← My First Million
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- [00:00]
Blake Scholl
I look at the mirror and I'm like, fat and dumb. And I'm like, if I want to have any chance of doing this, I have to go to the startup CEO equivalent of the gym. Because at that point, I don't think I could have sold a dollar bill for 50 cents. And I didn't know jack about airplanes. And so I'm like, okay, Like, I need to become that person. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
- [00:21]
Sean
I put my all in it.
- [00:22]
Blake Scholl
Like, no days off on a road.
- [00:24]
Sean
Less travel, never looking back.
- [00:26]
Sam
So how does a guy who's slaying coupons on the Internet become the founder of a supersonic jet company, which by.
- [00:32]
Sean
Way the one liner of what you're making is a commercial jet that flies 1300 miles an hour versus 500 miles an hour. Right.
- [00:40]
Sam
It takes you from. It would take you from where to where and how much time? Like, just take it.
- [00:43]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, that's what actually matters. Right. It take you from New York to London and just over three and a half hours. Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half, L.A. sydney, about eight and a half. And that. That's version one. We want to go faster after that.
- [00:55]
Sam
Amazing.
- [00:55]
Blake Scholl
So my backstory was I've loved airplanes since I was a kid, but because there was basically no innovation happening in aerospace, it never occurred to me to have a career there, you know? So I sort of fell in love with computers, with the Internet. My first job out of school was Amazon in 2001. My parents didn't understand it because that was. They were like, hey, we got you a computer science degree. Why do you want to work at a bookstore? But it was an amazing time to be there after that. I was part of one of the very early mobile app companies, and then I wanted to do my own startup. And so I looked at my resume and said, I know E commerce and I know mobile, so I should work on mobile E commerce, and surely there'll be something there. And we built this, like, barcode scanning game, which, like, if you make a list of, like, the most important thing in the universe, the least important, you have to, like, dig a deeper hole to find where barcode scanning game goes. And I would get up in the morning working on that thing, and I was just like, I was super depressed, and I would think, I'm going to screw this thing up. All the investors are going to lose their money. No one's ever going to hire me again. I was really afraid of failure, and I'm looking at what we're building and it's like, wait a minute, I'm building an app for people who shop in stores and I'm an E commerce nerd. I don't even like stores. What am I doing? And so when we had a chance to kind of go acquihire the company to Groupon and investors got a return and you know, I got a little money and I got to like get out of, you know, I basically got my escape fantasy, this business that I didn't love. It was a huge win and I kind of spent my couple years at Groupon sort of reflecting on that and thinking about what I learned. And you know, one thing I knew was, you know, I, I definitely wanted to found again. You know, I, I'd started my first company in my parents basement in high school and there's, you know, the founder bug had bit me but I, I hated that. Waking up in the morning thinking about, you know, what am I doing? And wishing I'd never started and I never wanted to do that again. And a thing I knew about myself is no matter what I was doing as a founder, I was going to push myself to my personal red line. And that red line is the max I'm capable of and it's going to feel the same no matter what I'm doing. But what won't feel the same is what I'm doing and how motivated I am by it. And I wanted to pick a startup idea where I would never regret starting no matter how hard the day was. And so it led me to sort of organize all my ideas by how happy I would be if they worked. And I'd had such a passion for flight at this point. I'd gotten my pilot's license. This is kind of all I knew about airplanes as to how to fly a single engine, one for fun. And I never understood why no one had picked up where Concorde had left off. And I felt like, okay, I gotta look at that and get it out of my system and then move on to the next thing.
- [03:44]
Sam
So before we tell that the boom story, what were the other ideas on that brainstorm of making a list of possible things to go do? We asked Palmer Luckey this question before he started Anduril and he was talking about how he was gonna make like the food version of Diet Coke. He's just gonna make like calories. You could just like calories that, things that tasted good but had no calories. And he was working on like synthetic food.
- [04:06]
Sean
Food.
- [04:06]
Sam
He's like, actually, all right, never mind I'm gonna make weapons.
- [04:10]
Sean
His other idea was actually pretty amazing. It was a prison. It was a private prison where you only get paid if the inmate gets out of prison and never comes back.
- [04:19]
Sam
Right.
- [04:19]
Sean
And so it was like, ooh, that's.
- [04:21]
Blake Scholl
Actually a good idea. I like that one. It's like, stuff on the cutting room.
- [04:24]
Sam
Floor is pretty good too.
- [04:26]
Sean
Yeah. So, like, it was, like, three, and then, you know, the third one was Andrew, but it was, like, three, like, pretty epic things.
- [04:32]
Sam
And by the way, his brainstorming process, he said he had, like, a house where he created, like, a padded room where he could just, like, build things that had. Would, like, explode. And he's like, cool. This is just walls that can take explosions. So I'd love to hear, you know, your process might not be quite as crazy, but what were the other ideas, and how did you actually brainstorm them?
- [04:50]
Blake Scholl
Well, the looking back, I think the. The alternate ideas I had then are not as good as the alternate ideas I have now. Like, I think I had something that was like a rental car company that would pick you up, like an Uber. I still sort of wish that existed, but I don't, you know, But I don't think that thing has long legs. Right. I don't think it's actually a good idea. Even though the small number of times I want a rental car, I really wish I had that. I think one of my general premises, especially I haven't reflected on the boom story, is there are a lot of great unsolved problems that are hiding in plain sight that nobody's working on. And I think it's an artifact of the bystander effect. And so for anybody who doesn't know that term, the bystander effect is this effect that, like, let's say someone falls over having a heart attack on the street, and you're the only one around, you're highly likely to run over, call 91 1, take care of them, make sure it's okay, be there until the ambulance comes. That's what people do. But if the street's crowded, everyone tends to think. I'm sure the people who need to know already know. Then it gets ignored. And the paradoxical effect is there can be a hundred people, and the guy having a heart attack is completely ignored. And I think this plays out in the business world, like in the Valley. Like, we tend to get told, if your idea is any good, there are already other. Several other good teams working on it. And if no one else is working on it, there's probably something wrong with the idea. But if you really play that thinking out what it, what it means is unique things tend to get left hiding in plain sight. And actually the more compelling they are, the more likely they are to be ignored because the more everybody assumes that somebody else would already be doing it. If it were possible, like supersonic flight is like this supersonic flight would obviously be good. Nobody's doing it. It must be impossible or a bad idea, you know, and there are other things in that category, like traffic. I don't think I am unaware of anybody attacking traffic in the right way. And it's a very solvable problem. It could be a trillion dollar company.
- [06:53]
Sam
It's funny because the only other person, the person who comes to mind who I think attacks these problems hidden in place sight is Elon. Yeah, you know, I was talking to an investor who knows Elon and he was like, you know, the thing I always admired about Elon was that he, he just saw the trillion dollar idea on the floor that the rest of us were walking by. Very similar to what you described with the bicycle. He goes, he goes, any of us, a lot of people who grew up fascinated with space, the idea of rockets that go to Mars was not a secret. It wasn't a nobody had ever thought of. But we all just sort of were blind to it. We assumed either must be somebody else must be doing it, NASA must be doing it, or it's too hard, it's too expensive. Either can't be done. He's like, we all just ignored it. And Elon also has a sort of bone to pick with traffic. I think he's to do with the boring company, which sounds like you might disagree with the approach there. How would you approach the traffic problem?
- [07:48]
Blake Scholl
I think boring company solves half the problem, but there's another half the problem. And so imagine for a second if grocery stores worked like roads do, meaning you pay for them with your taxes. And once you've paid your taxes, you feel you're entitled to use it whenever you want, as much as you want. So what would happen to grocery stores? There'd always be a line out the door and the shelves would always be empty. Right. That's what we've done with roads. We pay for them once with our taxes, and then we feel entitled to use them as much as we want, whenever we want. So they're always oversubscribed. What you need for roads is a price system and you need a dynamic price system. I think there's a technology element of this which I think is about smart traffic. Lights and the ability to actually do smart routing such that imagine you open up your phone and you open, you know, the Maps app and you put in your destination. And not, not only are there sort of different routes and different times, there's basically different times and different prices. And you can have fast and expensive or slow and cheap. And I think what we've seen, New York did like a baby experiment with this and like, you know, the simplest way where they put like a, you know, 8 or $9 fee to go into Manhattan.
