Boom: Supersonic speeds for everyday travel with Blake Scholl | E2006

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1:21Very excited to have our guest on again today for the second time. His name is Blake Scholl. He is the CEO and founder of Boom Supersonic, and they are making supersonic planes. he was last on this week in startups back on episode 638 it's been a minute uh and as you know we in this uh amazing technological miracle of an existence have seen so much change in the past 10 20 30 40 50 years one thing that's gone in the wrong direction is the speed of flight things have gotten slower and the dream of supersonic flight which i as a kid was enamored with because we had something called the concord that left out of uh jfk you know not too far from my home in bayridge brooklyn uh and you could get to london in a very short period of time welcome back to the program blake when was the last concord flight was that in the 90s or late 80s uh it was the early 2000s actually 2003 uh it shut down uh i was i was 22 years old never got to fly on it yeah i never got to fly on it as well um but i knew people who did and i would regularly in new york meet people so they were flying them as late as 2003 and there were one or two accidents i think tragically and it also maybe it was too expensive why did the concord program fail why did nobody ever replicate it well there are many layers to that onion uh there was one accident which actually for a 1960s airplane design one accident in 30 years of flying is actually a good safety record uh so that i don't think that was the real story uh go one level deeper it was economics uh this was an airplane with 100 not very comfortable seats They cost$20 ,000 a ticket.

3:21And you just can't fill 100 seats at$20 ,000 a pop, especially not with 80s, 90s kind of travel demand. And if you go a layer deeper than that, it's actually a story about product market fit because that doesn't make any sense as a product. That price point, that experience doesn't go to a scalable market. If you go a layer deeper than that, it's really about the birth and death of entrepreneurship in an industry. um where for the the first 50 years of aviation uh from the wright brothers forward uh founders were in charge of their companies we had a very entrepreneurially driven model of innovation in aerospace and what happened in the 60s is all the founders retired from the industry and we shifted from commercially driven product development to national prestige driven so concord was not a it's not a startup it wasn't even an established company it was two governments the french government the british government got together they basically handcuffed themselves together and said we're going to build a supersonic jet to beat the russians and uh we're not going to think too hard about the economics uh and of course the phrase product fit had not been invented yet um and so they went off and did something that was technically marvelous but commercially made no sense and that's really crazy to think of that it was a government-sponsored program well beating the russians was one dynamic in it but was there some economic or pride to doing this well so it was established via treaty in 1962 and so this is the height of the cold war and the thing that i think it helps to kind of hold in in context is we had we had the first world it was the west and we had the second world that was the the communist world and the the first and second world for fighting over the third world and that the mindset that we were in geopolitically was that what we had to do was impress the third world and that would like impact which countries would align with soviet russia and which would align with the west um and so this is very much the same motivation for why we did apollo you know we we went to the moon not because it made any sense to go to the moon uh at least not in the way we did it uh but we wanted to we wanted to show that american rocket technology was better than russian rocket technology yeah and so yeah and for people who don't know when you fly a supersonic plane it creates a boom in the name of your startup boom um i guess as a uh as a hat tip to that and this is why it only flew from the east coast of new york to those european cities so there was also this um geography that played a bit of a role yes he's sort of i mean i i think it's half true it's half anthology um so any yeah anytime a supersonic plane flies supersonic it creates a sound called a sonic boom uh which uh if you do it really close to the ground it can it can be pretty obnoxious uh but if you do it up at altitude um you know it's it's more like this sound of a you know thunder um and and you can fly a supersonic airplane without making a sonic boom just by flying it a little bit slower uh so so the way we're doing our overture airliner is we're about 20 faster over land right under the sound barrier so there's no there's no question of like is the sonic boom too loud or not uh and there's still a speed up relatively a billionaire airbus then we got out of our open ocean where no one's there to hear the boom, push the throttles forward, and we go fully two times faster.

6:56So it makes sense to focus on the routes that are more trans-oceanic, because that's where you get the bigger speed-ups. But then, you know, people remember Concord, New York to London, because it was the only one that had anywhere close to the economic legs to make it work. But, you know, we're going to be able to do Miami, Madrid, and Seattle to Tokyo, and LA to Sydney, and, you know, there are over 600 routes around the planet where this is going to have a big speed-up and make make economic sense as well you know it's very weird um as everybody knows the typical routes like i think it was washington dc and new york to paris and london obviously it makes total sense they also went to barbados which was bizarre like paris to barbados four hours which is incredible because that would normally be eight or nine hours to the caribbean any indication of why they did that or did you even know that yeah no i do that they they did that they did uh bahrain um british airways had one they would take to singapore i think with a stop with a stop in bahrain it was it was a kind of a neat concept the airplane if you look at it from one side was british airways delivery if you look at the other side it was singapore airlines so it's literally one one logo on one side the other logo on the other side um but yeah i mean they tried it in a bunch of places but just you've fundamentally you know everybody wants faster of flight so long as it's affordable and it's safe that the problem was that um it wasn't affordable and it wasn't comfortable and then and then that one accident didn't happen until it was about time to shut it down anyway um uh but you know it left for this kind of hangover like is there a safety question listen a strong sales team can make all the difference for a b2b startup but if you're going to hire sharks you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2.

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9:17Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. So you've been at this for close to a decade now, correct? Yeah, I think we'll turn 10 on paper in a few weeks. In a few weeks. I had that idea. So it was a good idea to have you on here to talk about this 10-year journey obviously a lot of this was just getting people to believe that it was even possible you were able to raise some money for this and recently you had a test flight i understand of one of the prototypes so take us through where you're at today the question everybody wants to know is when can i get him one of these are they going to be for billionaires are they going to be you know as part of the united fleet or jet blue and how much is it going to cost so so take us through where you're at today and how many more years it will be before we're in one of these well i'll just start with the bottom line up front the ultimate goal is to enable virtually anybody to be able to fly supersonic and uh the first airplane called overture is basically all premium class and so if you can fly business class today you're going to be able to fly twice as fast on overture and so that's about um that's about a quarter of what it costs on concord so i think concord about a twenty thousand dollar ticket in order for it to make any money and just it didn't didn't work really no legs there is that 20 per per leg or it's a 40 round trip per round trip okay so you think you can do it for five i do five it would be very profitable at five you know so so just take one example new york london that uh with 80 of the seats full which is a little bit less than what airlines usually get today uh and the break-even fare will actually be thirty five hundred dollars round trip and so any any dollar above 3 ,500 the airlines are making money and uh i think what we'll find is especially in the early years there aren't yet enough of these flying the the market clearing fares are going to be pretty high uh stratospheric i guess would be the phrase to use and um uh and it's going to be a flying mint for the airlines but you know with overture one as supply catches up with demand the cost is going to come down you know i think five thousand dollars is probably a good number to kind of hold in mind for what a typical ticket could be which of course is not that different from what people pay in business class today and that's actually business class in the summer to europe is more like 10 to 15 000 um pretty pretty standard so when when when five years five years five years okay five years five years for first passenger flight and to give you a sense of where we're at um yeah so we had our our first test flight in march with our second test flight uh two weeks ago and uh and that's on what we call the xb1 which is you know one third the size of of overture so i think you have a picture of that if we want to show it yeah let's show the test flight so this this is really the manifestation of how many years in the laboratory how many years in the laboratory yeah i mean you know we spent a lot of time kind of just figuring the company out like on day one it was really just me and uh you know and we didn't start building the airplane for quite a while uh after that we had to get the resources together we actually turned out it was critical to get orders before we started building in order to be able to obtain financing that makes sense uh so so you the last two three years have just been enormous acceleration uh so we uh so so xb1 so that's what you're looking at there it's the it's the scale of a fighter jet but this has got all the airliner technology on it it's got a carbon fiber composite fuselage it's got an augmented reality vision system for landing um it's got software optimized aerodynamics and the most shocking thing uh is that we didn't actually invent anything to build that airplane all we did is bring technologies together that were technologies have invented over the last 50 years since concord was designed that allow us to get past the tipping point on efficiency seat so that we can get to product market fit and so so that yeah that airplane's uh about 66 feet long it's got about a 20 foot wingspan and overture is about three times uh three times bigger it's about 200 feet long uh actually even proportionally bigger wingspan about 100 foot wingspan and uh on board it's all premium class so i think business class maybe some first class uh 64 seats and uh we actually just opened the factory where we're going to build this in north carolina and so we are we're getting going and yeah the goal's been ready for you and i to fly on it in five years now that has a united logo on it is is that customer zero united uh yeah so we actually japan airlines was first to pre-order okay um uh then united was the first to make an order with a non-refundable deposit which that was a real big deal and then american american American Airlines also made an order with a deposit.

