March 30, 2023 • 44 mins
With Boom Supersonic, Blake Scholl is reaching for the impossible. When the Concorde was grounded in 2003, dreams of a profitable model for supersonic aviation were abandoned. It took an introverted kid obsessed with aviation to prove skeptics wrong. Today, Boom has orders to make over 100 supersonic aircrafts for the US Airforce, United Airlines, and more, ensuring that supersonic travel is about to make a comeback. Of course, Blake didn’t achieve this overnight. He sat down with Bob to relay how his time in the early days of tech at Amazon and Groupon taught him the do’s and dont’s of startups and how he realized that above all else, it’s passion that makes a business soar.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
It doesn't matter what you've already done. What matters more
is what you can learn to do. Skills are variable
in a way that passion is not. I have consistently
found that following my passion and being willing to reinvent
(00:22):
myself and learn new things takes me to places where
I'm happier and able to do more than I ever
thought I could. I I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to
Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontier's Marketing. Businesses and
industries grow from bold steps and from ignoring conventional wisdom
and heard mentality. Our guest today embodies all that he's
(00:46):
taking Commercial aviation back in the Supersonic Flight is the
founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake Shoal Blake is
a pilot with a lifelong fascination with aviation. He describes
himself as having been a socially awkward child, but clearly
a smart one. He loved summer science camps and even
started a web hosting and consulting business while in high school.
(01:09):
He skipped his last year of high school and started
college early. Went on to Amazon, tech startups and groupon
before he took matters into his own hands and followed
his passions and his dreams to start Boom Supersonic. Now
I have to disclose as we began that I've been
a pilot since I was sixteen. I have seven thousand
hours of flight time, have an airline transport pilot's license,
(01:32):
and until the pandemic hit when I skipped flight school
for a few years, I flew left seat in a
Falcon nine hundred for the last twenty years, as well
as a helicopter. I'm a former board member of the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and basically love everything about
airplanes and flying. I'm a plane geek. As you can imagine,
I'm really excited to spend this episode with Blake. Welcome.
(01:55):
Great to be here, Bob. I guess you and I
are both playing crazy. Thank goodness, Blake. Before we dig
into the meat, I'd like to put you in perspective
with a little feature we do called you in sixty seconds. Ready,
let's do it. Do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs?
Cincinnati or Denver? Denver? Definitely introvert or extrovert. Introvert who
(02:16):
plays an extrovert on TV, window or aisle. If it's
a long flight, I'll take aisle. If it's a shorter
flight before the window. Amazon or Groupon Definitely Amazon pilot
or passenger pilot. All day long, Video games or board games,
Board games, Arctic or Desert, Desert, Virgin Galactic or SpaceX,
SpaceX hands down, X fifteen or X one. Let's go
(02:40):
X one. Moon or Mars. Definitely the Moon. Favorite astronaut
Neil Armstrong. Secret talent, I don't know dad jokes except
for Boom, your favorite plane, the SR seventy one Blackbird.
Smartest person you know, Jeff Bezos, childhood hero, Bill Gates. Okay,
final one. Most exciting airport where you've landed yourself. My best,
(03:05):
most exciting, maybe not proudest landing story was at Mimmolous, Oregon. Wow,
let's jump in and start with a history lesson. I
used to take the Concord when it had regular service
to London. In Paris, I could wake up in Paris,
have breakfast, leisurely, get to the airport for noon departure,
and land in New York three hours earlier at nine am.
(03:26):
Truly magic. I have taken two of my three kids
on the Concord, and then before my youngest can make
or flight get stopped. Can you tell us why Concord
stopped and maybe why it never really had a real
business plan my view, as Concord was stillborn, if we
(03:47):
started at the surface level, it shut down because it
was too expensive to fly relative to the passenger demand
a ticket on Concord adjusted inflation today it's upward of
twenty thousand dollars, and yet one hundred not necessarily very
comfortable seats on the airplane to fill. And it's just
very difficult to find a hundred people who want to
(04:07):
spend twenty grand to go somewhere really fast. So even
on the most popular routes like the ones you're mentioned
in New York, London and New York Paris, the airplane
was typically half empty and it did not have the
economics or the range to achieve economies of scale. So
why did that happen? In my view, the deepest cause
here is that this was a Cold War era glory project.
(04:32):
This was not a commercial venture. Concord was established in
nineteen sixty two via a treaty between the French and
British governments, and the goal was really fly fast, try
not to crash and show up the Russians. And it
was at that level mission accomplished, but it was never
something that was designed to be commercially successful or commercially valuable.
(04:55):
Very much akin to Apollo and in fact your nineteen
sixty nine first moon Land first Concord flight, neither of
those had any sort of thought of economics or commercial viability.
And while they both looked like tremendous technological progress. And
as we sit here, if you want a lunar lander
or a supersonic airliner, we got to go to a museum,
(05:16):
not look up into the skies. And I think that
goes back to the importance of commercial consideration on day's
zero and doing things for national prestige. Yeah, we can
show up the Russians, but it's not really a bridge
to change in the world. So let's give people who
don't know much about Concord a little lesson. It flew
(05:37):
mock two. Oh, that's about thirteen hundred miles per hour.
It flew up to sixty thousand feet. You could see
sort of the curvature or the earth up there, and
was a small cabin. The galley was in the middle,
so there was a front and a back, but it
wasn't first class and coach or business, and he got
incredibly warm in that cabin, especially around the galley as
(05:58):
you were flying at What else should they know about Concord? Yeah,
I think that's all about right. It was a long,
skinny airplane, a triangular delta wing, and expensive to fly.
And also a first impression of smallness that the boarding
door was small. You have to duck to get in,
and then before you even get to the passenger cabin
(06:19):
there's the equivalent of maybe three or four rows of sea.
It's worth of kind of Florida's ceiling equipment racks, and
so it has sort of a first impression of a
really tight space before you even get back into the
passenger cabin. And today you can see Concord. There's one
at the Intrepid Museum on the Hudson River in New York,
(06:40):
and there's one at the Air and Space Museum out
of Dullas Airport in DC. So why did the airlines
and consumers lose interest in supersonic or did they? I
think there's always been tremendous consumer excitement and supersonic. The
problem was that it wasn't offered at a price or
an experience or with the root network that made it
(07:03):
make sense. And so twenty thousand dollars round trip New
York to London for most people, that's a bucket list item.
It's not transportation. And if we look back at you
know what happened when we went in the fifties and
sixties from props to jets. There has always been consumer
interest in more speed. And when more speed is offered
(07:24):
at a price point and in locations that people can
really afford, it changes where we do business, it changes
where we vacation, It even changes who we can fall
in love with. But supersonic flight really only offered on
one airplane and never offered at a price point that
was attainable to any other than a relatively small number
(07:44):
of people. So let's go to the big question, why
will you succeed when the others failed? Well, it's certainly
not guaranteed that will succeed. There's a lot of challenge
ahead of us. Fortunately, there's also some challenge in the
rearview mirror. I can talk about why I think the
time is right and why if Boom doesn't succeed, it'll
be our failure of execution, not a failure of opportunity.
(08:06):
You know, fifty years after Concorde was designed, we've had
both significant progress in basic airplane technology and huge growth
in the market. So imagine Concord twenty thousand dollar ticket.
If airlines were charging a quarter of that, say like
five grand on airplane on overture, that'd be incredibly profitable.
And it has the legs not just to do a
(08:27):
couple of headline routes, but it's economically viable one hundreds
so not just New York London, but Seattle to Tokyo,
and La to Sydney and Miami to Madrid, just to
give a few examples. And we're able to go build
that airplane using only technologies that have been proven safe, reliable,
and efficient. So from a technological perspective, this is at
(08:51):
the same level as a Gabowing seven eight seven, meaning
it's a carbon fiber composite fuselage, it's got advanced turbofan engine,
fly by wire, flight controls. We could keep nerding out
about it. Every single thing on the airplane has a
precedent of flying on other commercial airplanes and being accepted
as safe by regulators around the planet. So your range
(09:13):
is about twice what Concord was, not quite twice. It's
forty two fifty nautical miles or about five thousand statute miles,
and that's with all the seats filled and everyone checking
a big heavy bag. And Concord was three thousand and change.
So we've got not quite fifty percent more range. However,
with sixty five seats on the airplane and the operating
(09:35):
cost and overall efficiency being better roots like La Sydney,
that's a very long route. So today that's a fourteen
fifteen hour flight with overture, it's about eight and a
half hours including stopping in Tahiti for gas. Wow, that's great.
And the speed is two O like Concord, slightly slower
actually Mack one point seven. We initially aim to be
(09:58):
a little bit faster, but as we learn more about
the details, what we found was going very slightly slow
or generated significantly better economics, significantly better sustainability, and also
allowed us to reduce the technological challenge, for example, being
able to operate with improven material systems. That is I
(10:19):
guess always to question is speed versus range? But it
sounds like you still got a lot of speed. There'll
be an overture two, and our goal is to make
it significantly faster. As an airplane nerd, I get very
excited about that stuff, but as a passenger, I want
to put this airplane in the hands of airlines and
passengers as quickly as possible. And so a phrase they
(10:40):
got drilled into me kind of growing up in tech,
growing up in Silicon Valley was minimum viable product, and
overture one is really a minimum viable supersonic airplane. We've
kept it as small and simple as we can because
we want to get it out as quickly as possible.