- [09:01]
Sean
Are you, are you familiar with that, Sean?
- [09:03]
Sam
I heard about, I heard they were doing. This was recent, right?
- [09:05]
Blake Scholl
It's pretty recent. It was super controversial.
- [09:07]
Sean
I'm here right now. And so basically I think it's $12. So I think it's between the streets of 60th on down and it actually shows you the map on Google. So if you type in like, you know, if you're on 70th street and you gotta get somewhere to 50th street, it would say, here's the threshold. And right when you cross through, boom, you're billed $12. And I'm walking around here downtown right now. It is so much quieter than it ever was. It's so much quieter and there's so much less traffic. Like the other day, like the day after it happened, I was downtown and I remember like standing in the middle of the street and I'm like, where is everyone?
- [09:41]
Blake Scholl
Right? Like, it's so much better.
- [09:43]
Sam
So I feel like this would be so effective. But also I would have guessed this is really unpopular to implement. But once it's implemented, maybe people see the benefits of it. Was that who got that through? That's kind of amazing to me that nobody's talking about this really important experiment happening in New York. Not some fringe like Tier 5 City. Was that unpopular?
- [10:02]
Blake Scholl
Oh, it's, it's what's hugely controversial.
- [10:05]
Sean
Even Trump was like, you're not going to do this. It was just, it was kind of like, dude, you're like the president. You get, you don't really, I don't know why you're getting involved in New York City. But like Trump was like, we're, we're yanking this. The governor got into, involved in this. Yeah, it's a huge ordeal.
- [10:18]
Blake Scholl
That's right. And I think that, I think the reason it's struggling is because they kind of solved half the problem, but not the other half. And they also did it a very like the most coarse grained way you could possibly do it. Meaning they put in place a Usage fee, but they didn't rebate the other taxes. And so there's a whole argument that says, hang on, I paid for the roads already. Why are you charging me twice? This is a tax increase. And especially as the world kind of moves to EVs and some roads are paid for with like licensing fees and some roads are paid for with gas taxes. Like now is the perfect time to fix this to make, you know, to go, to go to usage based pricing. But you got to get rid of the other taxes. Otherwise you've given, you know, every populace in the world a good reason to say no to it. And the other, the other sort of mindset, you know, I did think a bit about how you would sell this. I think the go to market challenges are way bigger than the, the product challenges. There's some fun like AI things about how you build AI traffic lights and how you optimize a network and don't need a bunch of traffic engineers to do it. It should be fun. I think it's way easier than self driving, way more impactful. But the, I think the go to market matters, you know, because it's like, you know, it's like there'll be this envy element of like oh, all the rich people are passing me. But I think what you could do is basically rebate money from the people who are paying for fast to the people who want cheap. And so, you know, so think, think. Think of it as like that asshole Elon cut me off, but every time he does it he has to pay me, right? So, so I, I think there's a way to, you know, effectively there's like cash flow from the people who want, who are willing to pay for the highest access to the roads, to the people who actually value the cheapest access to the roads. And then there's a technology layer, there's an operating layer on this. And then the, you know, whoever builds the System should get 10% off the top for building it and running it. And that ends up being an enormous business. But if somebody wants to start this, I will like be your advisor, I will be your champion. I will help raise money for it. Like I desperately want someone to build this.
- [12:17]
Sean
So you. So, all right, so boom has raised $700 million. You guys are, I think you just had a flight, you know, in the past year where you built one of, one of your engines. Broke the sound Barry. Huge deal. And so you know, we, we've had a few people like you, but you're like a legend potentially in the making.
- [12:36]
Sam
Take, take Us, take us back. Like, what was the original question in your mind? Like, why, why isn't there supersonic? What was the actual initial question in the first couple weeks?
- [12:45]
Blake Scholl
So it was like, why did Concord fail and what would you have to do for it not to have failed?
- [12:49]
Sean
But were you on Wikipedia and you just came across that or you're just a flying fan?
- [12:53]
Blake Scholl
Well, if I was a flying fan and then, yeah, you know, I go to Wikipedia and I read stuff and you know, the ostensibly. Okay, the facts make it obvious. Here's, here's a hundred seat airplane with 100 uncomfortable seats and adjusted for inflation, a $20,000 fare. And you can't fill the seats, you can't make any money. Okay, that's obvious. So but then the next question was, this turned out to be like the key question, why was Concorde so expensive? The answer is poor fuel economy. And that kicked off a vicious cycle that led to high fares, that led to the low utilization. The lower utilization, the higher the fares have to be. There's a whole vicious cycle to it. But the root of it was poor fuel economy. And the next question was, well, how much would you have to beat Concorde's 1960s technology buy in order to match the fuel economy of a flatbed in business class? The thought was, well, eventually it'd be great to do this for everybody. But as a starting point, business class is huge and you don't need the bed. If the flight's not long, you can have a better bed, the one at home. And so how much you have to beat Concord buy? And it turned out the answer was like less than 10% to match the total economics of a flatbed in business class. And I was like, what? Like head explode emoji? Like, I don't really know anything about airplanes, but can we really not do 10% better than 1960s?
- [14:12]
Sam
Give people a point of reference. How much did you know about planes and calculating the fuel economy and all of that when you started this idea?
- [14:20]
Sean
Yeah, aren't you a high school dropout?
- [14:23]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, I'm a high school dropout. I did actually graduate from college, but my degree is in computer science. And the closest thing I had to an aviation credential is a pilot's license. But, but this is, this stuff isn't actually that complicated at this level. Like, the fuel burn data is all on Wikipedia and you can calculate fuel burn per seat mile, which turns out to be like the key metric. And, and says, okay, what was Concords fuel burn per seat mile? What's the fuel burn per seat mile of a flatbed in business class. And again, you can just go pull on Seat Guru. You can see the map. You can like measure on your screen how much of its business class, how many seats are there, how, how much floor areas in their whole airplane, Allocate it out. And then it was like, great. You have to do about 10% better than Concorde to match the total economics. If you wanted to match the fuel burn per seat mile, it's a bit more than that. But there are all these other utilization benefits from speed. And then the next question was, well, how much better is Boeing's latest airplane versus the one that came before it? And the answer was something like 20%. I'm like, wait a minute, you can't find 10% over 50 years. I don't know anything about the details of the technology at this point, but it seemed plausible on the face of it. And so at this point I was like, okay, hang on.
- [15:34]
Sean
You said there's a fact here that has caught my attention. That's right. I'm going to spend a bunch of sleepless nights questioning this.
- [15:43]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, well, or actually I'm going to spend a lot of days trying to get smart on it. And so I was like, this seems plausible on the face of it, but I'm on the far left side of the Dunning Kruger curve. I don't even know what I don't know. And so I sort of imagined myself. I imagined in the future, it's 2050, I'm retired, I'm sitting on the beach, I'm sipping Mai tais. I had nothing to do with supersonic flight, but I'm just reading the aviation history books. And what do I think they say? Do they say we're still flying subsonic? I really hope not. Hopefully they say we're going supersonic now and they tell the story of how it happened. And how do I think that story goes? Does it go? After 150 years of not building a supersonic jet, Boeing finally did like, no. Business history never goes like that, right? Like, this is. Big companies don't suddenly get enlightened and build disruptive things. So what's the more plausible history? More plausible history is it was a startup that did it. The startup founder would not have come from the entrenched industry where everybody believed it was impossible or a bad idea. They have to be an outsider. And what would that outsider have to look like in order to be successful? They'd have to have built a dream team so that to be really good at Attracting great people. They'd have to be able to be a great storyteller. They'd be great at persuasion. They'd have to be technically deep in order to be credible with all the audiences that would matter. And I sort of look in the mirror, I'm like, is that me? I've got the, like, outside the industry box. But, like, the rest of it's no.