14:09So we've got about 130 announced orders and pre-orders between United America and Japan Airlines. And to put that in context, basically what that means is the first five years of production are booked. Like there was a line out the door for airlines wanting supersonic jets. It's just our job to go deliver them. And these are going to cost$200 million, something in that range? yeah it's 200 million dollars a copy um and uh and that's one of the interesting things with the business is just like surprising things one we don't need to deal with a sonic boom uh in order to have a business model here number two we don't actually have to invent anything fundamentally new it's just it's just engineering with technology that already exists uh the um yeah and then and then you know number three um you know all we have to do is take this the small scale design and scale it scale it up so if we were to compare this in terms of price i mean the highest end of the private jet market tops out with the like global 700 or something 70 75 million dollars it's kind of like as good as it gets in private in terms of speed and height and that stuff and then you start looking at like the boeing lineup the 737s those go for a buck 50 ish buck 25 am i correct that market has very obscure pricing um the the real price is usually about half of the advertised price and so yeah yeah so that so a 737 goes for approximately half of this price same thing true with all these aircraft and and the reason is that it's it's a commodity market for every every every product in boeing's catalog there's an airbus product which is a near identical clone so the 737 and the a320 you know as an airplane nerd i know which one i'm on i can tell even what engine it is but but for 99 of passengers they have no idea and unless they're worried about the airplane coming apart they don't even care uh and then from an airline perspective you know so the a320 kind of equals a 737 a 787 kind of equals an a350 etc etc etc like that you know you're saying those 120 million dollar planes actually get sold for 60 or 70 yep it's a stupid question why don't private buyers buy some of those is it the maintenance or it's just obscenely large and you can't land them at most airports and the maintenance it's the size in the in the airport compatibility you know like part of the part of the idea of flying private is that you're able to get in closer to your final destination and so there are all these you know a lot of people who fly commercial don't realize this that the country is covered in small airports and a small airplane can get in and out of a small airport and then that saves the the hassle of the commercial terminal and it probably gets you close to your destination and so you can you can get a whole 737 for your own use and that boeing sells that's called a bbj or in business jet yes i've been on a couple of those yeah a couple friends who have those they're ridiculous but i would they don't suck let's just call it that uh but but yeah it's crazy the one i was on was set up with i would say six or seven like individual cabins maybe 80 then it was crazy and like each one had multiple seating areas so it was so so that's a lot of airplane a lot of airplane in those range you said yours is how many feet long uh about 200 feet long tip to tail got it so so it's even longer it's longer than the 320 or something like that right yeah just by by a little bit it's it's probably about 20 30 feet longer than the longest um a3 a320 series airplane so it's it's almost exactly the same length as a triple setter uh to put that in context but it but it's much skinnier uh and so actually actually you can kind of see it behind me so i'm standing in our passenger experience lab and you know one of things we can talk about is that whole aspect of it but the uh what you're looking at is kind of a full-scale mock-up uh tip to tail of the passenger cap and of course there's you know there's cockpit in front of it and there's baggage and you know mechanical equipment behind it and that all adds up to the 200 feet so that the passenger cabin is is less than less than 200 feet uh and it's also it's also a bit skinnier and this will be closer to you know what's the configuration one seat on each side like that was how the concord was one on each side or was it two on each side concord was was two and two uh the whole way through um and uh you know we've talked about having one and want.

18:39So actually one of the things that makes Overture more efficient than Concorde is we've shaped the fuselage differently. So it's actually, if we could pull that United Render back up, you could see in the front of the airplane, it's actually a bit fatter. And as you go back, it gets skinnier. And you'll notice that the windows actually stop. The last passenger row is actually ahead of the engines. That's an important safety feature. But the airplane's bigger in the front and it's skinnier in the back. And in the in the back it's uh it's a one plus one and in the front we've talked about it could be a two plus two and uh so the back could have seating but as you go back it narrows so nobody is nobody doesn't have a window and nobody's above the engine or that's that's right so in the back is it's the back is really nice actually so it's one seat on each side of the aisle you don't have to choose window seat or aisle seat and um you know everybody gets both and when you say the back you kind of mean the middle of the plane right like the middle of the airplane but the back of the passenger cabin so you know if you look at the last like seven windows there yes those are the last seven rows of seats got it so these are all business class seats and uh so it will feel like a large private jet or a small commercial jet i'm not sure what the yeah width of a commercial jet is i'm trying to think of the ones that have two and two right so so the by the way we haven't revealed the final design and and i think when people so so we've said it's two plus two it may or may not actually be a two plus two sure i mean there's some there's something there well there's something i can't talk about yet oh okay i hope i hope you can hear it in my voice i'm really excited about it are you gonna stack people on top of each other i saw like some crazy japanese airline had done that no no no no no no um but you know there i mean if if you have cabins or you do what jet blue mint does where they do the two one two there are some really interesting things you can do in terms of maximizing space so i'm sure there are yeah yeah so one of our philosophies is that that you really want designers that think like engineers and engineers that think like designers and uh and so we we've put a lot of energy into building that into the product development culture and and we've got something really magical that that i what what we'll show it probably next year and and when people when people see it they'll be like there's no way you got that in a small skinny airplane just couldn't be uh because the first time i saw it that was my reaction that there's there's just no way uh but it turns out if you're really yeah experience behind you is what you're working on got it okay that's right yeah we'll have you back next year to debut that here on this week in startups i don't care if you're building enterprise sass a verticalized ai startup or the next great consumer app no matter what you are cooking up you have to have a brilliant website it's the first thing that people see or read from your startup and it has to be beautiful you got to make a great first impression people do judge a book by its cover it's that simple that's why we have that expression but since you're building a company you're strapped for time you know that and wouldn't it be nice to have some world-class help how about a beautiful website built to your specifications quickly and easily it's 2024 if you don't already know html css and javascript that ship has sailed get on squarespace and check out their blueprint ai product you answer five questions and squarespace's new ai tool is going to build you a gorgeous website it's so simple it's so slick it's just brilliant it's the future even better you don't need to worry about what's under the hood analytics seo payments memberships e-commerce you can do it all it's all included too so here's your call to action check out squarespace.com twist for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com twist to get 10 off your first website or domain purchase that squarespace.com twist tell me a little bit about what you've learned during this journey about how the markets have changed for startups you know we're here on this week in startups and the idea of a startup company doing something other than an app or SaaS software or a marketplace or, you know, anything in that software realm has changed radically since, you know, I think since Uber, Airbnb, and SpaceX and Tesla.