I want to dig into some questions about the how
(11:01):
and probably more importantly for this podcast, to management lessons
you learn. But first I want to get some perspective
on you by going back to your childhood. You grew
up in Cincinnati. Your dad was an engineer, your mom
was a French teacher. Paint the picture of growing up
in the Midwest in the eighties and nineties. I was
an only kid, so I sort of grew up by myself.
(11:22):
Didn't have a lot of friends, and I spent a
lot of time playing on my own, thinking on my own.
I was obsessed with model trains throughout much of my childhood,
and as I got a little bit older, became obsessed
with computers. And I love that gratification cycle of how
easy it was to do something in software and be
(11:44):
able to see a result quickly. I remember thinking about
airplanes and wanting to learn to fly, drawing little pictures
of cartoon airplanes that you know, I dream of building.
So where did the love of airplanes come from? There
must have been someone who planet that seed in there
for you. If you believe my parents, It goes back
to when I was six months old and they had
(12:06):
taken me to this little airport in suburban Cincinnati to
watch the Cessina's takeoff and land, and I had a
little Fisher Price toy airplane. As they tell the story,
that was the first time I made the connection between
a toy thing and a real thing, and I just
lit up. So I don't know, maybe it imprinted somehow,
But as long as I can remember, like, I've found
(12:28):
flight inspiring and it is such a uniquely human thing
to be able to do. I mean, we weren't born
to fly. We're you know, we're far heavier than air,
and we don't have wings like birds. We had to
go vent the airplane, and you know to this day
looking down out the window, it's a uniquely human vantage
(12:49):
point where we can take in everything that we've built
as humanity is, as well as the natural beauty of
the world, and doing it aboard one of the most complex,
safety critical machines ever created. It's like we're riding on
the wings of Newton and the right brothers. You're looking
down on the creation of Edison and Rockefeller and Ford,
(13:12):
and it's just an incredibly unique thing and an incredibly
human thing. More on math and magic right after this
quick break. Welcome back to math and magic. Let's hear
more from my conversation with Blake seul So. You have
(13:34):
said you were a socially awkward kid. How did that
contribute to your later success? Bob, That's not a question
I think I've ever been asked before. It's really thought provoking.
I have vivid memories of sitting by myself like an
elementary school, just thinking, and I remember being told, I
think in first grade, that we couldn't fly faster than
(13:56):
the speed of light, and that didn't make any sense
to him that I remember sitting by myself at recess
and elementary school, thinking about how we could fly faster
than the speed of light. I didn't understand anything about
aerospace or physics or rockets, and so I didn't know
that rockets were, you know, not empty on the inside.
I remember there's like Russian dolls that are nested, you know,
you take one apart and then there's another doll on
(14:18):
the inside to take it apart there on the inside.
Like I remember thinking about like, well, couldn't you build
a rocket like that? And it'd be like one nest
that inside, the next nest that inside the next. And
it seemed like if we had a contraption like that,
well couldn't you go arbitrarily fast? And I look back
now and it's like, you know, not only did I
not understand physics and relativity, Like I didn't understand that
rockets they had stuff on the inside that there was
(14:39):
not like they were empty. You could put another rocket
in there. So it was incredibly naive. But I spent
a lot of time because I guess I didn't have friends,
just kind of by myself thinking, so let's talk about
science camps. What's the power of a science camp? What
do they mean to you. The single biggest thing I
think it meant to me was a chance to see
(15:02):
what a good education could actually be, like, how engaging
it could be, and how fun it was to be
around other kids that I considered my peers like. I
did not like school growing up. I was bored, was
not engaging. I'm so grateful to Mom and Dad. And
mom researched all this back when there was no internet
and she had to go to the public library to
kind of figure out what was out there. But she
(15:24):
sent me to programming camps and electrical engineering camps and
various Today we call it STEM type stuff. And I
loved it. It was a chance to be challenged, a
chance to learn, and the teaching was great, and I
got to hang out with other kids that were like
me that I just didn't really have in suburban Cincinnati,
a public school kind of environment. So tell us the
(15:46):
story of how you skipped your last year of high school.
Got a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. So
went to public high school in suburban Cincinnati. Did not
love it, felt mostly socially disconnected, felt mostly academically disconnected.
And my high school girlfriend was a great ahead of me,
(16:07):
so she was gonna exit high school a year before
I was, and I think she said, like, hey, she'd
figure out how to do that too. And on my
short list of schools that were my dream schools was
Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and it turned out they had this,
in my view, brilliant program where you could apply as
a junior basically ride an essay about why high school
(16:33):
sucks and there's nothing left for you there. Then they
would run you through an interview, which I think was
basically a maturity test, and if you passed the maturity
test and they liked your essay, they would just treat
you like you're a high school senior. And they let
me come be a freshman without ever finishing high school,
without ever getting a ged, and I was like every
other freshman in campus. I look backwards and it was
(16:54):
one of the best things I've ever done. And obviously
you did well at university. I did all right. I
also rushed through. I did my undergrad in three years,
but I did actually graduate that time. So you dropped
out of high school, Soldier High School, Ara Business, and
off you went to college, and there I think you
took your first flying lesson two thousand and eight, you
(17:15):
got your private pilots license two eleven, you got your
instrument rating. Do you still fly today and what do
you fly? Yeah? I still fly today all my time.
Recently isn't a serious SR twenty two t which for
the folks who don't know, is it's basically, in my opinion,
the best single engineer plane you can get today. So
it's a four or five seed airplane, single engine propeller,
(17:36):
has the legs to go maybe at tops one thousand miles,
but it's a real nice little airplane, great for kind
of regional trips and for the layman, sounds really exciting.
It has a parachute, right it does. If something goes
really badly wrong, there's a handle that you can pull
and a rocket fires out the back of the airplane
(17:58):
and a parachute wrap inflates and the entire airplane just
flows to the ground. And this is saved dozens, if
not it's probably approaching one hundred lives now that have
been saved through the ballistic parachutes as they call them.
In fact, one of the Sirius is based here in
Centennial that I used to fly was in a mid
air collision about a year ago, and typically midair collisions
(18:22):
like everybody dies, it's really bad. And in this case,
the Sirius was able to pull the parachute miraculously. The
air planet collided with landed straight ahead and was fine.
It was really a miracle day where everyone lived in
part because of the parachute on the Sirius. After college,
you started as a software engineer at Amazon in two
thousand and one. You left in two thousand and seven.
(18:45):
What lessons did you learn at Amazon that you still
use today. We can probably talk for hours and not
days on things I learned at Amazon. One of them
was something that Jeff would just drill into everyone's mind,
which was, if you wanted to build something enduring, don't
focus on what's new and trendy. Focus on what's going
(19:05):
to stay the same over a long period of time.
In the context of Amazon, he would talk about selection
and availability and price as being things that people would
always care about and therefore being things where you could
make significant investments over a period of decades and trust
that you're going to be creating something of value. You
know that thinking directly applies to Boom because you know,
(19:26):
people are going to always want flights that are faster
and more affordable and more convenient. On those are vectors
in which we can invest over a period of decades
to build something great. Another one that comes to mind
was this notion of individuals and companies doing things that
they didn't have the resume for. You know, so when
I joined Amazon, it was always a debate is it
(19:47):
a bookstore or is it a software company? And I
got to be there. I didn't work directly at it.
I got to be there when they built aws, and
I got to be there when they built Kindle and
Amazon the retailer slash software company, and have the resume
to do any of those things, and yet they did.
They figured it out. And that left me with sort
of the very distinct impression that it doesn't matter what
(20:09):
you've already done. What matters more is what you can
learn to do. Skills are variable in a way that
passion is not. And so I have consistently found that
following my passion and being willing to reinvent myself and
learn new things takes me to places where I'm happier
and able to do more than I ever thought I could.
You did a couple of tech startups, and in twenty
(20:31):
twelve you were acquired by Groupon. Could not have been
a hotter company at the time. A couple of questions,
what did you do there, why did you learn? And
why did groupon lose its mojo? To set the stage
here a little bit, So it was twenty twelve, I
had founded my first company was called Keema Labs, and
I looked back and that was really a case study
(20:53):
and everything not to do. But it was twenty twelve.
The valley was hot, and if you had a decent team,
you could basically sell it for team and technology. And
so groupon bought my startup for team and technology and
they put me on what in my view should have
been group On two point zero. And so if you
think back about the foundation of Groupon with this local coupons,
(21:17):
there were so many at that time business plans that
were pitched that were about reinventing how we transact with
a local business. But they all had a chicken and
egg problem because they needed a digital connection to local businesses,
and they did it a digital connection to consumers. Group
On crack the chicken and egg problem basically with a
viral coupon the company was super hot. But Andrew Mason,
(21:38):
who was basically the founding CEO, had a really compelling
vision about how to take that collection of chickens and
eggs and parlay it into something really inspiring, really great.