- [17:09]
Sean
And so, like, you're like, what would it take to attract this, like, 10 out of 10, like, the smoke show? Like, they probably need to be good looking to have a great personality. They need to be funny. They probably should have, like, really nice teeth. That's me. I can do that.
- [17:26]
Blake Scholl
I mean, so I look in the mirror and I'm like, fat and dumb. And I'm like, if I want to have any chance of doing this, I have to go to the startup CEO equivalent of the gym. At that point, I don't think I could have sold a dollar bill for 50 cents. And I didn't know jack about airplanes. And so I'm like, okay, like, I need to become that person. And I sort of. My mental model for myself is, you know, we've probably seen those, like, how it's made videos with pasta and these, like, pasta extruders. And there's this, like, big mound of dough in this gigantic, like, press that's pushing the dough through this tiny little hole. And this, like, noodle, it gets extruded out the other side of the hole. I'm like, okay, I'm the dough. There's this hole, and I need to, like, extrude myself into the right shape to actually be able to do this. And. And so I went back and I started taking remedial calculus and physics because I hadn't had any since high school. And I. And I didn't know how to get through an aerodynamics textbook without way more math and physics. And then I read the aerodynamics textbooks, and I did the problem sets, and if I couldn't figure them out, I threw them out. And I got a different book and did those problem sets.
- [18:24]
Sean
You were not working at this point, Is that right? You had left Groupon. How. How long was that not working time and how much money were you able to save up in order to kind of.
- [18:32]
Sam
Do you, like, rich rich or you're like, I got two years where I don't have to have a job.
- [18:36]
Blake Scholl
I had one year where I didn't have to have a job.
- [18:38]
Sean
Okay, so you had what, like, $250,000?
- [18:41]
Blake Scholl
It was a little bit Better than that. I had sort of, in my mind, I had budgeted for, like, two failed startups before I would have to go get a big company job. I was like, let me give. I got two shots on goal before I'm working for the man again.
- [18:54]
Sam
You're like, cool, so I'll definitely fail on the plane thing, and then I'll try to do that mobile app, and then I'll go give back, give up and go back to the job.
- [19:01]
Blake Scholl
That was kind of the thought process. I budgeted. Like, here's, you know, here's my salary replacement money, and here's, here's the seed money that I put in the company myself. And I had, I had, I had enough savings to do that twice before I needed a job. And, you know, at the time, I was married. I had three young kids, like three under 18 months.
- [19:23]
Sean
Oh, my God.
- [19:24]
Sam
Yeah, I gotta do some math. Some twins. What are you doing here?
- [19:28]
Blake Scholl
Twins? Yeah.
- [19:30]
Sean
Okay. Would you, like, kiss your kids goodbye in the morning? And you're like, all right, I gotta go. Ready? And you just go, go into the.
- [19:37]
Sam
Other room and you just, you just go with them to school. You just go to the library with them. The lunchbox.
- [19:41]
Blake Scholl
It's funny, no, I mean, you say that tongue in cheek. That's kind of how it went. Like, you know, I had a, I had a office in the basement, and I, I, I'd give them hugs and kisses and I go downstairs and I'd sit at my desk and I. And I'd read and do problem sets all day.
- [19:54]
Sean
And you're, you were telling your friends for that year, they're like, what are you working on? And you're like, I'm kind of toying with this idea of launching a commercial jet company.
- [20:03]
Blake Scholl
Right. And you could just watch the eyeballs roll back. This was 2014. My wife said, okay, honey, you've got a year to screw around with this, and then I expect you to get a job.
- [20:13]
Sean
Yeah, this is like, before, startups were cool. Like, now, if you say you're working on like, that, you can just go on Twitter and post about it. And people are like, oh, that's awesome. In 2014, it still was a little bit.
- [20:27]
Blake Scholl
Startups were cool then, but not hard tech startups. Like, there were no hard tech startups to a first order. Like, there was SpaceX and that was it.
- [20:35]
Sean
That was like the era of, like, Airbnb for blank Uber for this.
- [20:39]
Blake Scholl
That's right. That's right. Yeah. And like, the only thing that was out there as a reference Point for anything like this was SpaceX and it was still pretty early, like SpaceX had gotten to orbit and they were working on the Falcon 9. And I remember thinking like, wow, you know, that guy went from PayPal to rockets. Rockets. You know, rockets sound harder than airplanes, so this must be possible. It turns out, I think actually airplanes are harder than rockets because because of. You have to have. Safety is an issue from day one versus rockets. You can blow them up and iterate and you can't, you can't do that to an airplane with a person on board.
- [21:14]
Sean
So.
- [21:14]
Blake Scholl
But I did, I didn't. I was, you know, what's that old phrase? Like I'm not doing this because it was easy, but because I thought it would be easy when I started.
- [21:22]
Sam
Yeah, the best motivational poster of all time.
- [21:25]
Blake Scholl
Right. And I didn't actually think it was going to be easy, but. And people, people often ask me, like, if I knew how hard it was going to be, would I still start? And they assume the answer is no. The answer is definitely yes. I still would have started even knowing how hard it turned out to be.
- [21:41]
Sam
So how do you describe this way of thinking? Because you know, you, you talked about this, the pasta dough and the hole and you're like, what kind of, what noodle do I need to. I need to shove myself through that hole to make myself the noodle that I want to be.
- [21:53]
Blake Scholl
It is.
- [21:54]
Sam
So there's. You have that and you talked about like I just imagined. I worked backwards from the end. I'm retired. I'm reading a book about the history of flight. And what does that say? Does it say nobody invented fast planes? No. Does it say that Boeing invented the fast plane after showing no evidence of wanting to do so? No. What do you call this? Like, I guess, do you have a frame or a phrase way of thinking? Because I think that's very. Sounds simple, but it's very rare. I don't do that and I want to do more of that. So I'll teach me about that.
- [22:23]
Blake Scholl
It's. It's first principles thinking and it's super, super important. And it's like the most. I think there are two mental skills that are really valuable. One is first principles thinking and the other is knowing when you're confused versus when you're clear. And if you have, if you have both of those, you can do anything.
- [22:38]
Sam
Explain both of them.
- [22:39]
Blake Scholl
Yeah. So, so first principles thinking is like looking to get, you know, it, it. Let's take a math analogy here. You know, are there a bunch of data Points, and I'm going to, like, draw a line through them and extrapolate, or am I going to go understand the equation that led to those data points being where they are? Am I pattern matching or am I understanding causality? And in going to causality is really important. And most people don't do it. They operate on rules of thumb. And rules of thumb are fine so long as you're, like, doing things that have already been done before or not too far from them. But if you want to do anything new or different, or if you want to break from conventional wisdom, you have to understand what's really happening. So, for example, the pattern matching is Concorde failed. People weren't willing to pay more for supersonic flight, like on Concorde, Therefore, it doesn't work. It was an economic failure. And you could find that in a zillion articles on the Internet. But, like, hang on, what was really going on? What were the actual economics? What's the actual passenger preference? There's a whole, like, don't accept a qualitative answer to a quantitative question here. And so as I was doing this.
- [23:47]
Sean
I saw you say that quote, by the way. I actually think that that quote is kind of more profound than the time that you just gave it. What exactly does that mean?
- [23:55]
Blake Scholl
People make all kinds of claims about issues that are measurable without measuring anything. Like, to pull on this example, supersonic flight costs more. Passengers prefer cheaper flights. You have to solve sonic boom to be able to fly over land in order for the market to be big enough. Therefore, you can't do any of this. And like, every single thing in there is some qualitative claim about a thing that's actually measurable. Well, okay, supersonic flight costs more. Well, how much? What would the fares have to be? How many people are already paying those fares? I mean, like, obviously people paid to save time. Well, how much do they have to pay and how much time is saved? And okay, is there a market without supersonic flight over land? I don't know. Go get the traffic data, build a freaking database and start to make some assumptions about costs and time savings and look at how big the market is. That's what I did in 2014. I had a spreadsheet and some JavaScript code that went and did all that, and it turned out the actual answers were not what anybody claimed they were because nobody else had done the math.