22:53I think when you saw those four cohorts, that cohort, those four, they really operated in the real world in a way that I remember watching them. They were received very poorly by venture capitalists at first, and then very significantly. You know, that's changed dramatically. Now you got Parker doing andro you've got all kinds of space products you know people are not afraid to do large scale big tech products whether it's bombs or drones or in your case planes so tell me about you know you straddled that market you've been around for 10 years so spacex existed uber existed but they were kind of upstarts and then you struggled a bit to get people to believe in this so take us with that journey yeah what i think if we pull the camera back even like one click further from that it's the period where we weren't doing hardware startups it's really the anomaly so if you look backwards to the the early 1900s from the wright brothers forward so the wright's first flew in 1903 of course they were bicycle entrepreneurs that was a startup and and and by the way one with you know no credibility that they should have been able to go invent the airplane but yet they did it uh and then and then from the wright brothers through about 1921 was sort of a golden age of of aviation and there's a lot of companies that got created then the ones that we all know the names of now you know so so uh not not just right but also uh douglas and lockheed and boeing uh all got created but the last one was 1921 and and and uh and by the way you could you feel like an automotive industry you see the same pattern there was a golden age of automotive and then there was this long period of no entrepreneurship and and in aviation the the founders all retired in the 1960s um and in fact the the introduction of the last mainstream speed up in flight when we went from props to jets coincides with uh the retirement of founders so that the first jetliner was the de havilland comet um the first successful one came from boeing but the actual first one that really kicked off the jet age with the de Havilland comet created by de Havilland while he was still running the company and uh and then what kind of happened is the the people who had worked with the founders took over and and so and then we ended up in this kind of there was innovation happening but um uh much more from an optimization kind of perspective you know so the 707 which is Boeing's first jetliner if you put it right next to the 787 which is their latest unless you're an airplane nerd it's hard to tell the difference um it's a long skinny tube with some wings and the engines hanging under the wings looks kind of the same and by the way it flies basically the same speed uh and then and then the even worse thing happened which was that the people who had respected and learned from the founders left and then and then the bean counters took and then that really wrecked that just wrecked commercial aviation uh i wish that were just purely metaphorical but at boeing it's literal um so let's pause there for a second i think it's like a good thing to double click on since we went down this uh sort of history lesson which is super fascinating because these companies people forget how old boeing is as a company um you know these were an airbus these were created in the the 20s and 30s correct uh more like no no before then the last one was doug was douglas in 1921 and boeing was boeing was 1910s oh wow incredible so these things are incredibly old and it's really interesting to see who winds up running them they are being run now you said b encounters but they're being run to lower the cost of aviation and that reminds me in some ways of the uber story because the goal was how do you get this in the hands of more people it reminds me of the android story or the pc story you know dell computers etc how do we have these uh devices become incredibly affordable or services you know uber black suv x then even pool and then eventually self-driving might be cheaper we'll see it might be more expensive and then you have this counter trend which is luxury comes back or performance or elite services and uh i guess the comment about luxury is like luxury begins i think said the famous quote is luxury begins where necessity ends so that's different luxury um because that would be more like iphones versus android phones but really they they just tried to make each mile and the maintenance of these planes cheaper and cheaper to the point at which boeing was so the bean counters and accountants there tried to put through that goddamn mcat system in order to not have to train people so take me through the state of like how deranged these people are behaving i think there are two things that we're conflating here that are really important to tease apart because there is a totally valid journey of bringing the cost to travel down whether we're talking a car you can send it from your phone or an airplane they'll take you the other side of the planet it makes sense to bring the cost of that down because what that means is more people can go more places more often and that will absolutely be part of our journey at boom we're starting with you know 75 less expensive than concord still business class still not for everybody but you know i want to get to the point where um it's you know it's never as a never a cattle car experience but but it's it's the where the cost has come down enough that people people will travel around the planet just the same way they would call an uber today um and you know Like imagine that future where flights are faster and the cost is, the cost is a point where you don't think about it too hard.

28:32And, and therefore you can, you know, the way you'd impromptu get around your city, you'd impromptu go around the planet. Like that's a very, very exciting future. And, and so that's one trend. And, and, you know, and Boeing for a while was part of that trend of bringing the cost down. And, and I think that's all valid and appropriate as part of making, you know, part of reaching a larger, larger market, which is entrepreneurs we should do. And then there's the other piece of it, which i think is pathological which is a very short-term focus on financial results and uh the best metaphor i have for this it's so let me give you a little boeing company history though contextualize it uh so through about the 1990s uh boeing was really good at developing the air so that they did it pretty quickly did it pretty efficiently and you could trust the airplane would come out with safe and but they would they would invest a lot of money they'd invest a few billion to develop an airplane and then they'd ship it and then they'd sell a lot and make their money back and that continued through about 2004 when i think the last good ceo at boeing left and uh and then they had a new guy come in who said the most insane thing he said we're not going to do any more moonshots and of course it's ironic because like this is the company used to be literally in the moonshot business like literally it wasn't a metaphor literally right i can't believe people say these things um but the uh so then they said all we're going to do is tweak the products we already got and and we're going to and the motivation for this was optimization of basically like next quarter financial results and and so a lot of jack welch acolytes kind of took over at bow and if you trace the histories of the individuals involved they trace back to the jack welch acolytes and jack jack's thing was you know he was the one to beat the street by a nickel every quarter and and you can do that for a little while um but it's like it's like flying in an airplane while only looking straight down and uh and so it'll be good for a little while but pretty soon you're not gonna be happy where you're at and that's you know so boeing boeing tried to tweak the 737 and they you know did a bunch of unnatural things the mcas uh which is that that's the system that was responsible for those crashes uh that's one example but you're doing it now with the triple seven the big disaster um you know they they have not we should pause on this because i think you know that the people who are listening today are like we're all builders entrepreneurs and like it's so normal that we make new things boeing has not launched an all-new product for 20 years right they're just trying to make the existing ones more price competitive in a really rabid market where as you said the list price and the actual price varies by double or 50 because that's right you have a situation where it's too competitive and it's just a race to the bottom and all margin has been taken out yeah well it's a duopoly and so between boeing and aribus and so nobody moves unless the other one moves and uh and so the margins get compressed and in the world of margin compression because there's like a product differentiation then it really creates this instead of like well when we build a product we want to keep it production for like decades and we want to not reinvest because without the margin uh you know it's harder to justify the payback but it's this it's this kind of this death spiral where like all the innovation drops up if you drop the innovation out it kind of kicks off the rest of this death spiral because okay now there's no differentiation the lack of differentiation drives lack of margin lack of Margin drives lack of desire to invest in innovation.

32:01It just goes around in a bad way. This is something you and I know natively, but might not be obvious from the outside, which is it's not compelling to work in a company like that for top performers. like if you go to facebook you know the people working on trying to make the incremental click on a google ad or a facebook ad you know if they were that good um they would be working at boom or andrel or spacex or xai or chat gpt which is what happens really supremely talented people are drawn to the project all things being equal which is why some companies will give fantastical amounts of rsus and stock-based comp because they know gosh this person could work at boom or xai or wherever or they could work on the ad network i mean that sounds like death to us right like yeah i mean i very ironically earlier in my career i worked in building automated advertising to the amazon uh but the uh but back when that was new and exciting and you know and it's not it's not now and so that that center of gravity of innovation swings around within an industry it swings between companies but i think i think it also swings between industries and you know the the if you look at people who were the big innovators i think it's interesting to look back at what was going on when they were kids and what inspired them and uh you know so you know in In the late 1960s, we lost our way as far as how to develop new products.

33:39We did Concord and Apollo. Actually, both were 1969. Both are regarding these big technical breakthroughs. I think both were actually disasters. I think, you know, can't go back to the moon, can't fly supersonic. Like, it literally killed progress. But what it did still do was inspire people to go into aerospace. And then we got to this moment where, like, nothing in aerospace was even exciting. And so, you know, people of my generation, like, you know, I've loved airplanes since I was a kid. It never occurred to me to go have a career in it. I spent my first 15 years in tech because that's where new stuff was getting built.

