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

Blake Scholl started with a crazy idea: bring back supersonic flight. A decade later, Boom Supersonic pre-orders from the likes of Virgin, United, and American Airlines, and is building the fastest commercial jet since the Concorde—without the sonic boom. But what looks like an inevitable success now was, at the beginning, a nearly laughable dream. In this episode, we break down how Blake went from crashing a Virgin Galactic rollout to pitching Richard Branson over breakfast, to getting a “yes” 24 hours before Y Combinator Demo Day. It’s a masterclass in high-agency entrepreneurship and building something audacious from first principles. From pitching billionaires to proving physics, from engineering emotional payoff for teams to raising capital from LPs directly, Blake unpacks how to build hard tech companies that actually work. If you’re a founder, builder, or dreamer, this one’s for you.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
A couple months ago, we did our our, you know,boomless announcement.

(00:03):
We we announced that in the morning and tweetedabout my least favorite regulation.
Elon responded and said, this administrationwill solve this and all the other dumb
regulations that don't make sense.
And, I flew to DC that night for a whole bunchof meetings.
By the time I landed, I had an invitation tocome to the White House.
Since then, we've been making a full courtpress on get getting that regulation repealed
as quickly as possible.

(00:23):
You know, one of our employees had actuallymade both the seat both the machine that made
the model and the model.
We brought that painted from virgin color, andwe sort of explained to Richard what we were
doing and why it made sense and why it was astep forward versus Concorde.
He was, you know, copiously taking notes.
He kinda leans back in his chair.
He says, gosh, guys.
Like, this is this is brilliant.
I love every part it.
But I said, Richard, you know, let me be clear.
We're not asking for your money.

(00:44):
We're asking in you know, for you to say thatyou want the product.
We're we're asking if you want the first ten ofthese to have a virgin logo on the tail.
As Do you believe that the bigger the idea, theeasier it becomes.
It's very counterintuitive.
Explain Explain why you
Boom.
We have days where I look at a problem, and itfeels like the start up equivalent of a a
cancer diagnosis.
It's like, oh, you know, I'm gonna fight overand win against cancer.

(01:06):
They have just asked the best people in theworld working on this.
And we have they do it at the team level.
They do the board level.
They do it at the investor level.
They do it at the adviser level.
They build a supersonic jet.
Like, everyone wants to talk about it.
Everyone's excited.
They've got their second order effects of beingable to fly to London more often, flying from
New York to LA.
What do you foresee to be the impact tobusiness, to society?

(01:30):
How did Boom become the most talked aboutcompany at YC Demo Day over a decade ago?
The lead up to Demo Day was really painful.
I remember, you know, a few weeks into YC, wewere talking about what we'd actually bring to
Demo Day.
And like all the other SaaS companies were likebringing a product and a growth chart.
We are, we're not gonna have a product in DemoDay.
It'll take more like eight years, not likeeight weeks, to ship a a supersonic airliner.

(01:53):
I didn't believe we could, you know, have salesbefore it actually built a product.
The the the YC partner said, Blake, if you shipa demo day without sales, your goose is cooked.
So I looked at our I looked at our productpipeline, our sales pipeline, and I was like,
man, I'll be lucky to sell airplanes in eightyears, let alone eight weeks.
It's certainly not gonna be like a, you know, aUnited or a Lufthansa that would be willing to

(02:14):
preorder a supersonic jet from a startupcompany.
It's gonna have to be either a startup airlineor, you know, somebody as bold as Virgin who
would, you know, be willing to jump and jumpand lean in.
So we focused we focused kind of all of oursales efforts on those two categories.
It'd be a startup airline or it'd be Virgin.
And we we managed to find a startup airlinethat was doing kind of an all business class

(02:35):
service in and out of London City Airport,which is the closest you could do to a faster
flight, short of actually having a fasterairplane.
It was gonna be all business class.
It was very much our model.
We managed to get them to give us LOI for$3,000,000,000 worth of airplanes.
And this sounds great until you realize thestartup airline actually hasn't started yet.
And they very much have a long road ahead ofthem.