That was about reinventing the way we would transact at
a local business. So they bought my company, and then
we went off and we bought another company that was
a iPad based wint A sales start up. What we
(22:01):
were going to go do is basically bring all that
onto the internet. So the vision was something like, imagine
you go online and you book a restaurant reservation, and
when you book your reservation, it says, hey, would you
like some calamari and a picture of margaritas on the
table when you arrive? And you know who doesn't say
yes to that? And because the consumer front end would
connect to the restaurant back in, the whole thing could
(22:22):
work seamlessly. You know, it's like ten months for your reservation.
The bartender starts making your drink and they start frying
up your calamari, and you can sit down, you can
have your whole meal, you can interact with a server,
you can order on your phone, kind of whatever, is
the right experience, and then when you're done, you just
get up and walk out and it's all built to
your group On account. That was the vision. And in
(22:43):
my view, it's so sad because groupon could have built
these things that I think the world still needs to
exist that no one's built yet, like the experience I
just described, and they could have parlayed the attraction around
the coupon's business into building that and it would be
a you know, a multi at least a deca billion
dollar company today if if that had happened. But instead
(23:05):
there were, in my view, sort of a series of
missteps that all started with a company going public before
it was ready, and all of that visionary stuff got
shut down and the company got stuck as a internet
coupon company with a very degraded brand and not a
very inspiring future. So you left twenty fourteen, and that
(23:29):
begins this journey in the Supersonic. Give us the story.
What were the big hurdles to get this thing started? Yeah, well,
the tail into my time at group On. There the
process of shutting down the visionary stuff I was talking about.
My VP asked me to come and run a big
piece of the core business, and so I was running
relevance and email and a lot of what was the
(23:49):
core of Groupon, and it was so uninspiring. You know,
I was paid very well. In my mind, I said, Okay,
the money I'm saving from this gets sucked away and
I called the fun fund, and beyond a certain dollar amount,
I was allowed to spend that money on anything I wanted,
and in my head that was to buy an airplane fund.
I actually never bought the airplane, but the savings for
(24:10):
the airplane became the seed capital for Boom. I left
Group on. I think I decompressed for a couple of weeks,
but I knew I wanted to do another startup, and
I thought back to everything I had learned doing the
first one, and in particular the decision to sell the
company when I had a chance to, and that the
lesson I learned from that was that as an ambitious founder,
(24:32):
that effort level feels the same regardless of what I'm doing.
But what isn't the same is whether I'm really motivated
by what I've set out to do. And you know,
I sold the first company because it was really hard
and I didn't love what we were building. For my
next start off, I wanted to do one where I
would never get up in the morning, no matter how
hard it was, I would never ask the question why
(24:52):
did I get myself into this? And I would always
note was worth it. And so at this point I said,
I'm going to organize all my ideas in descending order
of how happy I will personally be if it works,
and I'll forget everything else, whether I have the resume
for it, whether it's a good idea, whether it's physically possible.
And I thought I'd worked on that list, and I'll
(25:14):
work on the most exciting thing that's not impossible. And
so for me, anything with an airplane, and it just
goes straight to the top of that list. I had
had a Google alert on supersonic jet since my mid twenties,
and I sort of set a personal lifetime goal of
flying fashion the speed of sound because I was I
never got to fly on Concord. It shut down when
I was twenty two, and so I thought, Okay, take
(25:35):
a deep breath. I'm sure there's a really good reason
why no one's building supersonic jets, but I want to
discover for myself what that is. I'll do two weeks
of research, get it out of my system, and then
I'll move on to the next idea. And as luck
has it, I never never got off that top idea.
I kept finding a whole bunch of stale, conventional wisdom
(25:58):
that didn't stand up to a fresh, quantitative look at
what was really possible. So what was the group think
about why no supersonic airlines anymore? Well, I think it's
an instance of something called the bystander effect. And if
you don't know bystander effect, it's a term out of
social science that sort of refers to this idea that
(26:22):
if there's an emergency, someone's in trouble, and you know
only one or two people are around, they'll tend to
jump in and help. But if there are a large
number of people observing some kind of a problem, everyone
tends to assume everyone else has it and the right
people are already on the problem. And the bizarre consequence
of this is that really large, obvious things can go
(26:45):
unaddressed for long periods of time because everybody assumes it's
either impossible or the right people are already on it.
I think supersonic flight was one of those I mean,
who wouldn't want a faster airplane. Literally everybody would benefit
from flights that are faster and more convenient. So there
was this implicit assumption that there had to be something
wrong with that idea or else somebody would be doing it.
(27:07):
And then you could go on YouTube and there were
plausible sounding but not actually correct explanations, like you know,
one thing that was said was you have to solve
the sonic boom problem in order to find a market.
Another was that when supersonic came back, you would have
to be a private jet for the ultrawealthy, not an airliner.
Another was that it would inherently cost more and that
(27:28):
people wouldn't pay more. And it turns out none of
that is true. None of it stands up to relatively
simple first order analysis that you know, I could do
with a spreadsheet and data that I found in Wikipedia.
And you know, one of the lessons I learned from
that experience is never accept a qualitative answer to a
(27:50):
quantitative question. And so there were all these qualitative explanations
of why supersonic flight wasn't commercially viable, but really it's
a question should have like, okay, well how fast is
the airplane and what roots would it fly on. What
would affares have to be for it to be profitable,
and how many people could afford to fly on those roots?
And how much demand is there? And then that and
what's it going to cost to develop? And you know,
(28:12):
it's numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers that really say, doesn't
make any sense. And so there were all this a
qualitative dismissal that didn't stand up to running the math.
The reality was that boom could have been founded probably
ten or fifteen years before it actually was, but nobody looked,
nobody ran the math. So why didn't Boeing do this? Oh,
(28:35):
that's a fascinating question. Bowing certainly could do this. In fact,
they invented the key technology for it. All of the
key enabling technology for mainstream commercial SuperSonics really debuted on
the seven eight seven Dreamliner that Bowing built. Technologically they're
capable of this. But it's a classic innovator's dilemma situation,
(28:58):
so that the pace of innovation on subsonic aircraft. It
has become so well subsonic that when Boeing or same
things trade Airbus, when they develop a new airplane, they
invest billions of dollars to build a relative commodity that's
a low margin product that they're going to have to
keep in production for decades to come in order to
(29:19):
earn back their investment. And so that the last thing
that a big company wants to do is come out
with a new product that's going to cannibalize sales of
the existing product before they earn back their investment. And
so if Bowing did what we're doing, it would suck
the most profitable passengers out of the front of the
seven eight sevens before they earn back their seven eight
(29:42):
seven investment. And so if you look at what their
productive filament really is, they're focused on building replacement cycle products,
not cannibalization cycle products. And so technologically could they do it, Yeah, absolutely,
you know, I think we can do it faster and
better as a focused startup. But they could absolutely do it,
but they don't have the business motivation to do it
(30:03):
because it would cannibalize the cash cows. So you're building
this fascinating startup, You've got a prototype in place, the
XB one. I think you're going to fly the plane,
your first plane in this twenty twenty six. What I'm
interested in is you've been hiring these people to share
this dream with you, to go on this journey. I
(30:26):
read somewhere about your favorite interview question, could you tell
us what it is? Yeah, So to put this in context,
as we were saying before, I'm a software engineer by training,
and on day zero at Boom, my only knowledge of
airplanes was how to fly a very little one. I
knew I would need to learn a lot, and I
(30:46):
would need to learn to hire people who knew a
lot more than I did about their domains. And so
what I found was I could ask people to teach
me something, and it was shockingly easy to discover whether
people really knew what they were talking about, because I
could just walk away from that interview it said do
I understand it or not? And what I found was
(31:10):
most people operate on rules of thumb, not real deep understanding.
And if you're doing something that's been done over and
over again, rules of thumb work. But if you're going
to break from tradition, you have to operate from first principles,
what's physically possible, what's financially viable. Knowing a rule of
(31:32):
thumb doesn't cut it. And so in asking people teach
me something and then kind of iterating with them in
the conversation to see where I could really get my
head around it. I could separate out the people who
are first principles thinkers from the people who only had
rules of thumb, And the result was we were able
to build a culture of people who are first principles
thinkers and great communicators. So you have done for a
(31:57):
startup sort of amazing work. You got a two billion
dollar pre order from virgin for ten aircraft by two sixteen.