34:09yeah i mean the internet you know was so inspiring and dial up even before that in the 80s into the 90s the idea that you connect with anybody on the planet was like kind of mind-blowing like it was kind of trippy and it did capture everybody's imagination for a very long period of time and then you get to a certain point where we are today and you're like yeah everybody's online and it's a mess and there's great things and there's you know misinformation and hate and rage and doom scrolling so you kind of see the the full cycle um and then it's nice that people are kind of coming back to looking at projects and saying well what does this do for humanity and how exciting and thrilling is it it's not very exciting or thrilling in in many cases and if you're doing things for just the money which is what in a way boeing was doing when you're doing something for just money um at some point you get the money and then all of a sudden you you lose motivation, you know?

35:05And you have to then say, well, am I actually into this? I see this in venture all the time. You have somebody like Paul Graham or myself or, you know, some other folks who are really into startups because we're passionate about entrepreneurship, whatever. And you make some money. And then I watched all my contemporaries who made money retire. They were like, yeah, I hit Uber. I hit Airbnb. I hit AngelList. I hit this, I hit that. And they're like, I'm going to go meditate. it i'm gonna go do things that are more important to me so then you realize like okay they were into it to an extent but they were mercenary in another way which is when the money came in they stopped being investors and then you have people like vinod or like michael moritz and and doug leone who are supposed to be retired but i go to sequoia and i see them running around doing stuff so yeah or bill gurley's supposed to be retired and all he's doing is talking to me about startups and you know he's doing all kinds of uh still on boards and stuff like that so i do find that super interesting like yeah yeah well it's it is interesting because by the way paul graham and mike moritz are both both significant investors in bone and and and both actually pretty involved if you use multiple devices and apps to run your business you need open phone open phone simplifies your communications with one simple app an open phone has rethought what a modern business phone can be.

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37:35Easy peasy lemon squeezy. So head over to openphone.com slash twist and get a free trial and get 20 % off. What's it like to work with Michael Moritz? Because, you know, we have right now a lot of the investment class, whether it's Vinod or michael moritz or mark and drees and ben horowitz fighting over trump versus not trump and never trumps put all that politics aside what is the nature of michael moritz as a partner i'm really grateful to have him involved and he's he's incredibly wise and and he's he's i've always experienced him as and and paul graham is the same way like like the they show up more when things are hard different things are easy and uh and you know both of them you know there are other folks that are on this list for me as well uh where um yeah when when it's going well we don't hear from them and when there's some hard problem to solve i get on the phone with them and we work on it and you know and one of the things i will love i love about both of them uh is is they tell me what i need to hear even when it's not pleasant to hear candidness right it's a it's a hallmark i think actually what you're experiencing is this your first startup by the way i never asked you no it's it's like i don't know it's my first significant one my first venture back first venture back no so you had a venture back for that kind of anyway like a big baby startup like in high school i started an isp uh in my parents basement but that never was i i tried to raise an angel around for my parents i never succeeded in that but we got we got to be ramen profitable um and then i sold it when i went to college uh and then my first what you really think of as a startup was uh was in 2010 which was a was a iphone e-commerce company um cool uh which we sold to group on so that was the first thing that was what you would really think of as a singular double out of it uh it is but it also was incredibly motivating for me because what we made and i feel a little embarrassed to say this uh we made a barcode scanning game like oh wow if you make a list of like the most important thing in the world down to like the least important like barcode scanning games that's like a new low um and what was the output of barcode scanning understanding all the prices and skews and where they existed in the world yeah that's that's where we wanted to go with it uh but it had like an idea actually yeah it had like a force the idea was it'd have a four square like game dynamic that would cause people to put in content and then you could go scan a barcode and like price compare and you know that that was sort of the notion of it until you got kicked out of walmart for doing it yeah and well mostly like i would get up in the morning and uh and it was really hard because there's there's no such thing as an easy startup they're all hard and i would get up in the morning i think why am i doing this yes and and so and so when we had a chance to sell it to groupon like uh like i was so i was so excited to tap out because it just it just wasn't worth the like pain the juice wasn't worth the squeeze as we said the juice was not worth the squeeze what you're experiencing by the way with michael maritz in that instance or paul graham is not that they show up when this is what i suspect they it's not that they show up when there's hard problems it's that when there's hard problems, you go to them and they find out about the hard problems.

40:55And when things are going well, they know enough to let you cook. And this was a big lesson for me. And I got to work with Michael Moritz and Ruloff and I got to meet Paul Graham in the very, very first couple of classes. And I think in the earlier part of investors careers, they want to be involved in everything. And it's exciting to be part of the winning stuff. And then what you realize is, hey, when you get product market fit you have market pull and you know you hit that magical moment where united is putting in orders and then oh they'll put a deposit down oh they'll they'll check the box and initial the box that says non-refundable you know when you start getting those things done you don't want to mess with the magic now it's like the band is in the studio and the tracks are laying down now if the band is fighting and somebody's not showing up and you know There's a fistfight over the console and people can't get the lyrics.

41:51That's when the producer and the manager got to get in there and say, hey, I noticed we haven't laid a track. Should we maybe do a cover song here and get back into the groove? And I think that was one of the major lessons for me as an investor is knowing when you can be of service and you can truly be helpful and knowing when you're just noise. And I remember with Uber in those early days, there was a couple of investors who, when it was taking off, were super like i don't want to say taking credit for it but like doing a lot of press hits about it etc and then when you go back to that time period and you see me doing press hits um which sometimes you get either asked to do or you volunteer to do them i jumped in when travis was getting destroyed when you know there was some controversy uh over uh variable pricing and surge pricing i thought you know what use me when nobody else will say yes to go on cnbc and you can find these hits where i'm saying like listen all companies have crucible moments things are hard and you know that's kind of what makes the entrepreneur so let's let these entrepreneurs keep growing it's an amazing service and going but but but and i'm like yeah you know i've seen this before trust me but it is a uh it is important to stay the heck out of the way when things are cooking and then when things are hard yeah that's when you're like show up on a saturday or sunday with the founder and say let's go for a hike and let's have a real deep discussion about this how are we going to solve this what's the most challenging moment you had did you have any moments of like running out of money complete death this thing's going to get unplugged i mean we've had all of those my expectation at this point is we have one major crisis every year um and you know maybe the uh maybe the one that's kind of most fun to tell a story about is um this was this was just two years ago almost exactly now um uh where we uh we sort of famously been dating with rolls-royce uh for them to build an engine for our airplane and uh we had uh long story short we had decided that ultimately that was not the smart decision um that that it didn't make sense for us to put all of our eggs in the basket of a you know 100 year old british company that was sometimes on some days not even sure you even want to stay in the jet engine business um and and so we said just like spacex we're gonna build our own engines and you know that was that was a project that we now started on and we're you know spinning it up and incubating it and we'd had a conversation with with roles privately you know where we you know we thanked them for the partnership and we said look look we're gonna do this a little bit differently because we're not we're not getting there together and uh and let's find a face-saving way to hug each other and say goodbye when when we're ready to go say exactly what we're doing and and we just smiled and shook cans and um and you know in the meantime we were in the process of incubating what became our symphony engine and then american airlines placed an order uh it was our largest order order yet and then there was this freak out because i think we had been this um you know sort of you know this cute thing that maybe wasn't super credible uh you know and united orders maybe that's an anomaly maybe they did it for pr but united ordered and american ordered like you know once you're lucky you twice there's something interesting yeah and it's always where people yeah but you're making the own engine now we we are and like the crazy thing was the idea that we would ever not do that by the way but what happened is so so rolls ran to the press and broke up with us and uh and so we went from being you know this darling thing that everyone was so excited about so like they've got no engine there is you know none of the engine companies are going to work with them and this whole thing is just a glider and and like so you know overnight my ability to fundraise dropped to zero overnight my ability to get new customers dropped to zero um overnight you know it just like it completely blew up on us and um you know and we were we we were well into the process but we didn't want to talk about it half-baked with doing our own engine and so there was this uh i think it was from august or september through to december when we said okay you know we're ready to talk about what we're doing and how we're doing it that there was this like big stink over the company and um you know and then we had to go rebuild all the industry confidence because the way we went through that you know it created such a negative stink that you know the suppliers wanted to work with us were like you know but you have no engine and uh and so you know it took us probably another 18 months to just kind of get all that momentum back and that's like basically a second startup inside your existing startup like making the engine yourself sounds to me like it's technically more complex than making the plane am i correct i don't think so like it's yeah probably it's probably 50 50 uh but but the interesting thing that's surprising there is no way this would work if we weren't doing it that way not just because the legacy supply chain would flake which they probably would uh but because i mean so can you imagine spacex if if elon went to aerojet rocket dine for engines yeah like like i get merlins it's like how many do you want all of them right now you take them five years to decide whether they wanted to do it let alone to go invent and move at their speed and so and and with a supersonic airplane there's even stronger coupling because the um the way the engine and the airplane work together has to really really tightly matched and so if you've got a company boundary between you know between the airplane company the engine company like the rate of iteration is is very low and and if what ends up happening is the product isn't nearly as good you know so so uh you know we were talking earlier about the breakthrough passenger experience that i can't share the detail yet that is actually enabled by us doing our own engine and what how that makes no sense but okay It makes no sense.