(02:55):
And so this this LOI is maybe worth the paperthat it's not printed on.
So you got this LOI from an airline.
What did you do next?
Yeah.
I remember the run up to run up to demo day.
We're we're doing our practice pitches.
Michael Siebel said, like, Blake, do you haveanything that's real?
Because you sound like you're completely fullof shit.
And I was like, ugh.
Like, we were about to be, like, the biggestbiggest laughingstock at demo day.

(03:17):
We're gonna we're gonna show up without withouta product and without sales.
And it's like, great.
These these yahoos think they can build asupersonic jet.
Nobody even wants it.
We we went on this huge sprint on one hand toto just make the make what we had more
tangible, to bring some actual starting pointsof hardware to demo day.
And, and the others on the other hand, we justwe went after version with everything we got.

(03:37):
And the the backstory was that Richard Bransonhad a lifelong passion for not just for flight,
but for faster flight.
And when British Airways kinda put a knife inthe back of Concorde, he tried to buy the
Concordes out from BA and restart service, theythey wouldn't let him have them.
And that's how it ended up in a museum.
Around that time, Virgin was look working on,you know, Virgin Galactic, and they're about to
roll out their second spaceship out of thehangar in the Mojave Desert.

(04:00):
And we thought, great.
Well, like, maybe we could find a way to meetRichard while he's there for that event.
But I what I found was, you know, one of ouradvisors at that point was Mark Kelly, who's
now senator Mark Kelly.
If I if I wrote emails from Mark to Richard,Mark would send them.
And so we basically got a message to to Richardthat said something like, hey.
You know, I know you're gonna be in Mojave forthe spaceship rollout.
The boom guys are gonna be there too.

(04:21):
You should really you should really meet them.
And so I figured we'd then get an invitation tothe rollout.
Turns out we never actually got an invitationto the rollout.
I sort of crashed the rollout.
So you crashed the rollout.
Were you able to meet with Richard?
I got a fifteen minute meeting with Richard andhis mom, like kind of over breakfast, like
before the before the rollout event.
I sort of, you know, I, we'd made a model ofour airplane, painted up in in virgin colors.

(04:45):
This is a little wooden model that we made on aCNC machine.
You know, one of our employees had actuallymade both the c both the machine that made the
model and the model.
We brought that painted up in virgin colors,and we sort of explained to Richard what we
were doing and why it made sense and why it wasa step forward versus Concorde.
He was copiously taking notes.
He kind of leans back in his chair.
He says, gosh, guys, like, this is this isbrilliant.

(05:05):
I love every part of it.
But like, I'm already doing this spaceshipthing, and I don't know if I can do like two of
these things of this scale.
And I said, Richard, you know, let me be clear.
We're not asking for your money.
We're asking in, you know, for you to say thatyou want the product.
We're asking if you want the first ten of theseto have a Virgin logo on the tail.
As if you're willing to raise your hand andsay, I want this, and I'm gonna get all the

(05:25):
money I need somewhere else to get this done,and you're gonna get to have this before
anybody else will.
And it turns out he loved that.
Asking the right question, offering the rightthing was important.
And we kind of kept pushing on it and pushingon it.
And finally, the day before demo day, we gotthe email that said, Okay, we're in for the
first ten.
We'll sign the contract later, but you can goahead and announce it.
And to me, it felt like we went from being onthe verge of the biggest losers, the biggest

(05:49):
laughingstock at demo day to the to the biggestwinners.
So we went from 3,000,000,000 in LOIs thatdidn't really mean anything to an additional
2,000,000,000 from Virgin, from an actual wellrespected airline.
We, we sort of relaunched the company, thatthat Wednesday on demo day.
That that week was just a surreal week.
It was like Monday, we had gotten we took thecompany out of stealth, we had gotten we gotten

(06:10):
Ashley Vance to write the launch story.
And Ashley, of course, was, like, Elon's firstbiographer.
Tell me about your thinking about having AshleyVance write the launch story.
In my head, this was gonna be a brilliantcoming out of Stealth story.
So it's gonna be like, hey.
You know, Boom is the next SpaceX.
Boom is the SpaceX of airplanes.
That was the parallel we were going for.
I didn't realize back then just how early wewere and how early it looked.