- [25:00]
Sam
Yeah, it seems like my dad taught me this thing. He goes, he's an Indian dad. He likes to ask for discounts. And somebody would say no. And he would ask again.
- [25:08]
Blake Scholl
Yeah.
- [25:09]
Sam
And I'd be like, they said no, dad. And he'd be like, your dad?
- [25:12]
Sean
Didn't you say your dad just goes, no, you're going to give me this.
- [25:15]
Sam
Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, sometimes he'll just be like, so we'll get a discount. Right? Like, he'll do that type of thing instead of even asking for the discount. But when he. When somebody says no, he would ask again. Or he'd ask somebody else. And he would tell me. He would say, don't take no from a person who didn't have the power to say yes in the first place.
- [25:30]
Blake Scholl
That's a great price.
- [25:32]
Sam
She couldn't have said yes. So why do I care if she said no? Like, she didn't have the authority to say to give me the discount. So I'm just gonna keep asking until I get to the person who at least could say yes. Let's start that. And what you're saying is like, don't accept a qualitative answer. Don't take a narrative when numbers would. Would be. Would be there. And I see this all the time in my companies. It's like, yeah, those didn't perform well. Well, how well? How bad was it? What is that? How does that compare? Are we sure that you know? And once you start to dig in, you realize people are not operating from a place of fact. And definitely a team is not operating from the same set of facts.
- [26:04]
Sean
But how do you get people, Sean, not to think like that, though?
- [26:08]
Sam
Well, I'll tell you how I do. But I would like to hear maybe Blake do it, because it sounds like he's probably a little further ahead on the curve there. Go ahead. I just get very blunt about it, but go ahead.
- [26:17]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, I mean, I ask a lot of questions, like, if it's a. If it's an engineering thing, if someone's telling me something's not possible and they can't explain it in terms of Newtonian mechanics, I just don't believe it. The.
- [26:27]
Sean
The other thing is, that was Sean's answers. That was his answer, too.
- [26:32]
Sam
I got a C in physics, by the way. I had to retake it during the summer at Duke. So I'll give you two little tips that have worked for me. And I stole these from when I worked at Twitch. Emmett, the founder of Twitch, and now the CEO, Dan. They both had these great ways of doing this. So both of them, I think, wanted this. They wanted people to give more substantiated, dug in, detailed answers that were based on fact rather than either opinion or hearsay or just narratives in the company, whatever. And so what they would do is they would say things like, hang on, I just want to make sure I understand this. Rather than saying, I don't think you understand this, which would make the person feel of text. Hang on, wait, wait. Sorry. I need to ask you this question because I want to make sure I understand this. Yes, you said this. Is that because Blah, blah, blah. And so then they would break it down that way. They would.
- [27:18]
Blake Scholl
Yep.
- [27:18]
Sam
Take them off the defensive. And Dan did this great thing. He would say. He'd say, oh, you said something interesting there. When what he really meant was you said some bullshit. And then he would say, you said that this didn't work. Now explain this to me. It could be that this didn't work because A, or it could be that we measured this and we saw this and it could be B, is it A or B? And then he real that they would. People would have to walk through their logic and they would see where their own logic had potholes where they were taking huge leaps of assumptions. Or they'd say, we. I'd have to go look it up. And then he would. He would either pause and be like, let's see if we can get that data. Because you think you get that data in the next two minutes. And he would. He'd be like, because if we just continue talking without that data, then I guess the data didn't really matter. Or he'd say, let's come back with that. With that data. And what I'd be really curious of is A, B, C, D and E. And it'd be the logic chain that he wants them to go. To go do. And you do that two or three times. You undress people sort of two or three times. This way they start to anticipate it and they come into the meeting now with that because they know he's always going to pause me. I can't just. I can't get away with just saying some bullshit in here. I can't just say it. Well, it doesn't matter if you say it well. It's. What are you actually saying?
- [28:30]
Blake Scholl
That's right. So I think that's brilliant. And we built it into our interview process. Like my. My favorite interview question is teach me something. And it starts a conversation exactly like what you're describing. So hang on, I didn't understand what you said. Why is that? Can you walk me through that? Like a story about this? At one point I was interviewing for like a head aerodynamicist and like, aerodynamics is like the super hard, very mathy, very techy end of aerospace. It's the hardest, you know, technically the hardest part. And this guy shows up and he's got this star studded resume, and he, you know, claims to be an expert in hypersonic engine intakes. And I'm like, teach me something. He's like, oh, like what? I'm like, I don't know. Your resume says you know about hypersonic intakes. Like, I barely know what hypersonic is. Teach me. And he, he launches into this thing and he's like, oh, yeah, you really want to use a stream trace design because that minimizes the cow lip angle. And I'm like, hang on, slow down. You went way over my head. What's the cow. What's the cow lip? What angle are you talking about? Why does any of that matter? And it turned out the answer was I don't know, right? But he had a sound bite that turned out to be true. And we had this whole conversation, and by the end of it, I felt like I had actually been able to reverse engineer some understanding. It was very obvious he didn't have it. And the thing I love about that question is, even if you know, it's. I don't mind sharing this on podcasts because you can't cheat on the question even if you know it's coming. You have to actually understand something.
- [29:59]
Sean
Well, you know, what's funny is back when you were getting going in like 14 and 16 and 18, I don't know about Sean, but, like, I was definitely up and coming and I didn't have, like, a lot of money. I didn't have, like, enough money to make angel investments. And for some reason, like, I got sent your deal. Not like, you know, I wasn't in anybody. It was just like, you know, this crazy guy has started this thing. And it was almost as if I'm like, well, if I'm seeing this, then that must mean that all, like, the cool guys have passed on this, right? And I remember, like reading about this company, Boom. And I'm like, oh, this guy. This person's insane. Like, why on earth? How is this. How is anyone taking this seriously? And obviously that's how a lot of great ideas start. But it didn't seem like you had an easy going when it came to this fundraising. If like a, a guy like me was even able to come across the deck.
- [30:50]
Blake Scholl
Oh, it was definitely not easy. But by the way, notice, you know, unpack the thinking there. That's. That's an example of bystander thinking implied to, to investing.
- [30:58]
Sean
Sure. That's why I'm not, That's why I didn't invest in it and that's why really smart friends did.
- [31:03]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, no, I mean the fundraising piece of this has been extremely difficult. The, you know, I think some people have said there's no venture in venture capital. And it's, it's kind of true. And what didn't work for us is going to VCs and trying to raise money. And there are a bunch of reasons for that. The superficial reasons are like, oh, that the timelines for this are longer. It doesn't, it's not a natural fit for kind of fund life cycles where you want to show a mark quickly and then use that mark to raise the next fund. You know, anybody who's focused on that is going to run from a business like Boom. You know, but, but I think the bigger dynamic is like a principal agent type dynamic. And it took me a long time to realize this because I sort of naively thought VCs are the people with money and their job is to invest it to make more money. But that's actually not what VCs are. VCs are money managers. Remember that thing that would go around the valley like 10 years ago about Facebook being free and people would say if the product is free, then you're the product. But by the way, if the product gives you money, then you are definitely the product. Right. And the VCs are in the business of selling startups as an investment class to LPs. And who are the LPs? Many times, if you're lucky, those are wealthy people who have their own money. But many times it's like the endowment fund of Harvard. And it's like by the time you trace that dollar back to anybody who actually owns it, you have to go many, many levels back. And the dynamics, like the incentive dynamics in that money, in that sort of like chain of money managers is to be able to like raise the next fund and keep going relative at a relatively short time period relative to the investment payoff of most startups. And so what it does is it drives a. There's an incentive to go invest in things that look to LPs, like smart investments quickly. And boom might actually be an amazing investment. I think there's no guarantee of this. We could totally, at this point, we've done enough stuff. The impact is guaranteed. You know, I just really don't want it to be a crater. But, you know, in success, this is going to be a Trillion dollar company because, like, people are going to fly more on flights or supersonics than subsonic. This has to be bigger than Boeing if it works. So it could be a great return, but it will take a long time for it to be clear that it's going to be a great return. Which means any. Anybody whose career is based on raising the next fund from their LPs isn't going to like it. And I wish somebody had been an oracle and whispered that to my ear in 2014. I could have saved myself an enormous amount of pain.