47:51Let me explain why. To get the passenger experience where we really wanted, we had to change the tube of the airplane a little bit. Got it. Okay. So that makes sense. And it set us backwards on range. And we said, wow, okay, well, we want the airplane to be able to fly as far as we need it to fly. But we also want to have this thing that passengers are going to love. Right. How do we do both? And we found the missing efficiency by more closely matching the airplane and the engine. and uh and there was a moment this is actually pretty recent it just crossed the like yes we can do all this technically and uh i was in the you know i i review the the uh airplane engine together a couple times a week and we were in one of our friday reviews and the the head of aero and the head of propulsion were like making out with each other in the meeting uh and they're just like look if we we have both been in engine companies before we've both been in airplane companies before we've never been able to work together like this and we just found 500 miles of range that we needed for the airplane to be able to do its mission and we would never have found it any other way well this is you know one of the great skills of great entrepreneurs but also of just contributors inside of entrepreneurial organizations is cross-discipline and you know if you are somebody like joe jebbia you know and the co-founders you know brian uh at airbnb they have like they went to risdi they got a lot of design skill you start thinking about airbnb every time you go to an airbnb you're like this place is designed really beautifully well that's because they looked at it and they would see the pictures of an you know an airbnb like this is not beautiful and then they take better pictures i'm like okay these pictures are better but this is still not beautiful and it's like you know what'd be nice if there was like a coffee setup in the airbnb that was stunningly beautiful now when i rent an airbnb be and i love airbnbs in my family i prefer them to hotels and i can afford to do either you know i noticed they all use very beautiful coffee stations so something happened where and then beautiful outdoor seating areas and then like a foosball table or a ping pong table like there's something happening in that design panache and that patina you know uh that you see on the website that then translates to the experience and he really has thought about that in a in a way that's you know not possible if you were just a business person trying to optimize a marketplace for the take rate or the supply side you know these are kind of intangibles and there's a ton of stories about this as well with tesla where you know they were using mercedes drivetrain so on my model s which i just took which was the first one it has a mercedes shifter and drivetrain um what after the drivetrain i think it's a you know the steering wheel all that kind of stuff and so when i first like had to teach a nanny how to drive it to take the kids to school or whatever pick them up i was like it's just like the mercedes we had a mercedes next to the same exact thing except you don't hear noise but over time he started i remember when he started when i started touring the gigafactory with him and he would be like this is where we're going to make this and this is where we're making that and by the way here's what we're making with the hvac system now you'd be like why would you possibly waste time on the hvac system elon it's like what do you think the number two after moving the car use of the battery is it's not the display those leds don't use a lot of energy it's the hvac system and so the fact and that's when you see um have you ever seen this guy who takes cars apart sandy bunro when he took apart the y it's an incredible video he loses his mind when he sees the hvac system of how innovative it is and those are things that you would never think like okay the hvac's gonna unlock 30 miles or whatever it might have unlocked more than 30 miles i don't know 10 20 so you could either increase the price of the car and the weight by putting more batteries in or wait for physics and innovation to change batteries or you fix the hvac system pretty dope right yeah it is it's so dope and um actually i'm glad you brought that up Because it also, the technological arc of development at Tesla and at SpaceX and at Boom actually have some really interesting commonalities that, somebody should write a book about this one day because I think it actually will become the playbook for how you do a hardware startup.

52:13And if you look at SpaceX or Tesla today, they've earned the reputation of somebody who reinvents every piece of it. Because they have. But if you look back, that's actually not where it started. the the original tesla roadster was a lotus elise body with a cell phone battery and the original falcon one it didn't land it didn't even try to land and it was small and it never carried a payload and so they didn't actually invent anything new on the roadster they didn't actually invent anything new on the falcon one well the battery and the engine was probably a bit well no they use cell phone batteries i take cell phone batteries yeah they had a motor but it wasn't it wasn't built out of like unobtainium you know it was it was uh the thing that was you know if you if you want to say there's one miracle the one miracle is a startup could do it you know that that is the miracle well think about it too the roadster i remember i remember taking a plane ride with elon where he you know he was essentially i don't want to say losing his mind but he was perplexed because they had just told him that the 150 000 roads that i bought number 16 was going to cost 190 000 to deliver and he said well why didn't we charge 225 000 for he's trying to figure out like how these idiots were like who had been running the company shortly before he you know took over with founder authority and was like wait and that doesn't make any sense and man they just were not doing that grinding of every single component if you are making every component well think about the gains if you wanted to make something 100 more effective or efficient well there's probably nothing that you can change that will make it 100 efficient but there are certainly 25 things you could make 4 efficient in the next year or two yeah no that's that's that's exactly right you know but i think this goes back a little bit to what's surprising to people about boom i don't want to throw up the picture of the xp-1 flying again oh yeah um the uh but there is nothing that we invented on that airplane like okay it's got a carbon fiber composite fuse wash guess what boeing did that in the 787 you know we just made it the right shape um oh there's there's engine intakes you know ours are pretty efficient but that's the same basic architecture for an engine intake that was done on concord in the 1960s the um the there's an augmented reality vision system to the landing so we don't need that group knows that concord needed well and this was but guess what gulfstream put something not all that different on the g650 for people to land on the clouds and so you know so that the you know there is going to be an over an xp2 and there's going to be an overture 2 and these things are going to have a lot of new technology and with that augmented reality angle you're looking up uh you're actually looking down So if you look at the pilot there, so the reason Concorde had that root nose was two things.

55:09One is for a supersonic airplane, it wants to be long and skinny, big pointy nose. And the other thing is with that triangular kind of delta wing, for takeoff and landing, for that to generate lift, the nose needs to be pretty high. So you come in to land like this, and if it's the 1960s, the pilot can't see the runway. Yeah, that's what I'm sort of getting at. it's like you just don't have the ability to see the runway so yeah because the note because the nose is in well so today we've got this amazing thing called a camera right you put a couple of those up front we put it we put a couple of those up front and they're they're about the wingspan of a bird apart from each other so no no no single bird can take out both cameras um and then there's a little the pilot's little toggle where they turn on the the pilot screen basically flips over from a normal instrument to an algorithm reality rule and you just look at the screen you land the airplane on the screen the greatest my point i'll keep going you tell your money but my my point was like we're cobbling these things together but none of them are actually new and i think that's i think that pragmatism it is a in the in the initial part of hardware is a really important lesson to learn if you're doing a hardware startup like these these complex integrated hardware startups like Tesla, like SpaceX, like boom.