(06:33):
And so Ashley's team, the Bloomberg teamreally, had taken pictures of, like, me on a
orange plastic chair climbing into a cardboardmock up.
Ashley wrote a very nice story, but then hishis, his editor picked the image and the
headline.
The headline said something like, this Coloradocompany thinks it can build supersonic jets.
And, I know there's a picture of me climbing ina cardboard mock up, but it's kinda laughable.

(06:57):
And that Monday, we're on the top of hackernews, and the the comments are just brutal.
It's like, don't these guys realize that thesuper sonic jets are not made out of cardboard?
And what idiot runs marketing that would name ajet company after the sound of an explosion?
So that was Monday.
Tuesday, we get the email from Virgin.
And I'm like, I think we just I think we justwon.

(07:17):
And I called the YC press people, and I don'treally know how to run a media cycle, but would
you help us?
And we basically stayed up until midnight thatlight doing press interviews.
And we relaunched the company on Wednesday withwith a preorder from Virgin.
And we're back up the top of hacker news again.
And this time, the comments are like, wow, theone two punch.
What genius runs marketing at that company?
That's the way you launch a company.

(07:38):
And in like Monday colon, what a dumb company.
Wednesday colon, oh, shit.
It was it was very nearly a catastrophe.
But it turned into it turned into a pretty nicevictory.
There's different things to unpack here.
First of all, the fact that you started asupersonic jet company after working at Groupon
is one of the is is incredible high agency wayto build career.

(08:00):
But perhaps most interesting most interestingis the story with with Richard Branson's.
Not only did you find a way to him, which 99%of people couldn't do, you then assumptively
assumed that you could get into this conferencethat you weren't invited.
Then you went there and you asked I think tworeally powerful things that any hardware
entrepreneur or any entrepreneur on the planetcould benefit from.

(08:22):
The old saying if you ask for advice you getmoney, if you ask for money you get advice.
The powerful question to I'm not here to askyou for money.
Very disarming.
Secondly, I'm not asking you to believe thatwe're gonna build this, but if we did build
this, would you want the Virgin logo on it?
I thought that's one of the best questions I'veever heard.
Let me tell you about a conference I'm veryexcited about, Alpha on the Delta, which is

(08:44):
coming up in late April during Jazz Fest in NewOrleans.
Unlike some of the larger conferences, Alpha onthe Delta is limited to a 50 allocators and 30
niche managers on an invite only basis.
It's an authentic and different kind of eventwith some really great people.
If you'd like to learn more and request aninvite, visit www.howinvestdelta.com.

(09:05):
That's www.h0wiinvestdelta.com.
I hope to see you there.
There are a lot of lessons for hard techfounders in there.
And, you know, one of the things that like, ifyou're building a software company, it's
relatively inexpensive to test whether youbuilt a useful product.
You just go launch it.

(09:25):
You're trying to get people to use it.
And if they use it, okay, you built somethinguseful.
And if they don't, then you didn't.
And it's and it's relatively inexpensive totest that with, like, seed money.
But if your if your product is a supersonicairliner, you can't build it and then find out
whether it was the right thing to build.
It just takes too long and costs way too much.
So it's really important to find demonstrableways to demonstrate that the product is going

(09:46):
to be useful so that you don't have market riskand technology risk at the same time.
You take the market risk off the table, and youhave only the risk that you'll actually build
the product.
That was a big piece of the idea of let's getcustomers on board early.
You developed the XB-one, which is essentiallya prototype.
Talk to me about your prototype, and what didthat development, what did the development of

(10:07):
the prototype you?
Yeah, so it goes back again to the, know, howdo you take something that is a massive effort,
systematically decompose it, and thensystematically take risk off the table.
And, so if you start on day one, you can almostsay like, what are all the ways this could
fail?
Well, maybe we, maybe airlines don't want it.
Maybe passengers aren't willing to pay therequired fare.