Following two fifteen, you'd only raise seven hundred thousand dollars,
and you went on to get an order from the
US Air Force, American Airlines, United Airlines. Tell me how
on earth you did that one step at a time,
(32:17):
and so yeah, to recap where we are today, there's
an order from American and United and a pre order
from japan Airlines. We say order when we mean there's
a nonrefundable deposit that's unplaced, and a pre order is
kind of more like an option. Maybe the story of
the United deal is kind of the best one to
tell here. So this was this came together starting late
(32:40):
twenty twenty, kind of going into twenty twenty one. We
announced the United Order in the summer of twenty one,
and the way it got started was we were actually
out raising a round of capital and I was talking
with an investor and he had been doing kind of
due diligence checks on boom claim people he knew in
the industry, asking what they thought, and he calls me up.
He says, Blake, I'm going to invest, but I'm also
(33:03):
going to introduce you to this guy at United who
does not think what you're doing makes a whole lot
of sense. See if you can convince them to just
not be a detractor. And so I was like, okay,
and I took the intro and it was sort of
the mission of neutralize the detractor. And the conversation started
with a focus on sustainability, something like, you know, look,
(33:25):
I love what you're doing here, but at United we
really value sustainability and so obviously we would never do this,
And you know, I explained that sustainability was actually one
of the best reasons to do supersonic because we were
designing overture, you know, from the ground up, to be
compatible with a one hundred percent sustainable aviation fuel and
(33:45):
it could actually be the first airplane in their fleet
that would operate on net zero carbon. So from that conversation,
everything's sort of leapt forward. And it was just a
little bit more than six months from the very first
conversation with United to being able to announce their order
of jets. It started with trying to neutralize a detractor
and then ultimately turned into our anchor customer for overture. Well,
(34:09):
let's unpack some of your career in life lessons. You
were an Amazon before Amazon truthly was really Amazon. You
were at a few tech startups after that, as we
talked about, and then groupon you even had your own
startup in high school. What kind of mindset is necessary
to lead a successful startup? Working on something I care
(34:30):
about that I want to create in the world has
been I think the most important things. If I look
back at the biggest successes I've had, it was when
I took on things that I really wanted to work,
that I wanted to create, and where I was willing
to put aside my fears of whether I would succeed
or not and just run at the problem. Boom is
(34:53):
a good case study in that, and that on day zero,
I didn't have the resume to build an aviation company,
let alone a super not a jet company. And it
was kind of a heady thing to go do because
I knew either we'd fail or we would do something
that really would change the world. There wasn't a whole
lot of in between. And I struggled with that for
(35:13):
a while and ultimately decided that the people who take
on big missions and succeed, we know their names. That's
the right Brothers, that's Bill Gates, that's Steve Jobs, etc.
And the ones who try and they don't succeed, we
don't know their names. They're lost to history, but they
(35:36):
know they gave it. They're all And the thing I
told myself in twenty fourteen was the only way to
know what I could do would be to give it
a try, and I wanted to pick a mission where
I would rather try and fail than not try period.
So most companies starting out, culture becomes really important. It's
(35:57):
really the glue. Some people call it the operating system
that binds everything together. Core values I've observed that really
seem to be essential or urgency, focus, and curiosity. How
do those three work together for you? Urgency, focus, and curiosity,
those are three really important values thinking about how this
play out At Boom, We've challenged ourselves to do quickly
(36:20):
something that a lot of people say you can't do
at all. And you know, how quickly can we get
to hardware? How quickly can we learn something? Can we
go sell an airplane before we've ever even built one yet?
Focus is like the secret weapon of a startup, like
what we're talking about earlier with Bowing and why Bowing's
not doing supersonic They have the problem of an established
business that they don't want to disrupt. And one of
(36:42):
the biggest luxuries and benefits of a startup is you
exist in the world for one purpose. We're here to
make supersonic flight a reality and make it mainstream. And
that luxury of focus enables us to put our brains
and our best people on the things that matter most
and then last, but not least, necessity of learning. And
(37:02):
I think curiosity and first principles thinking really go together.
Why do things work the way they do today? What
would be possible if things were different? What could we change?
But also that a mindset of being willing to be
wrong and to change our minds quickly really matters. One
of my sayings is that if you want to be
right a lot. One of the best things to do
(37:24):
is to stop being wrong quickly, and so that requires
listening to reality, listening to evidence, listening to people around us.
And when we discover that our previous view or previous
strategy was wrong, that's not something to be ashamed of.
That's something to be excited about. That's called learning. One
of the things that I'm working really hard to make
(37:45):
part of the Boom culture is that it's okay to
change your mind, because changing your mind is called learning.
What do you say when people say it won't work.
You just gave us an example of unite it. Tell
me a little bit more about how you use that
culturally in your company. But there are plenty of skeptics,
and they have good reason. It's been more than a
(38:07):
century since the last entrepreneurially founded commercial aircraft company, which
was Douglass Aircraft in nineteen twenty one, and you know,
they got to start with a single engine propeller plane.
And we're saying we're going to build a transoceanic, supersonic
passenger airplane as a new company. So there's plenty of challenge.
But the thing that gives me heart is On one hand,
(38:29):
this absolutely should exist. You know, it's hard to imagine,
say in twenty fifty, twenty sixty, that we're still flying subsonic.
It needs to come, it's inevitable, and it really needs
to come from a new entrant. And so we say, great,
what would a successful attempt at this have to look like?
You know, it's going to require an ambitious team. It's
(38:50):
going to require really talented individuals. It's going to require
an ability to be persuasive of customers, of investors, of
supply liars. It's going to require deep passion for mission
and deep belief because the journey will be long and hard,
and persevering through it is going to be necessary for success.
(39:12):
There are plenty of big challenges ahead of us, but
also some that are in the rearview mirror. We've built
and tested histories first independently developed supersonic jet. We've pre
sold twenty six billion in Overture airplanes and order in
orders and pre orders. North Carolina has contributed two hundred
million dollars with the project and is funding build out
of the Overture superfactory in Greensboro. And so there are
(39:36):
plenty of quote unquote impossible things left to do. But
I look backwards and we've already done some things that
everybody said we couldn't do. You're the founder and CEO
of Boom Supersonic, which you're also a human with a family.
How do you integrate those two? It's challenging and sort
of some of the worst moments personally or what I
(39:57):
feel like, I really need to be in two places
at the same time, and I just have to choose.
I try to make it win win as much as
I can. And just to give one story, earlier this year,
I got to personally fly Supersonic for the first time
on a T thirty eight along with our chief test
pilot down in the Mojave Desert, And so I flew
(40:18):
myself down to Mahave in the Sirius and brought my
kids along for it. We made it into a little
bit of a family vacation. They got to have an
experience flying with me, and we got to have a
lot of conversations, you know, afterwards, about how I've chosen
what I work on, and you know, I hope it
will inspire them to go off and do things that
(40:40):
they love that will be meaningful to them. So that's
one of the better stories. So let's move to some advice.
What's the best advice you've ever received? I've been Look,
you have a lot of good pieces of advice if
I think about the ones that had been most pivotal,
you know, for the success I've had, a lot of
(41:01):
it comes down to people encouraging me to believe in
myself when I wasn't sure. It's so easy for me
to have self doubt and to say, Okay, what can
I do? Am I going to succeed at this? Should
I try something easier? Should I expect that someone better
than I am you can go off and do these things.
And I've been lucky to have some friends and mentors
(41:21):
at critical junctures when I wasn't sure who said, no,
I think you can do this. You should definitely give
it a try. That helped give me the courage to
be more bold. So, if you could, what advice would
you give your twenty one year old self? Aim high,
stay curious. Whenever you face a choice between doing something
(41:42):
easier and doing something harder, do the harder things so
long as it's something that you're passionate about and don't
spend your time on missions you don't love. So we
end each episode of Math and Magic with a shout
out to heroes, influencers, and mentors in business. I think
it is the combination of the math and the magic
that leads to success. Analytical understanding the math part, and
(42:05):
the sheer creativity built on that understanding that excites consumers
builds fantastic products. You get two shout outs, one for
the math person and one for the creative Who are they?
On the math side, it's Jeff Bezos and on the
creative side it is Steve Jobs who showed that we
(42:26):
could build products that people would fall in love with. Blake,
thanks so much for letting me go deep in the
airplanes and indulging my inner plane geek, and thanks for
bringing supersonic travel back for us non military types. We
wish you the best and I hope you'll let me
come fly your SIMS sometime. And congrats on all your success.
(42:48):
Thank you, Bob. Yeah, looking forward to doing some hang
or flying together. Here are a few things I've picked
up in my conversation with Blake. One, do what you
love at Boom. Blake is creating what many thought was
impossible because of his lifelong interest in aviation. He's proof
that if you follow your passion and you're willing to
(43:09):
reinvent yourself, you'll succeed. As Blake said, skills are variable.
Passion is not two know what you don't know. Learning
new skills are essential parts of building a business. Don't
worry if your ideas keep changing, as Blake says, that's
not a sign of chaos. It's a sign that you're
getting closer to the right answer. Three. Never accept a
(43:31):
qualitative answer to a quantitative question. As Blake explains, if
he listened to all the qualitative explanations about why supersonic
flight wasn't commercially viable, boom wouldn't exist. I'm Bob Pittman.
Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so
(43:59):
much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sydney Rosenbloom for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which
is no small feat. Our editor Emily Marinoff, our engineer
Jessica Cranchich, our executive producers Nikki Eatore and Ali Perry,
and of course Gail Raoul Eric Angel, Noel, and everyone
(44:21):
who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
It doesn't matter what you've already done. What matters more
is what you can learn to do. Skills are variable
in a way that passion is not. I have consistently
found that following my passion and being willing to reinvent
(00:22):
myself and learn new things takes me to places where
I'm happier and able to do more than I ever
thought I could. I I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to
Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontier's Marketing. Businesses and
industries grow from bold steps and from ignoring conventional wisdom
and heard mentality. Our guest today embodies all that he's
(00:46):
taking Commercial aviation back in the Supersonic Flight is the
founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake Shoal Blake is
a pilot with a lifelong fascination with aviation. He describes
himself as having been a socially awkward child, but clearly
a smart one. He loved summer science camps and even
started a web hosting and consulting business while in high school.
(01:09):
He skipped his last year of high school and started
college early. Went on to Amazon, tech startups and groupon
before he took matters into his own hands and followed
his passions and his dreams to start Boom Supersonic. Now
I have to disclose as we began that I've been
a pilot since I was sixteen. I have seven thousand
hours of flight time, have an airline transport pilot's license,
(01:32):
and until the pandemic hit when I skipped flight school
for a few years, I flew left seat in a
Falcon nine hundred for the last twenty years, as well
as a helicopter. I'm a former board member of the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and basically love everything about
airplanes and flying. I'm a plane geek. As you can imagine,
I'm really excited to spend this episode with Blake. Welcome.
(01:55):
Great to be here, Bob. I guess you and I
are both playing crazy. Thank goodness, Blake. Before we dig
into the meat, I'd like to put you in perspective
with a little feature we do called you in sixty seconds. Ready,
let's do it. Do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs?
Cincinnati or Denver? Denver? Definitely introvert or extrovert. Introvert who
(02:16):
plays an extrovert on TV, window or aisle. If it's
a long flight, I'll take aisle. If it's a shorter
flight before the window. Amazon or Groupon Definitely Amazon pilot
or passenger pilot. All day long, Video games or board games,
Board games, Arctic or Desert, Desert, Virgin Galactic or SpaceX,
SpaceX hands down, X fifteen or X one. Let's go
(02:40):
X one. Moon or Mars. Definitely the Moon. Favorite astronaut
Neil Armstrong. Secret talent, I don't know dad jokes except
for Boom, your favorite plane, the SR seventy one Blackbird.
Smartest person you know, Jeff Bezos, childhood hero, Bill Gates. Okay,
final one. Most exciting airport where you've landed yourself. My best,
(03:05):
most exciting, maybe not proudest landing story was at Mimmolous, Oregon. Wow,
let's jump in and start with a history lesson. I
used to take the Concord when it had regular service
to London. In Paris, I could wake up in Paris,
have breakfast, leisurely, get to the airport for noon departure,
and land in New York three hours earlier at nine am.
(03:26):
Truly magic. I have taken two of my three kids
on the Concord, and then before my youngest can make
or flight get stopped. Can you tell us why Concord
stopped and maybe why it never really had a real
business plan my view, as Concord was stillborn, if we
(03:47):
started at the surface level, it shut down because it
was too expensive to fly relative to the passenger demand
a ticket on Concord adjusted inflation today it's upward of
twenty thousand dollars, and yet one hundred not necessarily very
comfortable seats on the airplane to fill. And it's just
very difficult to find a hundred people who want to
(04:07):
spend twenty grand to go somewhere really fast. So even
on the most popular routes like the ones you're mentioned
in New York, London and New York Paris, the airplane
was typically half empty and it did not have the
economics or the range to achieve economies of scale. So
why did that happen? In my view, the deepest cause
here is that this was a Cold War era glory project.
(04:32):
This was not a commercial venture. Concord was established in
nineteen sixty two via a treaty between the French and
British governments, and the goal was really fly fast, try
not to crash and show up the Russians. And it
was at that level mission accomplished, but it was never
something that was designed to be commercially successful or commercially valuable.
(04:55):
Very much akin to Apollo and in fact your nineteen
sixty nine first moon Land first Concord flight, neither of
those had any sort of thought of economics or commercial viability.
And while they both looked like tremendous technological progress. And
as we sit here, if you want a lunar lander
or a supersonic airliner, we got to go to a museum,
(05:16):
not look up into the skies. And I think that
goes back to the importance of commercial consideration on day's
zero and doing things for national prestige. Yeah, we can
show up the Russians, but it's not really a bridge
to change in the world. So let's give people who
don't know much about Concord a little lesson. It flew
(05:37):
mock two. Oh, that's about thirteen hundred miles per hour.
It flew up to sixty thousand feet. You could see
sort of the curvature or the earth up there, and
was a small cabin. The galley was in the middle,
so there was a front and a back, but it
wasn't first class and coach or business, and he got
incredibly warm in that cabin, especially around the galley as
(05:58):
you were flying at What else should they know about Concord? Yeah,
I think that's all about right. It was a long,
skinny airplane, a triangular delta wing, and expensive to fly.
And also a first impression of smallness that the boarding
door was small. You have to duck to get in,
and then before you even get to the passenger cabin
(06:19):
there's the equivalent of maybe three or four rows of sea.
It's worth of kind of Florida's ceiling equipment racks, and
so it has sort of a first impression of a
really tight space before you even get back into the
passenger cabin. And today you can see Concord. There's one
at the Intrepid Museum on the Hudson River in New York,
(06:40):
and there's one at the Air and Space Museum out
of Dullas Airport in DC. So why did the airlines
and consumers lose interest in supersonic or did they? I
think there's always been tremendous consumer excitement and supersonic. The
problem was that it wasn't offered at a price or
an experience or with the root network that made it
(07:03):
make sense. And so twenty thousand dollars round trip New
York to London for most people, that's a bucket list item.
It's not transportation. And if we look back at you
know what happened when we went in the fifties and
sixties from props to jets. There has always been consumer
interest in more speed. And when more speed is offered
(07:24):
at a price point and in locations that people can
really afford, it changes where we do business, it changes
where we vacation, It even changes who we can fall
in love with. But supersonic flight really only offered on
one airplane and never offered at a price point that
was attainable to any other than a relatively small number
(07:44):
of people. So let's go to the big question, why
will you succeed when the others failed? Well, it's certainly
not guaranteed that will succeed. There's a lot of challenge
ahead of us. Fortunately, there's also some challenge in the
rearview mirror. I can talk about why I think the
time is right and why if Boom doesn't succeed, it'll
be our failure of execution, not a failure of opportunity.
(08:06):
You know, fifty years after Concorde was designed, we've had
both significant progress in basic airplane technology and huge growth
in the market. So imagine Concord twenty thousand dollar ticket.
If airlines were charging a quarter of that, say like
five grand on airplane on overture, that'd be incredibly profitable.
And it has the legs not just to do a
(08:27):
couple of headline routes, but it's economically viable one hundreds
so not just New York London, but Seattle to Tokyo,
and La to Sydney and Miami to Madrid, just to
give a few examples. And we're able to go build
that airplane using only technologies that have been proven safe, reliable,
and efficient. So from a technological perspective, this is at
(08:51):
the same level as a Gabowing seven eight seven, meaning
it's a carbon fiber composite fuselage, it's got advanced turbofan engine,
fly by wire, flight controls. We could keep nerding out
about it. Every single thing on the airplane has a
precedent of flying on other commercial airplanes and being accepted
as safe by regulators around the planet. So your range
(09:13):
is about twice what Concord was, not quite twice. It's
forty two fifty nautical miles or about five thousand statute miles,
and that's with all the seats filled and everyone checking
a big heavy bag. And Concord was three thousand and change.
So we've got not quite fifty percent more range. However,
with sixty five seats on the airplane and the operating
(09:35):
cost and overall efficiency being better roots like La Sydney,
that's a very long route. So today that's a fourteen
fifteen hour flight with overture, it's about eight and a
half hours including stopping in Tahiti for gas. Wow, that's great.
And the speed is two O like Concord, slightly slower
actually Mack one point seven. We initially aim to be
(09:58):
a little bit faster, but as we learn more about
the details, what we found was going very slightly slow
or generated significantly better economics, significantly better sustainability, and also
allowed us to reduce the technological challenge, for example, being
able to operate with improven material systems. That is I
(10:19):
guess always to question is speed versus range? But it
sounds like you still got a lot of speed. There'll
be an overture two, and our goal is to make
it significantly faster. As an airplane nerd, I get very
excited about that stuff, but as a passenger, I want
to put this airplane in the hands of airlines and
passengers as quickly as possible. And so a phrase they
(10:40):
got drilled into me kind of growing up in tech,
growing up in Silicon Valley was minimum viable product, and
overture one is really a minimum viable supersonic airplane. We've
kept it as small and simple as we can because
we want to get it out as quickly as possible.