56:25The first place that they're starting, they're actually integration of things that are proven where all they're doing is bringing the integration together. And then because they want to have a sexy brand and they actually do want to go invent new stuff, pretty quickly they get to the state they're in today where you've got Starship and you've got the OctoValve on the Model 3 and you've got the steer-by-wire on the Cybertruck and there's all this stuff. But then people forget where it started and that it has to start with that pragmatist. yeah and you then earn the ability with your investors with capital with timelines to say you know what we're going to do this project it's the unibody project you know we're going to just stamp like that's like a that's like a moonshot kind of ish project or we're going to land this thing or we're going to make it much bigger you know you start earning the right to to do all that um yeah i have a stupid question you know at the front of all of these um supersonic planes is like a a stick an antenna like a little tip on top of the tip what is that for so that's on a um let's bring the picture back up so people talk about so that that's an artifact of it being a test airplane um so that yeah so that it's that it's an air probe and it's something called a pitot tube we've got a pitot tube on there pitot tubes doing airspeed right and stuff like that yeah Yeah, they measure what's called ram air pressure, which is the force of the air coming at the airplane.

57:49Basically, if you compare the ram air pressure to the ambient pressure, the difference tells you what the speed is. And so if you look at the nose of XP1, we've got a pinot tube at the end of it. And then we've also got what are called alpha and beta veins, which basically measure the nose angle relative to the oncoming air flow. So is the nose up or down? Is it left or right? And the reason on a test airplane, it's way out in front of the airplane, is we don't yet have calibration data. to put it near into the airplane put it right next to the airplane before we're 100 certain what that airflow pattern really is we could be wrong and so that you put the sensors way out in front of the airplane where there's where they're going to be in clean air and uh and therefore be more accurate but once you've got calibration data and you're in production you get rid of the nose boom and it looks like every other but but all planes have those i think right because there was that light there was an air france flight from south america where they like these young pilots didn't understand the airspeed of the plane because i think the pitot tubes or one of them had frozen or something it was or was getting a wrong yeah do you remember that one oh yeah that was air france for air france 447 was from rio to de gaulle and and yeah what what happened was actually this is this is a lesson in cockpit design yes um because they had uh they're up at altitude and the pitot tube which did the airspeed sensor i stone and so all of a sudden the the airbus yeah there were certain kind of automated protection features in the cockpit that that would work only if it knew airspeed and so the moment the airspeed data went away um uh it it it stopped having that protection and then the two pilots so so they both had joysticks and they're gonna think of them as like your joystick on your you know on a home flight sim or on your xbox or whatever and so if you and i are flying an airplane together and you're on your stick and i'm on my stick they can both move independently so so one of the pilots freaked out and hold all the way back on the stick and the other one get elevation he wants to get altitude yeah but we all know what happens when you do that that's right so then the other pilot was doing the rational thing which is a little bit of forward pressure so okay uh they're not physically coupled and what is what does the aerobus cockpit do when you're what i'm pulling all the way back on my stick and you're pushing i don't know split the difference split the difference it's the most insane decision it's the worst decision it flies the average so the average of catastrophically back and a little bit forward is still catastrophically back and then so they they just stole the airplane all the nose is going up the lift goes away and it just drops and the pilot wakes up the the captain comes out who has knows how to fly an airplane because these guys don't obviously know what they're or one of them didn't know what he was doing you know and he kills all the passengers and he's like no yeah the nose they had and by the time they hit the ocean uh that the ice had all melted off and they had a perfectly fine airplane um and the uh but you know the lesson there's a lesson in pilot training there which the industry is has really taken to heart but there's also a lesson in cockpit design and and so when we revealed our cockpit about six weeks ago uh like airbus we've got these side sticks but they're force feedback side sticks so that if you and i are you know the airbus thing had this alarm that would go off and it's a dual input but by the way when you're in a crisis there are a thousand alarms going off and you miss the whole thing's blinking like a christmas tree yeah right so so we didn't work it's the the connection with the pilot until we can do autonomy which i think is going to be a ways off for airplanes um until we do economy the the tangible connection the visceral connection we airplane and pilot really matters and uh and so if you and i are flying the airplane together then we can feel each other on the stick and when and an overturing from the autopilot on it acts like a third pilot and it moves the stick and so you can feel the the autopilot forces if you did take over from the autopilot you're literally you're reaching your hand where the autopilots fly and you're taking over from that exact position so there's this great like tangible uh visceral sensory awareness of what's going on with the airplane so if they had that on the airbus they never would have had that accident oh do we have a picture of your new cockpit design let's pull that up if we have i think i think we have a video of it i really love this it's like going from a blackberry to an iphone like we got everything on this airplane you can control through software yeah so instead of having glass avionics with the exception of that section in the middle where you have the thrust right that needs to be more visceral tactile is that right that's that's that's right well there's um we basically said put everything needs to be software control some things also you want to have a physical control and then we only added a minimum of physical control where it was important for that visceral feel and you know for normal flying is also we also think about emergency situations like if there's a smoke in the cockpit and you can't see there's certain things you need to be able to do just by feel oh wow i never thought about that yeah if you have smoke you got to feel around to you know change the flaps maybe or that's right change the air speed right those are important so if you look at the details of the cockpit design that the really critical controls all have a physically different shape so you put your hand on it you know what it is like the landing gear controller there um is it looks like a wheel and you touch it you don't have your hand on anything other than the landing gear controller yeah um and the flap controller literally looks like the landing gear it looks like the landing gear and when you put your hand on it it feels like the landing gear so if you and this is this is really you know this is really important in emergencies because what happens in an emergency is that the pilots get saturated they're like they get overwhelmed and then so if you're using only the communication channel of the screen or an audio alert you have a very narrow bandwidth ability to get put more information to the pilot so you have to make use of the of the uh touch and and that that you know like oh this can't be what i should have my hand on it feels wrong right let me ask you some stupid questions here since we're we're diving into the the the pilot experience um we'll have automation um obviously that's super important but why are planes you know we had mh370 disappear i'm like really into this kind of stuff like once you go down the youtube rabbit hole i watched this guy called blanco lirio did you ever watch the blanco lirio channel i don't know that one okay uh blanco lirio um youtube channel uh and i i give this guy five bucks a month on on patreon only because i think he ultimately will make people safer so this is a channel here um and uh you can see he just takes every crash and he breaks it down he takes all the data he'll do like the kobe bryan helicopter crash the day it happens three months later three weeks later three months later six months later a year later it's incredible for education and you have 370 disappears right and we have this the greatest aviation mystery i'm curious what you think happened i have my own thoughts um i think was intentional um but that's me um the thing that comes up is why aren't these given starlink given that we're all on the internet why aren't these remote controllable from the ground i obviously hacking is a piece of that or why aren't people in the control towers or at boom or at united not able to pull up the cockpit a virtual cockpit and watch the pilots in this air france situation and say hey we're watching air france do you guys have pitot tubes that are frozen what are you doing you're both pulling the stick the wrong way and when is that coming it's coming on overture okay so i think i think i just made an announcement we haven't talked about that before okay but the but yeah so over overture will have basically a remote tech support uh feature where um pilots on the ground can get into a flight sim and it will mirror exactly what somebody in the sky is seeing in real time now they can't they can't control it you know and that's kind of a hardware lockout because you go down that rabbit hole now there's a security question but now you got al-qaeda trying to hack into it and take a plane down that's right but it's it's the airplane equivalent of uh we call tech support and you can screen share with tech support perfect the airplane equivalent of that is uh you press a button and there are two you know factory train test pilots that can see and feel exactly what you're seeing and feeling and help you through it and so that's um i think and if you peel that back and say why has no one done that before uh it's the lack of innovation so back to our original discussion back to the original discussion the last time boeing did an all-new airplane was 2004 now satellite wi-fi hadn't really been invented yet right right and so there's your answer yeah right because it's overture this blows my mind to say that in the year 2024 overture is the first airline designed in a world where internet connectivity is a standard assumption like like if you look at every other airplane out there that they've got the satellite humpback on their opinion to a satellite every minute and like we're we're we are worried we are literally going to the bottom of the ocean trying to find a flight recorder to figure out what happened yeah okay yes it's great to have flight recorders it's great to be flight record but all that should be real time and it should be built in like literally the satcom on today's airplanes is a bolt-on and you can tell it's a bolt-on because it's got a hump what about pilots and having hammers in there to monitor the pilots in the cockpit this is a controversial union issue i understand but you do have situations with pilots sadly you know it's one in i don't know a million or something some pilot shows up drunk we had one who showed up on mushrooms and tried to hit some you know shut the engines down i mean some crazy stuff that's occurred you have the egyptian pilot who ran the plane into a mountain and committed suicide by commercial airline these are very rare things that occur but it would seem to me that on a human factors basis and studying pilots having the video of the pilots in the uh box or being streamed when that plane went down you know from mh70 or the 447 whatever it is would be invaluable it sure would be and and also by the way i think i think you're right that it was intentional and the the strongest evidence from that from my perspective is that there was a bunch of equipment that was turned off and and so they would have turned the cameras off you know the first thing so if um they were allowed to there could be a camera that's not allowed to be turned so you think mh370 was intentional too i i mean certain no uh probability basis the product on a probability basis it seems to be the only thing that's consistent with the facts uh from you know from my youtube study of that um but if you think about it on an if you if you think about it on who would want to do a cover up here if you had a pilot who uh you know was suffering from depression or whatever mental illness and who did this intentionally and you knew about it and you would cover it up right and it would be very confusing to the rest of the world and i think that's kind of what happened here the reason this is such a mystery and feels so weird to me i think it's the rest of the world is there's some amount of data it feels like the malaysian government just didn't give to people that's me saying it i know you have to work with people but yeah i mean i think there's some conspiracy going on here where they're like let's not investigate it too much that um i see a little bit differently so i i'm not aware of what data they could have shared that they didn't share uh you know this this is this is not like you go back and look at the you know we're not conspiracy theory chat here now if you look at the origin of covid there's a lot of data that that that the wuhan or chinese government had that wasn't public and i'm not aware of any analog on that on mh370 um okay yeah i'm just thinking like they seem you know to not have done the most thorough job that's my kind of i feel like they slow walked it in a way so they might they might have so there's a so you have a favorite youtube teardown of this my favorite youtube teardown of this is from a channel called mentor pilot m-e-n-t-o-u-r pilot and and he does these awesome accident teardowns that go all the way down to the cockpit design but he's got a really good one on mh370 including there's new data that did not exist uh when it first happened that that's this is a whole new way of tracking what happened that airplane that they've been able to do in the 10 years that elapsed um that that suggests a place where we could where it might be that no one has looked oh wow is that the deepest location like because they said in his simulator he had flown a sim to like one of the deepest cliffs and locations and so if he was intentionally trying to ditch in that area to make it unrecoverable he kind of wasn't the mariana trench but it was like similar to like the depth and then when they found the wings and stuff like that they said this these wings are indicative of a controlled landing in water because they didn't shatter so you're like wait a second how it it's yeah so crazy i would love to see us go look at a place we haven't looked forward see if you can find that airplane find the black box and then we're gonna know what happens isn't it extraordinary how safe it all is it is actually that's that there's this weird paradox of safety and in aviation work but literally the most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport and not not by a little bit by a lot And it's great to be able to accomplish that.