(10:27):
Maybe we can't make the engineering work.
Maybe there's a regulatory barrier.
Maybe we can't get the appropriate supply chainto work with us.
There are all these, you sort of imagine likeall the, all the biggest failure risks.
And then we try to try to make proof pointsagainst each one of those.
And so on the, on the engineering, from anoutside in, as well as an inside out
perspective, we thought it was foolish to tryto go straight to building like a 400,000 pound

(10:50):
safety critical supersonic airliner.
The odds that that would succeed the first timewere just very low.
We wanted to do something very analogous towhat SpaceX did.
Before they built the Falcon nine rocket thatis the workhorse today, they built a Falcon
one, which never really carried meaningfulpayloads, but proved to SpaceX and to their
customers and to their investors that, hey,this startup company could build a rocket and

(11:11):
put something in orbit.
And so that was the XB-one.
We sort of took our initial idea of what thethe Overture airliner would be, we shrank it
down to one third scale, and we said, let's godesign, build, fly, learn.
But we were starting with a palette oftechnology that we knew we could use to build
an airliner in success.
And we wanted to learn a % of what we needed tolearn to do that successfully.

(11:32):
And so that was that was the origin of XB-oneinitially.
We called it baby boom.
It's got a lot of firsts on it.
It's the first supersonic jet developed outsideof a nation state.
It's the first civil supersonic jet sinceConcorde in 1969.
It's the first one ever made in America, andit's the first one to prove that you can do
supersonic flight reliably, repeatedly withoutan audible sonic boom.
I I saw the Twitter post.

(11:53):
Basically, it's the sound sound wavesrefracting back and into the atmosphere.
That's right.
It's actually not really the airplane itself,but it's how you fly the airplane.
Fly at a sufficiently high altitude at theright speed, given current weather conditions,
and the boom just makes a U-turn in the sky, itnever reaches the ground.
This works up to about a 50% increase in speedover today's airplanes, up to about Mach 1.3,

(12:16):
plus or minus a little bit based on based onweather.
But you don't have to do anything impracticalwith the airplane to make it work.
You just have to fly it high enough at theright speed for the day.
How did you come up with this scientifictheory?
And tell me about how that came to you.
Well, we we didn't come up with a scientifictheory.
This is this is well known physics.
It existed and was understood decades ago.
But if you look and say, well, why did Concordenot do this?

(12:38):
Well, to do this, you need decently goodweather data.
You need a computer that can crunch the numbersand say, well, given today's weather, here's
the right speed and altitude.
And then you need an engine that can fly thatspeed and that altitude efficiently.
And today we have three out of three.
Concorde had zero out of three.
So it's it's physics that have long sinceexisted, have been, you know, well covered in

(12:58):
academia, but had never been turned into apractical product before.
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Something that I believe you and Elon both havein common in how you developed your products is
you focused on what next action would be neededto unlock the next set of resources.

(13:21):
So you didn't, Elon's not focused on how do Ipopulate Mars.
First it was how do I show that SpaceX rocketworks, then the biggest technical challenge at
SpaceX historically was the reusable rocketthat was the most difficult, was the most
unproven.
Once he had that then he could start creatingthe starships and then, you know, he's still
not obviously on Mars, but creating these thesebridges to the next set of resources needed to

(13:47):
take on the next mission.
One of the things that a lot of people areinspired by what you've done is you went after
this incredibly audacious goal, and you'vesystematically executed across it over more
than decades.
So talk to me about that, and how do youmaintain the momentum?
Yeah.
I'll just answer the second part first.
In ways that's the easier part.

(14:08):
I deeply believe that it is far more importantto work on what you love than what your resume
says you can do.
And this is my second company.
My first company was a, we made a barp codescanning game that we ended up acqui hiring to
Groupon.
Like like any startup, it had the days wherethere were problems where we didn't know how we
would solve them, and that they feltexistential life and death.
And but, know, I would constantly think, gee,this is really hard.

