can't wait to see what happens to Boom in the future. And I can't wait to book our girls trip. in what is it four and a half years four to five years four to five years let's do it the timeline will accelerate and it'll be faster than that awesome all right see you levy i will catch you on the next one okay bye bye