I want to dig into some questions about the how
(11:01):
and probably more importantly for this podcast, to management lessons
you learn. But first I want to get some perspective
on you by going back to your childhood. You grew
up in Cincinnati. Your dad was an engineer, your mom
was a French teacher. Paint the picture of growing up
in the Midwest in the eighties and nineties. I was
an only kid, so I sort of grew up by myself.
(11:22):
Didn't have a lot of friends, and I spent a
lot of time playing on my own, thinking on my own.
I was obsessed with model trains throughout much of my childhood,
and as I got a little bit older, became obsessed
with computers. And I love that gratification cycle of how
easy it was to do something in software and be
(11:44):
able to see a result quickly. I remember thinking about
airplanes and wanting to learn to fly, drawing little pictures
of cartoon airplanes that you know, I dream of building.
So where did the love of airplanes come from? There
must have been someone who planet that seed in there
for you. If you believe my parents, It goes back
to when I was six months old and they had
(12:06):
taken me to this little airport in suburban Cincinnati to
watch the Cessina's takeoff and land, and I had a
little Fisher Price toy airplane. As they tell the story,
that was the first time I made the connection between
a toy thing and a real thing, and I just
lit up. So I don't know, maybe it imprinted somehow,
But as long as I can remember, like, I've found
(12:28):
flight inspiring and it is such a uniquely human thing
to be able to do. I mean, we weren't born
to fly. We're you know, we're far heavier than air,
and we don't have wings like birds. We had to
go vent the airplane, and you know to this day
looking down out the window, it's a uniquely human vantage
(12:49):
point where we can take in everything that we've built
as humanity is, as well as the natural beauty of
the world, and doing it aboard one of the most complex,
safety critical machines ever created. It's like we're riding on
the wings of Newton and the right brothers. You're looking
down on the creation of Edison and Rockefeller and Ford,
(13:12):
and it's just an incredibly unique thing and an incredibly
human thing. More on math and magic right after this
quick break. Welcome back to math and magic. Let's hear
more from my conversation with Blake seul So. You have
(13:34):
said you were a socially awkward kid. How did that
contribute to your later success? Bob, That's not a question
I think I've ever been asked before. It's really thought provoking.
I have vivid memories of sitting by myself like an
elementary school, just thinking, and I remember being told, I
think in first grade, that we couldn't fly faster than
(13:56):
the speed of light, and that didn't make any sense
to him that I remember sitting by myself at recess
and elementary school, thinking about how we could fly faster
than the speed of light. I didn't understand anything about
aerospace or physics or rockets, and so I didn't know
that rockets were, you know, not empty on the inside.
I remember there's like Russian dolls that are nested, you know,
you take one apart and then there's another doll on
(14:18):
the inside to take it apart there on the inside.
Like I remember thinking about like, well, couldn't you build
a rocket like that? And it'd be like one nest
that inside, the next nest that inside the next. And
it seemed like if we had a contraption like that,
well couldn't you go arbitrarily fast? And I look back
now and it's like, you know, not only did I
not understand physics and relativity, Like I didn't understand that
rockets they had stuff on the inside that there was
(14:39):
not like they were empty. You could put another rocket
in there. So it was incredibly naive. But I spent
a lot of time because I guess I didn't have friends,
just kind of by myself thinking, so let's talk about
science camps. What's the power of a science camp? What
do they mean to you. The single biggest thing I
think it meant to me was a chance to see
(15:02):
what a good education could actually be, like, how engaging
it could be, and how fun it was to be
around other kids that I considered my peers like. I
did not like school growing up. I was bored, was
not engaging. I'm so grateful to Mom and Dad. And
mom researched all this back when there was no internet
and she had to go to the public library to
kind of figure out what was out there. But she
(15:24):
sent me to programming camps and electrical engineering camps and
various Today we call it STEM type stuff. And I
loved it. It was a chance to be challenged, a
chance to learn, and the teaching was great, and I
got to hang out with other kids that were like
me that I just didn't really have in suburban Cincinnati,
a public school kind of environment. So tell us the
(15:46):
story of how you skipped your last year of high school.
Got a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. So
went to public high school in suburban Cincinnati. Did not
love it, felt mostly socially disconnected, felt mostly academically disconnected.
And my high school girlfriend was a great ahead of me,
(16:07):
so she was gonna exit high school a year before
I was, and I think she said, like, hey, she'd
figure out how to do that too. And on my
short list of schools that were my dream schools was
Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and it turned out they had this,
in my view, brilliant program where you could apply as
a junior basically ride an essay about why high school
(16:33):
sucks and there's nothing left for you there. Then they
would run you through an interview, which I think was
basically a maturity test, and if you passed the maturity
test and they liked your essay, they would just treat
you like you're a high school senior. And they let
me come be a freshman without ever finishing high school,
without ever getting a ged, and I was like every
other freshman in campus. I look backwards and it was
(16:54):
one of the best things I've ever done. And obviously
you did well at university. I did all right. I
also rushed through. I did my undergrad in three years,
but I did actually graduate that time. So you dropped
out of high school, Soldier High School, Ara Business, and
off you went to college, and there I think you
took your first flying lesson two thousand and eight, you
(17:15):
got your private pilots license two eleven, you got your
instrument rating. Do you still fly today and what do
you fly? Yeah? I still fly today all my time.
Recently isn't a serious SR twenty two t which for
the folks who don't know, is it's basically, in my opinion,
the best single engineer plane you can get today. So
it's a four or five seed airplane, single engine propeller,
(17:36):
has the legs to go maybe at tops one thousand miles,
but it's a real nice little airplane, great for kind
of regional trips and for the layman, sounds really exciting.
It has a parachute, right it does. If something goes
really badly wrong, there's a handle that you can pull
and a rocket fires out the back of the airplane
(17:58):
and a parachute wrap inflates and the entire airplane just
flows to the ground. And this is saved dozens, if
not it's probably approaching one hundred lives now that have
been saved through the ballistic parachutes as they call them.
In fact, one of the Sirius is based here in
Centennial that I used to fly was in a mid
air collision about a year ago, and typically midair collisions
(18:22):
like everybody dies, it's really bad. And in this case,
the Sirius was able to pull the parachute miraculously. The
air planet collided with landed straight ahead and was fine.
It was really a miracle day where everyone lived in
part because of the parachute on the Sirius. After college,
you started as a software engineer at Amazon in two
thousand and one. You left in two thousand and seven.
(18:45):
What lessons did you learn at Amazon that you still
use today. We can probably talk for hours and not
days on things I learned at Amazon. One of them
was something that Jeff would just drill into everyone's mind,
which was, if you wanted to build something enduring, don't
focus on what's new and trendy. Focus on what's going
(19:05):
to stay the same over a long period of time.
In the context of Amazon, he would talk about selection
and availability and price as being things that people would
always care about and therefore being things where you could
make significant investments over a period of decades and trust
that you're going to be creating something of value. You
know that thinking directly applies to Boom because you know,
(19:26):
people are going to always want flights that are faster
and more affordable and more convenient. On those are vectors
in which we can invest over a period of decades
to build something great. Another one that comes to mind
was this notion of individuals and companies doing things that
they didn't have the resume for. You know, so when
I joined Amazon, it was always a debate is it
(19:47):
a bookstore or is it a software company? And I
got to be there. I didn't work directly at it.
I got to be there when they built aws, and
I got to be there when they built Kindle and
Amazon the retailer slash software company, and have the resume
to do any of those things, and yet they did.
They figured it out. And that left me with sort
of the very distinct impression that it doesn't matter what
(20:09):
you've already done. What matters more is what you can
learn to do. Skills are variable in a way that
passion is not. And so I have consistently found that
following my passion and being willing to reinvent myself and
learn new things takes me to places where I'm happier
and able to do more than I ever thought I could.
You did a couple of tech startups, and in twenty
(20:31):
twelve you were acquired by Groupon. Could not have been
a hotter company at the time. A couple of questions,
what did you do there, why did you learn? And
why did groupon lose its mojo? To set the stage
here a little bit, So it was twenty twelve, I
had founded my first company was called Keema Labs, and
I looked back and that was really a case study
(20:53):
and everything not to do. But it was twenty twelve.
The valley was hot, and if you had a decent team,
you could basically sell it for team and technology. And
so groupon bought my startup for team and technology and
they put me on what in my view should have
been group On two point zero. And so if you
think back about the foundation of Groupon with this local coupons,
(21:17):
there were so many at that time business plans that
were pitched that were about reinventing how we transact with
a local business. But they all had a chicken and
egg problem because they needed a digital connection to local businesses,
and they did it a digital connection to consumers. Group
On crack the chicken and egg problem basically with a
viral coupon the company was super hot. But Andrew Mason,
(21:38):
who was basically the founding CEO, had a really compelling
vision about how to take that collection of chickens and
eggs and parlay it into something really inspiring, really great.