(14:30):
And like, what am I doing?
Like, am I here for a barcode scanning game?
Is that gonna be my impact on the world?
And like like, this this is incredibly painful.
It's not worth it to me personally.
And so when we had a chance to acquihire thecompany and everybody made a little bit of
money, like, did.
And and yet I wanted that startup experienceagain, but I never wanted to wish I hadn't
started.
And so I wanted to pick a mission that would beso compelling to me, and and I think for

(14:55):
secondary reasons, so compelling to everybodyelse around us, that that we would never give
up.
And so I just I put all my you know, I ignoredwhat my resume said I could do, and I focused
on what I what I would never give up on.
And, you know, I deeply believe that we havethis, like, historical injustice.
In 1969, we could land on the moon.
We could fly supersonic.
And fast forward to 2025, we can't do either ofthose things anymore.

(15:17):
And very grateful, you know, grateful, youknow, Elon and the SpaceX team, they're fixing
the moon side of this and and going well beyondit.
But nobody was serious nobody was making aserious effort on supersonic flight.
And it's it's not because it wouldn't be worthit.
It just really nobody was trying.
And, you know, if you build flights that arefaster and affordable and convenient and safe,
everybody's gonna want them.
And in fact, the market for supersonic flightis going to have to be larger than the market

(15:39):
for subsonic.
Because when flights are faster, people go moreplaces.
It's like the Jevan's law of of aviation.
Speed things up, people will use it more.
That's what happened when went from props tojets.
So so it's, like, very valuable to the world togo to go create it.
Just the risk isn't, you know, can you actuallycreate it?
And so so that's the and this created asubstrate for me and the key people at Boom
where we believe so much in fomenting thesupersonic renaissance and what that would do

(16:01):
for humanity and how it would inspire otherpeople that we would just never give up on it,
no matter how hard it got.
So that's that's kind of thing one.
And thing two, like the de risking framework isvery much what you described.
Step one, let's go prove that if we deliverwhat we're talking about, that airlines are
gonna actually want it, and they're gonna wantit in quantity.
Not just supersonic flight as an idea, but thevery specific airplane that we're building,

(16:22):
like how many seats and how much range and thefuel efficiency target and what the economics
are gonna be.
And so that's why it was a big deal to haveVirgin raise their hand.
And then a few years later, United made a nonrefundable deposit.
American made a nonrefundable deposit.
And both of those things happened before we'dever flown an airplane.
And so that was key to unlocking.
It's like, okay, they already came.

(16:43):
All we have to do is build it.
So the next step is let's let's prove thatwe've got a good shot at building it.
So let's go do a simpler scaled down, but stillsufficiently representative and challenging
prototype that we inspire inspire belief thatwe can pull off the big airplanes.
Step step one, market.
Step two, technology proof of concept.
Step three, scale up.
And we're on step three now.
You believe that the bigger the idea, theeasier it becomes.

(17:06):
It's very counterintuitive.
Explain why you believe that the bigger theidea becomes, the easier it becomes to execute.
The first is just for the, for me as a founder.
Boom, we have days where I look at a problemand it feels like the startup equivalent of a
cancer diagnosis.
It's like, oh, I don't know if we're gettingthrough that one, that one could be fatal.
Yet, because the idea is big and inspiring andimportant, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm

(17:29):
gonna fight over and win against cancer.
That's true of me, but it's also true of theteam.
Like, have just some of the best of the bestpeople in the world working on this, and we
have incredible people on the board.
And if we were building something lessinteresting, we never could have gotten those
people to want to be there or to work as hardas they do.
So the fact that inspiring missions attractgreat people, and they do it at the team level,

(17:50):
they do it the board level, they do it at theinvestor level, they do it at the advisor
level, it impacts how you can do media.
Like you go to media and you say, I'm buildinga supersonic chat, like everyone wants to talk
about it.
Everyone's excited.
And because of that, it solves what I think insome ways is really the biggest problem in any
startup, which is how do get great people andhow do you get them motivated?
And a big compelling mission is a magnet forgreat people.

(18:11):
And once you get some great people, then whatother great people wanna do, they wanna work
with other great people on something thatmatters.
And so it just creates this sort of, like,talent flywheel that continues to gain momentum
as it goes.
It's one thing to have a huge mission.
A lot of people have big mission, but it'sanother thing corral the resources, the
investors, the employees to singularly focus onmilestones.