- [33:39]
Sam
You did end up raising money. And I remember the first time that I heard about you guys, it was, hey, at YC Demo Day, some guy got on stage and he waved a piece of paper and basically said, we have $100 million or something of Lois or pre orders for our supersonic airplanes that we're going to build from I think Virgin and one other company.
- [34:01]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, it was actually 5 billion in Lois.
- [34:04]
Sean
5 billion.
- [34:06]
Blake Scholl
$5 billion. I still remember, like Sam Altman's tweet. He's like, you know, boom, had 5 billion. Dol said, Lois at Demo day is a record that probably won't be passed soon.
- [34:14]
Sam
Well, exactly. So how the heck is that?
- [34:17]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, no, I mean, so. So I'll tell you the story. And it involves the story about the. So we do YC and like, Sam had been in our seed round and he had sort of like, you know, this is back when Sam was running YC and he had sort of like been telling me I need to do yc and I'm like, well, isn't YC for like mobile social? You know, I don't know that it's for supersonic jets. They kept saying, you have to do it, you have to do it. And eventually I was like, okay, my biggest risk is I never raised enough money to actually build anything. YC claims that they'll help with that. I'd rather try it and it wasn't useful than not try it and fail and not have given it every chance to succeed. So I did YC and early on, the group partner's like, well, you need to show up with demo day with sales. And I'm like, this is like a 10 person company that just moved out of my basement. Like, I'd be lucky that my customer pipeline is like Lufthansa United. I'd be lucky to sell airplanes in eight years, let alone eight weeks. And what am I going to do? And so I was like, okay, there are two things that are possibilities here. One possibility is a startup airline. But if I look at an established airline, the only one that could conceivably do this quickly is Virgin, and only if I get to Richard. And so I went after both of those paths and we actually got a startup airline to do it. We got them to. There was a startup called Odyssey, was going to do an all business class service from New York to London City airport. And I was like, this is great. They're doing the, you know, flying to London city, which is like the little airport in the center of London. That's the best thing you can do short of being supersonic. These guys probably get speed. And so I met with a guy and he was willing to like give me an LOI on like actually a different corporate entity letterhead. And I'm like, woohoo. Now this, this LOI was for 15 airplanes at $200 million each. So it's a $3 billion LOI.
- [36:07]
Sam
Explain what an LOI means in this context is. Lois can range from non binding. Hey, sure, sure, I'm interested in taking a look to a binding LOI with hard money. There's, there's a range.
- [36:20]
Sean
What I was saying, when you're talking.
- [36:22]
Sam
Loi, what are you, what were you talking at this time?
- [36:24]
Blake Scholl
So this LOI was a piece of paper and you know, you start asking questions about it from a startup airline which by the way hasn't flown any airplanes yet. Like this was a PDF and it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.
- [36:37]
Sam
This was the equivalent of, I have a girlfriend, she just goes to another school.
- [36:40]
Blake Scholl
Trust me, it's basically. And so I'm doing the practice demo day pitches and Michael Siebel, bless his heart, that guy's got the. I think one of the brilliant things about PG is he's built a culture at YC where people just tell you what they really think. It's one of the best things about yc. And so I'm doing practice demo day and Michael Siebold looks at my slides and my pitch and he's like, Blake, do you have anything that's real? Because you sound like you're completely full of shit. And you know, it was bitter, it was bitter tasting medicine, but it's what I needed. And, and so I kept working on retooling the pitch to be focused on what hardware we really had at that point in time. And also trying to figure out this customer thing because I knew that LOI was flimsy. And so we've been working on Virgin and there's a whole Other set of stories I could tell at length about how I got to Branson. But I did get to Branson.
- [37:30]
Sam
Well, tell us we like the hustle stories. Give us one.
- [37:33]
Blake Scholl
So Mark Kelly, who is now Senator Mark Kelly, shuttle commander, human extraordinaire in a bunch of ways.
- [37:43]
Sean
Astronaut Mark Kelly.
- [37:44]
Blake Scholl
Astronaut Mark Kelly, yes. Was on our advisory board and he hung out with Richard and. And I sort of discovered I could ghostwrite emails from Mark Kelly to Richard Branson and he would send them. And so I did. So this was like February, March of 2016. So Virgin Galactic is about to roll out their second generation spaceship. Branson's going to be in the Mojave Desert for that event. My chief engineer had actually gotten invited to go because he was connected to those circles. I hadn't been invited. And so the pitch to Branson from Mark was, hey, the boom guys are going to be in Mojave for your spaceship rollout. You should really meet with them while you're there. And he said, okay. And so we got a 15 minute meeting and it was me and my chief engineer and Richard and Richard's mom. I actually never got invited to the rollout. I had to crash the rollout. But I managed to talk my way into it. And I had this 15 minutes with Richard and he kind of, you know, he asked us if we want anything to drink. And I said, no, I've already had lots of coffee. And I realized a couple minutes into the pitch, he's drinking scotch. It's very early in the morning. I love Richard.
- [39:01]
Sean
You failed the cool guy test, apparently.
- [39:05]
Blake Scholl
Maybe the pitch would have gotten better if I had more scotch. But anyway, he's like, guys, this is brilliant. I love what you're doing. This all makes sense. And then he kind of leans back on his chair and he's like, oh, but I'm already doing Virgin Galactic. And that's a lot. And I don't know if I've got two of these things in me. And I said, richard, we're not asking you for money. We're asking if, when this works, if you'd like the first few airplanes to be for Virgin, if you want them. Because if you'll raise your hand and say, I want these, the product makes sense, then I'll go get all the money elsewhere. And that turned out to be the thing that worked.
- [39:43]
Sam
How did you think to say, instead of saying, you know, invest in us or advise us or whatever, just say, do you want the first ones to say Virgin on the tail or do you want them to Say Lufthansa, because the world a lot.
- [39:56]
Blake Scholl
It was really Virgin versus ba and if you know him with a history of Virgin, he hates ba, right? What is Richard, what Richard cares about pr and he hates ba and when he tried to buy Concords, which he did, he tried to buy BA as Concords when they were shutting it down and they wouldn't sell it to him because they want to get embarrassed.
- [40:13]
Sean
So what does this basically, Sean, I don't know if you ever read his book or the Listener. BA and Virgin British Airlines, they had a battle in the 90s and early 2000s where BA was trying to shut down Virgin. And so he went on this whole campaign. I think he brought like, is this when he brought a tank through London and he like rolled over like a fake model plane? Like, it was like a whole PR campaign of the little guy, Virgin versus the big guy, BA oh, it's great.
- [40:36]
Blake Scholl
The stories are great, right? And he very specifically tried to beat BA with Supersonic and he lost, right? And so he wants to do this and he cares about PR and he cares about his brand. And so I'm like, why don't I let you stick it to BA So it turned out, you know, so. But then the meeting ends and there's no deal. And I'm sort of like working it through my friends at Virgin Galactic at this point, trying to get something done at this point. YC the way YC was structured is demo day was spread across two days. And the company might not exist if we hadn't been on day two. So what happened that week is so Wednesday is our demo day. Demo day two. Monday we were launching the company out of stealth mode and we'd gotten Ashley Vance to write the launch article for Bloomberg. And if you don't know Ashley, he was Elon's first biographer. We let him and the Bloomberg team come out to Denver and interview me and take all the pictures they wanted to take. And in my head, this is brilliant because the story is going to be boom as the SpaceX of airplanes. But I had no self awareness about how darn early we were. And I let the photographers take a picture of me on a plastic orange chair climbing into a cardboard mockup of an airplane. And Ashley actually wrote a nice story, but his editor picked the picture and wrote the headline. And the headline said something like, this Colorado company thinks it can build a supersonic jet. And then there's my like fat ass climbing into a cardboard mock up. And so that's Monday. I know, it's so bad. So bad. And it's. And then it's at the top of Hacker News. And the comment.