That was about reinventing the way we would transact at
a local business. So they bought my company, and then
we went off and we bought another company that was
a iPad based wint A sales start up. What we
(22:01):
were going to go do is basically bring all that
onto the internet. So the vision was something like, imagine
you go online and you book a restaurant reservation, and
when you book your reservation, it says, hey, would you
like some calamari and a picture of margaritas on the
table when you arrive? And you know who doesn't say
yes to that? And because the consumer front end would
connect to the restaurant back in, the whole thing could
(22:22):
work seamlessly. You know, it's like ten months for your reservation.
The bartender starts making your drink and they start frying
up your calamari, and you can sit down, you can
have your whole meal, you can interact with a server,
you can order on your phone, kind of whatever, is
the right experience, and then when you're done, you just
get up and walk out and it's all built to
your group On account. That was the vision. And in
(22:43):
my view, it's so sad because groupon could have built
these things that I think the world still needs to
exist that no one's built yet, like the experience I
just described, and they could have parlayed the attraction around
the coupon's business into building that and it would be
a you know, a multi at least a deca billion
dollar company today if if that had happened. But instead
(23:05):
there were, in my view, sort of a series of
missteps that all started with a company going public before
it was ready, and all of that visionary stuff got
shut down and the company got stuck as a internet
coupon company with a very degraded brand and not a
very inspiring future. So you left twenty fourteen, and that
(23:29):
begins this journey in the Supersonic. Give us the story.
What were the big hurdles to get this thing started? Yeah, well,
the tail into my time at group On. There the
process of shutting down the visionary stuff I was talking about.
My VP asked me to come and run a big
piece of the core business, and so I was running
relevance and email and a lot of what was the
(23:49):
core of Groupon, and it was so uninspiring. You know,
I was paid very well. In my mind, I said, Okay,
the money I'm saving from this gets sucked away and
I called the fun fund, and beyond a certain dollar amount,
I was allowed to spend that money on anything I wanted,
and in my head that was to buy an airplane fund.
I actually never bought the airplane, but the savings for
(24:10):
the airplane became the seed capital for Boom. I left
Group on. I think I decompressed for a couple of weeks,
but I knew I wanted to do another startup, and
I thought back to everything I had learned doing the
first one, and in particular the decision to sell the
company when I had a chance to, and that the
lesson I learned from that was that as an ambitious founder,
(24:32):
that effort level feels the same regardless of what I'm doing.
But what isn't the same is whether I'm really motivated
by what I've set out to do. And you know,
I sold the first company because it was really hard
and I didn't love what we were building. For my
next start off, I wanted to do one where I
would never get up in the morning, no matter how
hard it was, I would never ask the question why
(24:52):
did I get myself into this? And I would always
note was worth it. And so at this point I said,
I'm going to organize all my ideas in descending order
of how happy I will personally be if it works,
and I'll forget everything else, whether I have the resume
for it, whether it's a good idea, whether it's physically possible.
And I thought I'd worked on that list, and I'll
(25:14):
work on the most exciting thing that's not impossible. And
so for me, anything with an airplane, and it just
goes straight to the top of that list. I had
had a Google alert on supersonic jet since my mid twenties,
and I sort of set a personal lifetime goal of
flying fashion the speed of sound because I was I
never got to fly on Concord. It shut down when
I was twenty two, and so I thought, Okay, take
(25:35):
a deep breath. I'm sure there's a really good reason
why no one's building supersonic jets, but I want to
discover for myself what that is. I'll do two weeks
of research, get it out of my system, and then
I'll move on to the next idea. And as luck
has it, I never never got off that top idea.
I kept finding a whole bunch of stale, conventional wisdom
(25:58):
that didn't stand up to a fresh, quantitative look at
what was really possible. So what was the group think
about why no supersonic airlines anymore? Well, I think it's
an instance of something called the bystander effect. And if
you don't know bystander effect, it's a term out of
social science that sort of refers to this idea that
(26:22):
if there's an emergency, someone's in trouble, and you know
only one or two people are around, they'll tend to
jump in and help. But if there are a large
number of people observing some kind of a problem, everyone
tends to assume everyone else has it and the right
people are already on the problem. And the bizarre consequence
of this is that really large, obvious things can go
(26:45):
unaddressed for long periods of time because everybody assumes it's
either impossible or the right people are already on it.
I think supersonic flight was one of those I mean,
who wouldn't want a faster airplane. Literally everybody would benefit
from flights that are faster and more convenient. So there
was this implicit assumption that there had to be something
wrong with that idea or else somebody would be doing it.
(27:07):
And then you could go on YouTube and there were
plausible sounding but not actually correct explanations, like you know,
one thing that was said was you have to solve
the sonic boom problem in order to find a market.
Another was that when supersonic came back, you would have
to be a private jet for the ultrawealthy, not an airliner.
Another was that it would inherently cost more and that
(27:28):
people wouldn't pay more. And it turns out none of
that is true. None of it stands up to relatively
simple first order analysis that you know, I could do
with a spreadsheet and data that I found in Wikipedia.
And you know, one of the lessons I learned from
that experience is never accept a qualitative answer to a
(27:50):
quantitative question. And so there were all these qualitative explanations
of why supersonic flight wasn't commercially viable, but really it's
a question should have like, okay, well how fast is
the airplane and what roots would it fly on. What
would affares have to be for it to be profitable,
and how many people could afford to fly on those roots?
And how much demand is there? And then that and
what's it going to cost to develop? And you know,
(28:12):
it's numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers that really say, doesn't
make any sense. And so there were all this a
qualitative dismissal that didn't stand up to running the math.
The reality was that boom could have been founded probably
ten or fifteen years before it actually was, but nobody looked,
nobody ran the math. So why didn't Boeing do this? Oh,
(28:35):
that's a fascinating question. Bowing certainly could do this. In fact,
they invented the key technology for it. All of the
key enabling technology for mainstream commercial SuperSonics really debuted on
the seven eight seven Dreamliner that Bowing built. Technologically they're
capable of this. But it's a classic innovator's dilemma situation,
(28:58):
so that the pace of innovation on subsonic aircraft. It
has become so well subsonic that when Boeing or same
things trade Airbus, when they develop a new airplane, they
invest billions of dollars to build a relative commodity that's
a low margin product that they're going to have to
keep in production for decades to come in order to
(29:19):
earn back their investment. And so that the last thing
that a big company wants to do is come out
with a new product that's going to cannibalize sales of
the existing product before they earn back their investment. And
so if Bowing did what we're doing, it would suck
the most profitable passengers out of the front of the
seven eight sevens before they earn back their seven eight
(29:42):
seven investment. And so if you look at what their
productive filament really is, they're focused on building replacement cycle products,
not cannibalization cycle products. And so technologically could they do it, Yeah, absolutely,
you know, I think we can do it faster and
better as a focused startup. But they could absolutely do it,
but they don't have the business motivation to do it
(30:03):
because it would cannibalize the cash cows. So you're building
this fascinating startup, You've got a prototype in place, the
XB one. I think you're going to fly the plane,
your first plane in this twenty twenty six. What I'm
interested in is you've been hiring these people to share
this dream with you, to go on this journey. I
(30:26):
read somewhere about your favorite interview question, could you tell
us what it is? Yeah, So to put this in context,
as we were saying before, I'm a software engineer by training,
and on day zero at Boom, my only knowledge of
airplanes was how to fly a very little one. I
knew I would need to learn a lot, and I
(30:46):
would need to learn to hire people who knew a
lot more than I did about their domains. And so
what I found was I could ask people to teach
me something, and it was shockingly easy to discover whether
people really knew what they were talking about, because I
could just walk away from that interview it said do
I understand it or not? And what I found was
(31:10):
most people operate on rules of thumb, not real deep understanding.
And if you're doing something that's been done over and
over again, rules of thumb work. But if you're going
to break from tradition, you have to operate from first principles,
what's physically possible, what's financially viable. Knowing a rule of
(31:32):
thumb doesn't cut it. And so in asking people teach
me something and then kind of iterating with them in
the conversation to see where I could really get my
head around it. I could separate out the people who
are first principles thinkers from the people who only had
rules of thumb, And the result was we were able
to build a culture of people who are first principles
thinkers and great communicators. So you have done for a
(31:57):
startup sort of amazing work. You got a two billion
dollar pre order from virgin for ten aircraft by two sixteen.
Following two fifteen, you'd only raise seven hundred thousand dollars,
and you went on to get an order from the
US Air Force, American Airlines, United Airlines. Tell me how
on earth you did that one step at a time,
(32:17):
and so yeah, to recap where we are today, there's
an order from American and United and a pre order
from japan Airlines. We say order when we mean there's
a nonrefundable deposit that's unplaced, and a pre order is
kind of more like an option. Maybe the story of
the United deal is kind of the best one to
tell here. So this was this came together starting late
(32:40):
twenty twenty, kind of going into twenty twenty one. We
announced the United Order in the summer of twenty one,
and the way it got started was we were actually
out raising a round of capital and I was talking
with an investor and he had been doing kind of
due diligence checks on boom claim people he knew in
the industry, asking what they thought, and he calls me up.