1:11:57It creates this sort of paradoxical situation where if something even like a little bit bad happens on an airplane, it's news versus in automotive. In automotive, we have the equivalent of a 737 crashing every 48 hours and everybody dies. That's just the U.S. Auto fatalities in the U.S. And if you reported on it, you couldn't report on anything else. It was just take over all the news. and this is what kills me on the pushback people have about wanting um you know a driver automation to be perfect before we can roll it out it's like no i would take a half automation because it would still be better than the carnage that we have on roadways today that nobody talks about 30 000 deaths about 100 a day and it hasn't gotten better meaningfully which is super interesting because you have uber and lyft and options for drinking and driving yet you still have it and it seems from the statistics that you still have a ton of drinking and driving but we have this addition of distracted driving and if you told me i'm with you you know every single car has to have level two adaptive cruise control and stay in the lane oh and automatic braking which i guess would be three i don't know if automatic braking emergency braking and adaptive cruise control are considered the same thing but i kind of are right stop if you're going to hit something or you know adapt to the speed it'd be very interesting if everybody was forced to have those on yeah i think there's something interesting there and it's also how you manage safety over time so if you look at aviation you know the early days weren't so safe but you know every every accident got a um root cause uh review and the industry um aside at least used to be really good at learning from these things and uh and the safety bars come up and come up and come up and come up and the expectations come up and you know and i think that like on-ramp is actually really valuable and we you know every time i read something that's like well we shouldn't have self-driving cars until we can prove they're perfectly safe i'm like no no no you're actually killing the on-ramp you're killing the on-ramp to safety and you know we have to allow things to come to market so long as they're better and then we can make them perfect over time yeah availability the i just looked it up while we're talking availability heuristic is the cognitive bias where people overestimate the likelihood of a bad thing happening based on some recent event in psychology you might call it catastrophizing where you'd think about the worst thing but our minds remember these things and there are famous cases where in new york city a child was abducted in manhattan and that everybody stopped letting their kids walk to school in manhattan in brooklyn when i was growing up in the 70s and 80s because rightfully every parent was like i don't want my kid kidnapped and i was like this doesn't happen that often and the ritual of being able to walk yourself to school at 9 10 11 12 years old is what turns you into an adult and then the damage that caused to independence in kids in different generations would probably be greater than the occasional kidnapping and murder of a child as horrible as that is which speaks to like what you have to deal with with i don't know suicidal pilots or al-qaeda taking over an airplane these are edge cases i think it's exactly the same situation where we can we can trade a visible uh but small risk or an invisible but actually much larger risk and uh and so that that's exactly what happened after 9-11 when your airport security went way up and um and you know and the it's hard to measure what the real impact of that would be but but i i suspect that airport security has killed more people than the terrorists did and and the way it did that is to at the margins nudge people from flying to driving there's there's some tipping point on how long does it take and how convenient is it and you know and it's some at some point putting a bit more friction at the airport pushes passengers the margin out of the airplanes and into the into cars you can see it on routes like new york boston used to have a lot more shuttle service than they do now the air air shuttles a bunch of air shuttles the friction killed a bunch of air shuttles yeah i used to take the boston one all the time and it would go from uh this marine terminal um i forgot the name of it but it was that laguar it was the marine terminal yeah yeah yeah exactly you would go there it was the greatest experience ever you could walk up it was every hour you didn't book a flight it was like taking the subway you walked up you would go in my day you went up to a counter you gave the woman your credit card you bought it and then shortly thereafter you had a kiosk and there was like very little security it was just you go through and you get on and you could show up five ten fifteen minutes before the flight and still get on because what you would do is you queue up at the gate imagine how revolutionary would be if you could go from la to san franc you know la to san francisco on southwest and it left on the hour and you got there if you got there an hour before you definitely got a seat if you got there 15 minutes before maybe you got a seat but if no big you get a cup of coffee and you go on the next flight you're first on the next right right we need we need to bring that back and in it's i think that's actually a harder problem with supersonic flight uh because these safety protocols can often be one-way doors uh even when they're not really effective um like uh like i'll tell you to tell you a fun story when i first got married flew from san francisco to seattle got married on would be island um uh then flew to through through heathrow and onward to italy for my honeymoon and we're like in uh somewhere in venice in my uh my now ex-wife is like honey can you get the like blah blah blah out of my purse i'm fishing through her purse and i and i find a uh a box cutter uh which is the literal weapon used the 911 it's gone through airport security and sfo and c-tac and in heathrow um and and not found and so the uh but by the way you can well if there's a bottle of water we're really good at finding that um and so the like it's not what whatever has made airplanes safer since 9 11 and i think they actually are safer since 9 11 it's not the airport security no i mean you know yeah and then we probably you think about those doors right we reinforce every door so you can't kick in the door like that's a great innovation right it is i think i think i think two things have actually mattered you're in the doors one and there's a second one and it's it's hold on let me see if i guess it uh oh see something say something people are yes super aware it's obvious that's right and in fact in fact that learning happened so quickly it happened on the day of 9 11 the passengers learned that they that they should fight back right and that's why that's why the fourth flight didn't make it into the white house yeah that's right yeah that learning happened in a few hours and so those two those those two things have actually made us safer but now we've got this airport security theater and like nobody knows how to get rid of it or simplify it yeah amazing uh what what is the uh what's the since we're wrapping up here what's the path to autonomy in airplanes because we do have many things like i bought one of these latest dgi drones i was i was shocked you're allowed to fly this in manhattan and like my friend's flying his drone he's teaching me how to do it and you just hit a button return and this thing's you know 10 blocks away whatever it's out of visual sight he just presses return and it returns and lands in this little tiny park we were sitting in benetton well i think it's gonna it's gonna start in counterintuitive places it's definitely not gonna start with with overture like this is not what we're doing here um but the i think the place where it will start is um with with the small kind of vertical takeoff and landing airplanes that are getting developed now where they've only got four yeah like the joe bees and archers because they've only got four or five seats on them and when one of those seats is taken by somebody