- [42:17]
Sean
And the comments Photoshopped like a helmet on your head.
- [42:20]
Blake Scholl
Oh, I mean, it was so awful. The comments are like, you know, what an idiotic company. Don't they know airplanes aren't made out of cardboard? And you know what? What idiot runs marketing at that company? Because who would name a supersonic jet company Boom? And it's brutal. It's just. And I'm like, we are so screwed. Like, we're just. We're going to be the laughing stock at demo day. And so that's Monday, Tuesday. I'm sitting at my desk working on the slides, and up pops this email from Virgin that says, we're in for the first 10 airplanes. You can announce it tomorrow. And I, like, read the email, like, three times because I'm like, there is. There's like, no way. There's. There's like, no way this says what I think it says. So we're like. We're like, in San Jose in an Airbnb, prepping for demo day, right? And. And so I'm like, I think. I think I just went from the biggest loser to the biggest winner. And I called up the team at YC and I'm like, I need to relaunch my startup. How do I do this? And so I think I stayed up to midnight that night redoing press pitches under embargo. We relaunched the morning of demo day with a $2 billion LOI from Virgin done on an email. And then we're back to the top of hacker news again. And the comments are like. My favorite comments were like, 1. What genius runs marketing at Boom? They're the ones you punch. That's how you launch a company. And if there was another one that was like, Monday, colon, haha. Wednesday, colon. Oh, shit. And, you know. But by the grace of Richard Branson, we would have died that week.
- [43:58]
Sam
You seem to have a lot of these stories that are what our buddy George Mack likes to call high agency. So you were a high school dropout, yet you got into college. And I think you high agency your way into college. As I understand it, you didn't just work at Amazon. I think you, like, kicked ass at Amazon in some. You got the job in an interesting way. And I think you kicked ass in an interesting way. This whole idea of, like, I didn't take at face value why the Concord failed, and I kind of, like, taught myself the physics and calculus I needed to, like, diligence the idea Initially it seems like you have a lot of these, what's your favorite version of those stories that you think you know? It's that I think your meter might be like you don't have the, what's it called? Like the, like the thing that stops a car from going at a certain speed. Like an artificial governor.
- [44:48]
Blake Scholl
A governor, yeah, yeah.
- [44:49]
Sam
You removed your governor. And so you're willing to go further than the average person would when it looks like the default answer is no, no, no for you.
- [44:58]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, well, I want to understand, I guess a couple things. One is I want to understand things for myself and maybe that's the most important thing. Like I don't funny side story as I was like going through a divorce and like fighting with my ex wife over like custody and I had to go through this like weird psychological exam and I'm going through, you know, these like multi choice questions where they ask you, you know, this random thing. Like I could tell there were questions like I, I think the experts are wrong and I know better. And I'm like, I think they're testing for delusions of grandeur. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna answer this one honestly, but that's actually what I think. I think the experts are wrong all the time. And anybody who bothers to think about it can figure out differently. And so I have that premise. But I also, I don't know, I feel like I have a complicated relationship with my own ego. It was a really weird decision for me psychologically to start this company. It's like I look in the mirror and I'm like, totally don't look like the guy to do this. And it was very bizarre to tell my friends I'm going to go build supersonic jets. It's like I didn't look like the person to do it. I didn't actually believe on the inside I was going to succeed. I just didn't want to not try. And I really struggled with that. I remember thinking about who my business heroes were and I thought of a lot, but I especially thought of Bill Gates because Gates had said, I think during the 70s that his goal for Microsoft was to put a personal computer in every home and on every desk running Microsoft software. And he said that in the 70s and then he actually went and did it and then some. And what was it like to be Bill when Bill said that? Like he didn't have a resume for it either. He could have flamed out. And like, because he didn't flame out, we know who Bill Gates is. And we have those computers. But if, you know. So I'm like, okay, there must be a couple categories of entrepreneurs. They're the people who, like, go after these big missions and they succeed. And we all know their names because it is Bill and it's Steve and back in the day it's Thomas Edison and the greats of the great. Right. And then there's probably the dark matter of founders. And the dark matter of founders are the people who go for big things, you set big goals, but it doesn't work. And would I rather be in the dark matter of founders or would I rather be in the. Like, I didn't try and I just had a job or I started another mobile apps company and I made the conscious decision that I'd rather be a dark matter founder.
- [47:36]
Sean
That's pretty badass.
- [47:37]
Sam
Basically, you were willing to lose.
- [47:39]
Blake Scholl
I had to be willing to lose. Another turn of phrase here is, oh, boy. I'll tell this through the story of my daughter. When she turned 10, which is a few years ago now, I took her out to ice cream and it was one of these low moments. I didn't know how the company was going to survive. And by the way, we have one of those, like every year, like, with like, regularity. There's like a life and death crisis every year. And I didn't know, I didn't know how we were going to get through this particular one. I was feeling pretty down about it and like, you know, I had this self talk that was like, man, my daughter, for her entire conscious life, all her dad has been doing is saying he's going to build supersonic chats. And, you know, and it could totally. The first prototype might never fly. And, you know, what the hell is my identity to my children? And it's just not really a great question. But I had that question. And so she's in the back of the car, we've just had ice cream. And I said, ada, what would you think if I failed at boom? And I'm going to tear up as I say this. She didn't miss a beat. And she said, I'd be proud of you for trying. And that speaks to me very deeply. And that's the view I try to have for myself. Do things I'd be proud to try do things I'd be proud to fail at. And I've always told the team, like, there's no guarantee of success here. We might fail, but if we fail, we're going to fail honestly, and we're going to fail. Having given it our all and we're not going to give up. And when XB1, which is that's our prototype airplane, the first startup to ever break the sound barrier with that airplane when it landed earlier this year for the last time. And I was standing outside the airplane with the team of 50 people that had built it and flown it and I said to the team, the reason we get to be here today is we didn't give up. We got here because we're the team that did not give up. It took a whole lot of not giving up. Other reasonable people would have given up. A bunch of reasonable people did give up. And to get to get over to our airliner flying, that's going to require a lot more not giving up. So pick something you'd be proud to fail at. Don't give up.
- [50:02]
Sean
New York City founders. If you've listened to my first million before, you know I've got this company called Hampton and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs. A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton. We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it's amazing. But the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your board of advisors for your life and for your business. And it's life changing. Now to the folks in New York City, I'm building a in real life core group in New York City. And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does 3 million in revenue or you've raised 3 million in funding, or you've started and sold a company for at least $10 million, then you are eligible to apply. So go to joinhampton.com and apply. I'm going to be reviewing all of the applications myself. So put that you heard about this on mfm so I know to give you a little extra love. Now back to the show. That's a great story. I also think that, you know, I'm not in your industry at all. Sean and I make Internet stuff and I remember seeing this Elon Musk video where his the rocket. I don't remember what it did, but it was some threshold that they had never accomplished before where it got to space something like that. And you see him looking up and you hear the launch control like freaking out and he actually, I think he like cries. It looks like he's about to cry and he's like looking up and he's like. It almost felt like he was even in awe or impressed where he Was like, I can't believe it. It worked.
- [51:33]
Blake Scholl
Yeah.
- [51:33]
Sean
And the whole crew, you know, a thousand employees are just freaking out.
- [51:38]
Blake Scholl
Yeah.
- [51:38]
Sean
And I remember thinking like, you know, I don't want to. Something like that seems so challenging, man. I couldn't do it. It took 15 years, 20 years to get there. And then you see that video and you're like, wow, that's totally worth it. And I. And I'm a little envious. It's sort of like someone like running a marathon. And at the end of the marathon their family is there and they're freaking out or doing some type of like crazy physical task where it takes decades or years to work towards. And then you have this like moment where it's like, you know, there's a very beginning and a middle and an end to the journey. And I'm very envious of that. And it's really cool that you had that, you know, recently. It happened like six months ago. I forget that you guys like had your first flight.
- [52:14]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, it was three. It was like three months ago. It was recent.