He says, Blake, I'm going to invest, but I'm also
(33:03):
going to introduce you to this guy at United who
does not think what you're doing makes a whole lot
of sense. See if you can convince them to just
not be a detractor. And so I was like, okay,
and I took the intro and it was sort of
the mission of neutralize the detractor. And the conversation started
with a focus on sustainability, something like, you know, look,
(33:25):
I love what you're doing here, but at United we
really value sustainability and so obviously we would never do this,
And you know, I explained that sustainability was actually one
of the best reasons to do supersonic because we were
designing overture, you know, from the ground up, to be
compatible with a one hundred percent sustainable aviation fuel and
(33:45):
it could actually be the first airplane in their fleet
that would operate on net zero carbon. So from that conversation,
everything's sort of leapt forward. And it was just a
little bit more than six months from the very first
conversation with United to being able to announce their order
of jets. It started with trying to neutralize a detractor
and then ultimately turned into our anchor customer for overture. Well,
(34:09):
let's unpack some of your career in life lessons. You
were an Amazon before Amazon truthly was really Amazon. You
were at a few tech startups after that, as we
talked about, and then groupon you even had your own
startup in high school. What kind of mindset is necessary
to lead a successful startup? Working on something I care
(34:30):
about that I want to create in the world has
been I think the most important things. If I look
back at the biggest successes I've had, it was when
I took on things that I really wanted to work,
that I wanted to create, and where I was willing
to put aside my fears of whether I would succeed
or not and just run at the problem. Boom is
(34:53):
a good case study in that, and that on day zero,
I didn't have the resume to build an aviation company,
let alone a super not a jet company. And it
was kind of a heady thing to go do because
I knew either we'd fail or we would do something
that really would change the world. There wasn't a whole
lot of in between. And I struggled with that for
(35:13):
a while and ultimately decided that the people who take
on big missions and succeed, we know their names. That's
the right Brothers, that's Bill Gates, that's Steve Jobs, etc.
And the ones who try and they don't succeed, we
don't know their names. They're lost to history, but they
(35:36):
know they gave it. They're all And the thing I
told myself in twenty fourteen was the only way to
know what I could do would be to give it
a try, and I wanted to pick a mission where
I would rather try and fail than not try period.
So most companies starting out, culture becomes really important. It's
(35:57):
really the glue. Some people call it the operating system
that binds everything together. Core values I've observed that really
seem to be essential or urgency, focus, and curiosity. How
do those three work together for you? Urgency, focus, and curiosity,
those are three really important values thinking about how this
play out At Boom, We've challenged ourselves to do quickly
(36:20):
something that a lot of people say you can't do
at all. And you know, how quickly can we get
to hardware? How quickly can we learn something? Can we
go sell an airplane before we've ever even built one yet?
Focus is like the secret weapon of a startup, like
what we're talking about earlier with Bowing and why Bowing's
not doing supersonic They have the problem of an established
business that they don't want to disrupt. And one of
(36:42):
the biggest luxuries and benefits of a startup is you
exist in the world for one purpose. We're here to
make supersonic flight a reality and make it mainstream. And
that luxury of focus enables us to put our brains
and our best people on the things that matter most
and then last, but not least, necessity of learning. And
(37:02):
I think curiosity and first principles thinking really go together.
Why do things work the way they do today? What
would be possible if things were different? What could we change?
But also that a mindset of being willing to be
wrong and to change our minds quickly really matters. One
of my sayings is that if you want to be
right a lot. One of the best things to do
(37:24):
is to stop being wrong quickly, and so that requires
listening to reality, listening to evidence, listening to people around us.
And when we discover that our previous view or previous
strategy was wrong, that's not something to be ashamed of.
That's something to be excited about. That's called learning. One
of the things that I'm working really hard to make
(37:45):
part of the Boom culture is that it's okay to
change your mind, because changing your mind is called learning.
What do you say when people say it won't work.
You just gave us an example of unite it. Tell
me a little bit more about how you use that
culturally in your company. But there are plenty of skeptics,
and they have good reason. It's been more than a
(38:07):
century since the last entrepreneurially founded commercial aircraft company, which
was Douglass Aircraft in nineteen twenty one, and you know,
they got to start with a single engine propeller plane.
And we're saying we're going to build a transoceanic, supersonic
passenger airplane as a new company. So there's plenty of challenge.
But the thing that gives me heart is On one hand,
(38:29):
this absolutely should exist. You know, it's hard to imagine,
say in twenty fifty, twenty sixty, that we're still flying subsonic.
It needs to come, it's inevitable, and it really needs
to come from a new entrant. And so we say, great,
what would a successful attempt at this have to look like?
You know, it's going to require an ambitious team. It's
(38:50):
going to require really talented individuals. It's going to require
an ability to be persuasive of customers, of investors, of
supply liars. It's going to require deep passion for mission
and deep belief because the journey will be long and hard,
and persevering through it is going to be necessary for success.
(39:12):
There are plenty of big challenges ahead of us, but
also some that are in the rearview mirror. We've built
and tested histories first independently developed supersonic jet. We've pre
sold twenty six billion in Overture airplanes and order in
orders and pre orders. North Carolina has contributed two hundred
million dollars with the project and is funding build out
of the Overture superfactory in Greensboro. And so there are
(39:36):
plenty of quote unquote impossible things left to do. But
I look backwards and we've already done some things that
everybody said we couldn't do. You're the founder and CEO
of Boom Supersonic, which you're also a human with a family.
How do you integrate those two? It's challenging and sort
of some of the worst moments personally or what I
(39:57):
feel like, I really need to be in two places
at the same time, and I just have to choose.
I try to make it win win as much as
I can. And just to give one story, earlier this year,
I got to personally fly Supersonic for the first time
on a T thirty eight along with our chief test
pilot down in the Mojave Desert, And so I flew
(40:18):
myself down to Mahave in the Sirius and brought my
kids along for it. We made it into a little
bit of a family vacation. They got to have an
experience flying with me, and we got to have a
lot of conversations, you know, afterwards, about how I've chosen
what I work on, and you know, I hope it
will inspire them to go off and do things that
(40:40):
they love that will be meaningful to them. So that's
one of the better stories. So let's move to some advice.
What's the best advice you've ever received? I've been Look,
you have a lot of good pieces of advice if
I think about the ones that had been most pivotal,
you know, for the success I've had, a lot of
(41:01):
it comes down to people encouraging me to believe in
myself when I wasn't sure. It's so easy for me
to have self doubt and to say, Okay, what can
I do? Am I going to succeed at this? Should
I try something easier? Should I expect that someone better
than I am you can go off and do these things.
And I've been lucky to have some friends and mentors
(41:21):
at critical junctures when I wasn't sure who said, no,
I think you can do this. You should definitely give
it a try. That helped give me the courage to
be more bold. So, if you could, what advice would
you give your twenty one year old self? Aim high,
stay curious. Whenever you face a choice between doing something
(41:42):
easier and doing something harder, do the harder things so
long as it's something that you're passionate about and don't
spend your time on missions you don't love. So we
end each episode of Math and Magic with a shout
out to heroes, influencers, and mentors in business. I think
it is the combination of the math and the magic
that leads to success. Analytical understanding the math part, and
(42:05):
the sheer creativity built on that understanding that excites consumers
builds fantastic products. You get two shout outs, one for
the math person and one for the creative Who are they?
On the math side, it's Jeff Bezos and on the
creative side it is Steve Jobs who showed that we
(42:26):
could build products that people would fall in love with. Blake,
thanks so much for letting me go deep in the
airplanes and indulging my inner plane geek, and thanks for
bringing supersonic travel back for us non military types. We
wish you the best and I hope you'll let me
come fly your SIMS sometime. And congrats on all your success.
(42:48):
Thank you, Bob. Yeah, looking forward to doing some hang
or flying together. Here are a few things I've picked
up in my conversation with Blake. One, do what you
love at Boom. Blake is creating what many thought was
impossible because of his lifelong interest in aviation. He's proof
that if you follow your passion and you're willing to
(43:09):
reinvent yourself, you'll succeed. As Blake said, skills are variable.
Passion is not two know what you don't know. Learning
new skills are essential parts of building a business. Don't
worry if your ideas keep changing, as Blake says, that's
not a sign of chaos. It's a sign that you're
getting closer to the right answer. Three. Never accept a
(43:31):
qualitative answer to a quantitative question. As Blake explains, if
he listened to all the qualitative explanations about why supersonic
flight wasn't commercially viable, boom wouldn't exist. I'm Bob Pittman.
Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so
(43:59):
much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sydney Rosenbloom for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which
is no small feat. Our editor Emily Marinoff, our engineer
Jessica Cranchich, our executive producers Nikki Eatore and Ali Perry,
and of course Gail Raoul Eric Angel, Noel, and everyone
(44:21):
who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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