you have to pay yeah versus somebody who's paying to be there economically it's a huge difference and so like if you want air taxis to work economically like one we're just like to find enough pilots for these things yeah uh so it's not a jobs problem it's like we can't find a point of flying a quadcopter like that these things know exactly where they're going they have very short missions it's a very constrained environment you're only going up to i don't know what they fly five ten thousand feet they're just zipping from manhattan to jfk or you know across the bay and from oakland to san francisco i mean these are going to be very short missions and those things are already doing massive calculations in terms of the rotors and if they do get knocked off balances load balancing them it's kind of baked in to what they do right yeah i think so i think it'll start there and like i think you know for commercial airplanes it's gonna be really really really a long time and you know and the reason is because we've made that one when there are a couple hundred people on the airplane they're two pilots economically it's not that significant um so there's just nobody with a strong financial incentive to go change this up um on one hand on the other hand like the platform has gotten to a near perfect level of safety and and the question becomes you know uh is there a way to actually move forward on safety with autonomy it's really hard to do that given how nearly perfect the safety bar is today and you look at things like you know sully landed in the hudson you know um maybe maybe i'm going to date myself quickly here but i i think i think it could be a long time before we have an ai that's going to say i'm going to land in the hudson um i'm going to i'm with you on that yeah like i the edge cases is always the hardest part which is why today when a airplane um is at whatever 34 or 40 000 feet it's on autopilot when it lands in a storm it's on autopilot right if i'm if it's in fog it's on autopilot um in almost all cases and like when do pilots actually fly a commercial airline i wonder but to your point why wouldn't you have the two if it's perfect why would you take on that complexity and it's already what what percentage of commercial flights are on autopilot you think every flight uses at least once and you know what percentage of the time is the autopilot act i mean it's it's on the entire cruise and the longer the flight the greater the percentage that is so it's you know i don't know the numbers it's got to be in the 90s got to be in the 90s right yeah yeah it's amazing but but then it turns out that there there are those edge cases where you're gonna be really glad there's a pilot there like when the uh those tubes freeze over pretty good to have a pilot yeah pretty good pretty good now there's a there's a different way to solve that problem i watch like every accident teardown video i can find and and then we try to learn what's the root cause and how and how do we fix it three different ways which they can never happen in overture and so we were talking earlier about the active force feedback side sticks that solves air france 4047 one way another way to solve it is something called synthetic airspeed which is uh even if the airspeed tube freezes over you can use gps and recent wind data to come up with pretty good estimate um you can also use inertial navigation so there's a lot of ways you can kind of synthesize airspeed so if the tube freezes over it's not a you know all the automation still works and the last thing is you make the automation not need a lot of sensors and so you know on overture another thing if you look at the airbus cockpits that the flight controls have many different modes that can be in there's normal mode there's alternate mode one there's alternate mode two and it keeps going there's a long list and you spend almost all your time in normal mode and if something goes happens and all of a sudden alternate mode the pilots you know may not even remember what that really does and how it's different um and so a thing that we put a big focus into is not having a bunch of modes like overture has two modes normal mode and reversionary mode and reversionary mode depends on very very little for it to work you know it's really interesting i was talking to my friend sky dayton who was the original investor in joeby and he was giving me the statistic like we haven't had a commercial death in the united states not gone wood got some wood over here um since 2009 and i was just looking as we were talking at the last couple of fatalities tragically and when you look at them like it's unbelievable like collagen air i'm not getting on any airline called colgan air colgan air started college and colgan air that was in buffalo it's one of these regional collagen air is really good for your skin college is right for your skin hom air white uh 51 91 in 2006 uh again one of those regional uh things i don't fly regional airlines as a rule no american eagle for me yeah i won't fly that you know why i looked it up because i'm like you i watch these things if you eliminated the regional airline and recreational pilots i mean you're you've just accounted for the overwhelming majority of accidents are small planes with recreational pilots i will not get in one of those i have friends who have little series they got this thing that thing yep no thanks you got two gray hair pilots in the front or preferably one salt hair salt and pepper one younger i kind of like that combo i never go in with one pilot always two never a regional airline and never a small plane you take those out you've just eliminated it's like eliminating getting in a car with a drunk driver or an old car with mechanical problems or a speeder or a distracted driver i wouldn't if i've been in a car where an uber driver will start using their phone i'll say excuse me i'm sorry i have anxiety when you're using your phone can you please not use your phone i'm still going to give you five stars it's it's me i'm just getting very anxious oh no problem sir no problem it's a great way to handle it that's the way i handle i put it on always put it on me that's the best way to handle with service you you have a problem maybe you can help me you know it's like a jedi thing uh listen you're fascinating uh congratulations we put you in the twist 500 it's our top 500 private market companies um that doesn't mean anything right now because i just started it um but i'm indexing the top 500 private companies based on alex wilhelm and i was the co-host now formerly of tech crunch and we're building this twist500.com so everybody can go check that out welcome to the 500 uh continued success we're rooting for you we cannot wait cannot wait to get to you know for me it's to get in la and go to japan i don't know if you can make that one but hawaiian japan is my dream it is well i gotta to tell you the story about that and then we'll let you out but the today as you know if you're leaving west coast and you're going to japan let's say you got a monday morning meeting in tokyo you got to leave midday saturday you get there on a day sunday you go to a hotel room try to sleep in the hotel next morning your alarm goes off you're going to try not sleep in the meeting and then and then you come home and and the whole thing takes at least three calendar days and and you're messed up from the jet lag the rest of the week and super sonic doesn't just save you time it saves you two whole calendar days instead of leaving saturday saturday night you sleep at home sunday morning uh the flights the flight from west coast to tokyo is about six and a half hours supersonic what that means is an 8 a.m departure say from san francisco gets to tokyo um six and a half hours later it's now 8 30 a.m monday morning in tokyo and so but to you it's just sunday afternoon so so we're awake they're awake right to the meeting right to the meeting go to bed go to bed early come home if you want uh you can do the whole thing in 24 hours and so so that's that's the magic of this it's not just about hours it's like days amazing listen uh we love what you're doing continued success and we will see you all next time on this week in startups bye-bye