- [52:16]
Sean
Yeah, three months ago. And I remember having. I'm like, I have nothing to do with you, but I have this sense of pride just for you. And I remember seeing Paul Graham, who isn't like a very. Paul Graham doesn't seem like a very excitable person. And he seemed very excited about this. And I was like, this is amazing. And it almost felt. It felt very patriotic, you know, that had nothing to. I don't know if there was no.
- [52:38]
Sam
Like patriotic team ambition instead of Team America. Right. It's.
- [52:41]
Sean
Yeah.
- [52:42]
Sam
I think there's a part of all of us that wonders what's the version of me if I did the most ambitious thing, if I did my version of supersonic jets. Right. And when I was little, I wasn't a flight enthusiast. I didn't have my pilot's license. I. Your thing is your thing. But I think everybody has a little version of that in them. There's some version of that in you. The most ambitious thing, the most you thing you could possibly do. And you'd probably fail and it'd probably be super hard and you could probably. If you're smart, you have a lot of easier options if you decided to choose them.
- [53:13]
Sean
And it could be small even. Like.
- [53:14]
Blake Scholl
That's right.
- [53:15]
Sean
Be a stand up comedian or do a show all the way to go to space.
- [53:19]
Blake Scholl
It's the biggest ambition relative to someone's actual frame and their actual values. Like imagine going back to your five year old self and saying, let Me tell you, let me tell you what you're gonna get to do. Here it is. And what makes that five year old self just tickled pink like, wait a minute, I get to do that?
- [53:37]
Sam
Blake, have you ever read the Pixar rules of storytelling? They have this thing called the 22 rules. And the 22 rules, rule number one, the most important rule, this is Pixar. Pixar, who, if anybody knows how to move people, they know how to move people emotionally. Rule number one is you admire the character more for trying than for their successes. And so the hallmark of every Pixar movie is not the happy ending. Right. It's how the character approached the obstacles. And this sounds like super, super obvious, but the reality is that's also what moves founders. It's also what inspires people is not the success. Because, yes, it's amazing that the, like Elon's story with the rockets landing, wow, that's so cool. The rockets landing on their on synchronized in the middle of the ocean. That is amazing. But it's like 10 times more amazing when you know that the first three rockets blew up and that he went all in and that, you know, and that nobody was going to do this if he didn't.
- [54:35]
Blake Scholl
That's right.
- [54:35]
Sam
If he didn't push forward and continue on in the face of like almost certain failure. Right. So I think that's like one of the most important rules for founders because it's what will inspire your team, it'll inspire customers, it'll inspire the audience, it'll inspire investors. In the end is that you admire the character, how the character tries rather than success.
- [54:55]
Blake Scholl
I think that's right. One of our OG Boom people has a metaphor for this that I found really useful. He calls it the emotional piggy bank. And he's like, every time you're struggling with a problem and you push through, you're putting a quarter in the piggy bank. And when you finally succeed, you get to break open the emotional piggy bank. And the harder it was to get there, the more joyous the victory. And I think he used it. This guy's been at Boom for nine years. He's one of the few early people that stuck it out. Now he runs our engine program and I think he was using that with himself a lot. But I've tried to broadcast it to the team. I think it's really true.
- [55:37]
Sean
When do you think you guys are going to be mainstream? When are people going to be flying? Because right now you're at this point in the company where it's like, all right, you've raised 700 million, so obviously you're a big deal, but you're not to the point where it's like, this is a thing, this is going to work. When do you think that it's going to cross this? And I GUESS it's been 15 years or 12 years.
- [56:00]
Blake Scholl
Yeah, 11. We'll turn 11 on paper in September. Eleven years ago, I was in my basement reading textbooks.
- [56:07]
Sean
Wow, so not that long ago. And now when. What's the next chapter of the story? So you got through a bunch of chapters. You got through the crazy guy in his bedroom to, oh, okay, this is kind of interesting to, oh my God, he made a prototype. This is actually, this is actually potentially serious. Now the next chapter, what's that going to be? And when is it going to be? When are we going to read it?
- [56:28]
Blake Scholl
You know, one way to look at this is like, you know, progressive overturning of the skeptics. That's not how I see it on the inside, but that's one way to look at it. You know, the skeptic said a startup could never sell airplanes to airlines. Oh, we did. United bought them, made a deposit. American did. Japan Airlines did a pre order. Okay, that happened. A startup can never build a supersonic jet. Oh, we did that. Okay. The next thing skeptics say is we're never going to succeed at building our own jet engine. Like, there's a whole class of people who are just convinced that only big companies can build jet engines. And we're going to find out pretty soon who's right. Because at the end of this year, our full scale jet engine prototype, you know, should be running. And then next year we'll start building the first airplane. And our, our goal is to roll the first one off the line in 27, fly it in 28 and be ready for passengers in 29. And there's a good chance that, like, it could take longer than that. But those are, those are the goals. And I, and I, I believe in. We've got a lot, gotten a lot of learnings along the way about how you set goals and how you set schedules, which I could talk about. But my, my conclusion is ambitious schedules result in the fastest actual execution. And so that's, those are our targets.
- [57:47]
Sean
You know, it's a cliche that I say this at the end of the podcast. You know, it gets to the point where someone says something amazing. I go, man, you're, you're the man. And so I've overused that phrase. But I Think that of the people who I look up to, or it's almost, you're potentially going to be an American hero. And I. And I think that, like, we're honored to talk to you. And I think that, that I hope that you are, because it would be really fun to have you win. It would be. It would give us all a huge sense of pride to watch you win. And I think the jet thing is cool, but the cooler thing is that you had a crazy vision and it might actually come to fruition.
- [58:27]
Blake Scholl
You know, I appreciate your saying that. It's a weird. Again, I have a weird relationship with my ego on this. But I think back to, like, my days in college and I was reading my favorite book, which is Atlas Shrugged. And my favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is this guy, Hank Reardon, who is this sort of combination business, technology hero who invented a new kind of metal. But I remember crying, thinking like, man, I don't have it to be somebody like him. And I always wanted to be, but I didn't think I could be. And along the way, someone told me that the things we admire in other people are actually our own strengths. And at first that made no sense to me, but as I start to pattern match about it, my own weaknesses are the things that annoy me the most in other people, and my own strengths are the things I admire most in other people. It's very paradoxical, but it seems to actually be true. And so there's this weird thing where I think we can actually become our heroes. Of all the various random things that were said about me after we broke the sound barrier, the one that spoke to me the most was where someone who I'd never met, never heard of, compared me to Hank Reardon.
- [59:44]
Sean
Oh, that's awesome.
- [59:45]
Sam
Yeah, that's amazing. I always say if you spot it, you got it both from the good and bad. If something bothers you about some other people, it's because there's a part of you that recognizes that behavior. And same thing. If something inspires you, there's a part of you that identifies with that behavior. Right? You are what you admire. And I think that once you realize that, you start to get. Actually, you start to pay some attention to what you're choosing to admire because you're actually pointing your little compass in that direction. And, you know, then there's just a question of, are you going to remove the governor? Are you going to leave it in and not actually go chase it all the way? I love this.
- [60:17]
Blake Scholl
That's right. That's the happy side of it, and then the unhappy side of it is the things that drive me crazy in other people. Holy shit. I need to have a talk with myself, because I'm probably doing it too, Right.
- [60:26]
Sam
I like this quote that you have. You said, if every founder worked on the most ambitious thing they could get their head around, everyone would be happier and more great things would get built. You know, there's probably going to be somewhere between half a million and a million people who listen to this episode. Like, I guess if you were going to leave here making your case for that, for why founders should work on the most ambitious thing. What's your case?
- [60:49]
Blake Scholl
Can't lose. If you win, obviously, it's great, but I think it's a mistake to start from your resume, and it's a mistake to start from what you think you can do is. I think the only way to find out what you can do is to pick the most motivating thing in the world and run at it. Something that's so motivating that the goal matters more than your own insecurities. That you could do that thing where you extrude yourself into the noodle of the right shape. That's the only way you find your limits.
- [61:24]
Sam
By the way, you were really young, and I think I read that you reported directly to Jeff Bezos. I can't let you leave without asking. Do you have any good Bezos stories?
- [61:32]
Blake Scholl
Oh, I've got a bunch. I did not report directly to Bezos. One of the most annoying things that happens as the. As you go through these journeys is, like, little bits of bio get turned into better sound bites. And then I feel embarrassed because, like. Like, people claim I was an executive at Amazon, and I was not like.
- [61:48]
Sean
Well, someone was like, what?
- [61:49]
Blake Scholl
Actually.
- [61:49]
Sean
Oh, he. He worked at Amazon. Oh, so he works for Jeff Bezos. Yeah, he worked with Jeff Bezos. He worked with Jeff Bezos.
- [61:55]
Blake Scholl
Right. So did every hourly worker in the warehouse. I did get able to do something that Jeff cared about, so I got to work with him a bit. But that meant that, like, I was updating him once a quarter and, you know, and if I screwed up really badly, like, Jeff would hand my ass to me. And by the way, there's no better early career experience than to be, like, 22 working on something that Jeff happens to care about. And when I screw it up, he tells me. And so I found out later that I was the youngest ever manager at Amazon. I think I knew that at the time, but I got to build the. The thing I got to do was basically do Amazon's first ad buy from Google and build the system that was, I think, the first automated ad buying system on the Internet. This was before we were buying AdWords, before there was an AdWords API with screen scrapers that were automatically clicking buttons in the background with Perl scripts. And my experience of it was it was like standing next to a rocket, and then the rocket took off, and my jacket got caught on the rocket, and I kind of was along for the ride. But at some point, this thing was driving 7% of Amazon sales and 7% of Google sales all at the same time. And somehow I just. My experience of it was I was on the precipice of failing, and they were about to fire me and replace me with somebody who actually knew what they were doing. And I was right at that line and never quite crossed it. But it was a great first go build something from scratch gig. And. And I got to learn a lot from that experience. And I got to. Got to know Jeff a little bit, but, like, I didn't work directly for him. I was like, what's he like?
- [63:30]
Sam
What'd you pick up from him?
- [63:32]
Blake Scholl
Oh, I really admire Jeff. The stories that get told about CEOs tend to be the ones about how they lose their cool and yell at people and fire people in elevators and whatnot. And one of my favorite things, and I would watch Jeff lose it from people a couple times. But what I found is he never lost it with me so long as I took accountability. And I remember the very first time I was presenting to Jeff, we had just launched, like, the MVP of this thing I was describing. And I'm, like, telling Jeff how he built it and why. And I'm like, nervous AF, because I'm, like, 22 or 23 presenting to, like, this God. And we get part through the presentation and it's going well. And then he says, well, why didn't you do X? And he's got this idea. And I said, well, we didn't think of that. And he starts laughing, right? He starts laughing. The big, famous Jeff Bezos laugh. And he says, that's a great answer. It's true all the time, but nobody's willing to say it. And so what I found was, like, whenever I just told Jeff the truth and took accountability, there was another time I was in front of the executive team, and the temperature's going up in the room. I was like, why did we do this when this other thing was a higher priority and everyone's getting progressively more pissed off that we've misprioritized. And I just spoke up and said, that was my call. I got it wrong. I misprioritized. I won't do it again. And the toe in the room was okay, and the conversation moved on. And obviously I couldn't do that every single time on every single thing. But Jeff rewarded straight shooters. Jeff rewarded accountability. Jeff rewarded knowing your own business like the back of your hand. And he was tremendously forgiving for learning on the job. And I have huge respect for it. The other thing is, I'd go in to talk to him once a quarter and he would have. And I felt like I knew my shit. And he would hand me a novel insight in five minutes on the thing that I did every day. And I think that goes to being really smart. But also that first principles thing. You go to first principles, you could actually get to novel insights quickly.
- [65:29]
Sam
That's exactly what Emmett said. Amazon bought Twitch for a billion dollars. Whatever. So he reported to Jeff, and so he would go, I think twice a year or three times a year, go meet him. And he said the same thing. He's like, he wants you to know your business. He's like. But then within five minutes of sort of reading the document, he's like, without fail, he would give me one thing that I thought was kind of impossible. I think about this business 24 7, and he gives me an idea or an angle or perspective, like a novel perspective or novel idea that I didn't have. And he's like, that's amazing. That is a. You know, that shows kind of the level that that guy's at.
- [66:05]
Blake Scholl
He's super smart and he's very first principles. And if you put those two things together, I think that's what makes my experience and immense experience possible. And it's the thing that enables other leaders to do the same thing. The thing I try to challenge myself to do is at any given management review or working with a team, I try to ask myself, what's the most important question? And many times what I find is, no one's asked the most important question. It's actually not hard to find it and not hard to ask it.
- [66:30]
Sam
That's pretty brilliant. Could you just give us an example of that? Like a situation where you asked that question and it shifted the convo.
- [66:36]
Blake Scholl
I got one from yesterday. That's sort of an example. I called the Overture leadership team together on a Sunday. My spidey sense was firing that we weren't aligned about development philosophy. And we start talking about when to insource and when to vertically integrate. The conversation in the room started off as, like, oh, vertical integrations is a goal, so we'll eventually do all these things. And I tried to take the conversation to, like, no, it's not like, what we need is the winning strategy. What we need to decide is when do we want suppliers and when do we want to do things ourselves? What are the principles by which we make those decisions? And then so I went to the whiteboard, and the room started, like, trying to answer those questions, like, how do we know whether we should do something ourselves or outsource it? And I don't think we've completely cracked the nut on that, but we at least brought the team's focus not to, like, what are the answers, but how are the principles by which we make those decisions? And I think if we pull. I think we'll keep pulling on that thread and ultimately the answer to that question will be part of our success story as a company, because we've understood how to think about it, and we've got the team on a set of principles that will then, if they won't need to bring every supplier decision to me, they'll understand the principles and make great independent decisions.
- [67:51]
Sam
Dude, Blake, you're awesome, man. You're a very unique founder. Met a lot of founders. You're a very unique guy, and what you're doing is awesome. I really appreciate you coming on, and I hope. I hope my keyboard wasn't making too much noise because I kept writing down these little quotables that I thought were pretty. Pretty great for me.
- [68:07]
Sean
The best episodes, Blake. The best episodes. You'll see Sean and I do two things. You'll see us do this, and we like our gazing. Or the other thing that I. That we do is we just. You see us do this. You see us just lean back and cross our arms and like, classes in session.
- [68:22]
Blake Scholl
Well, thank you. I had a lot of fun.
- [68:24]
Sam
Yeah. Where should people follow you or follow the journey? Where do you want to direct people who want to kind of stay in touch here?
- [68:30]
Blake Scholl
I'm pretty active on X, so I'm shol B S C H O L L. That's probably the best place to follow along. I try to give people an inside view on what's going on at boom. And then I mouth off about other random things in the world.
- [68:45]
Sam
All right, man. Well, I look forward to flying everywhere in half the time. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for doing it and. All right, that's it. That's the podcast.
- [68:53]
Blake Scholl
I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on.
- [69:00]
Sean
The road let's travel never looking back. Hey, everyone, a quick break. My favorite podcast guest on my first million is Dharmesh. Dharmesh founded HubSpot. He's a billionaire. He's one of my favorite entrepreneurs on Earth. And on one of our podcasts recently, he said the most valuable skill that anyone could have when it comes to making money in business is copywriting. And when I say copywriting, what I mean is writing words that get people to take action. And I agree. By the way, I learned how to be a copywriter in my 20s. It completely changed my life. I ended up starting and selling a company for tens of millions of dollars. And copywriting was the skill that made all of that happen. And the way that I learned how to copyright is by using a technique called copy work, which is basically taking the best sales letters. And I would write it word for word, and I would make notes as to why each phra was impactful and effective. And a lot of people have been asking me about copy work, so I decided to make a whole program for it. It's called Copy that, copy that dot com. It's only like 120 bucks, and it's a simple, fast, easy way to improve your copywriting. And so if you're interested, you need to check it out. It's called Copy that. You can check it out@copy that.com.