(18:32):
How did you do that?
What were the early milestones?
And walk me through the first five, six, seven,eight years before there was really a
substantial milestone that made thisinevitable.
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(18:54):
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(19:15):
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If I go back all the way, you know, I thinkabout how I got the the right, you know, first,
first engineer to come join.
Part of it was sort of recursively searching mynetwork for talent.
The first meeting I got in the industry,because literally I didn't know anybody in the

(19:35):
industry on day one, was this guy who nowworked at SpaceX, but he'd played hockey in
college with somebody who had worked for me atGroupon.
And so that was my first meeting.
And I said, Hey dude, if you could wave a magicwand and you could get anybody in the planet to
come work with you on this, forget whetherthey're interested or available, but just who
would you want if you could get anybody?
And he gave me five names.
And I met those people and I asked them thesame question.

(19:56):
And pretty pretty soon I was talking toactually some of the best people on the planet
for like early stage, airplane engineering.
And I remember the the guy who ended up beingour first chief engineer, I met him at this
random SFO airport restaurant.
And I just showed him the models I built.
You know, I'd built a spreadsheet model of themarket, and I'd built a spreadsheet model of

(20:18):
the airplane based on kind of first orderdesign principles that I learned from just
reading textbooks and taking an airplane designclass.
I remember he looked at it and he's like, wow,I didn't expect you'd be that far along.
Also he's like, he's like, I always get pingedby these like internet guys that have airplane
ideas, and they're always kinda like fruitcake.
But this isn't fruitcake.
This actually makes sense.
This seems feasible, and it seems important.

(20:38):
And it seem it seems practical.
And so it was that kind of a reaction thatallowed me to put the early team together.
Here was a big inspiring mission.
Here was the the actually pragmatic approach toa a product and a thing where the the founder
had done enough technical work on it that thatit actually made some sense.
And so all of that, you know, all of thatmattered to getting that getting that initial

(21:00):
team together.
And once you got the engineers, they start torecruit their their friends and engineers like
to work with each other.
That's right.
Great people are magnets for great people.
Reminds me of Elon another Elon Musk storywhere there was a famous professor at Stanford,
and he wrote an article or he said to thepress, five of my top 10 students ever went to

(21:21):
this company called SpaceX.
I don't know much about it.
And Elon reached out to him to take a meeting.
And the professor figured out that halfwaythrough the meeting, he was just trying to
figure out who the other five students were.
The other five of the top 10 that that were notworking at SpaceX.
It's this maniacal pursuit of getting the verytop engineers working at your company.
There's the old Jim Collins, know, the rightpeople on the bus and get them in the right

(21:41):
seats and figure out the bus is going.
And I think that probably undersells theimportance of having an inspiring place for the
bus to be going.
But it is very true.
You believe misconception that hardwarecompanies require a lot of capital and are very
capital intensive.
Why do you believe this is a misconception?
Well, if you look at the numbers, it just tellsa different story from what everyone claims.

(22:03):
One of my general principles is is never accepta qualitative answer to a quantitative
question.
And this is this is a microcosm of that.
Like, if you look at how much money, like, Uberraised or Airbnb raised or Stripe raised, and
you compare it to, like, SpaceX and Andro andRocket Lab, it's just not factually true.
Like, the software companies many timesconsumed way more venture capital than the

(22:26):
hardware companies.
The hardware companies can have some of thebest return on invested capital stories.
It's not inherently worse for investors, andit's not inherently more capital.
The difference is the complexity indemonstrating product market fit.
And one of the lessons that I hope the worldand especially the investing world takes away
from Boom is how do you decompose risk?

(22:46):
And how do you, for a software company wheremarket risk is eliminated relatively early on
through demonstration, what does that playbooklook like for a hardware company?
Such that, you know, you can invest thedevelopment dollars with confidence that the
market will be there on the other end.
And if do the development the right way, itdoesn't actually have to be an insane amount of

(23:08):
money at all.
Speaking of money, speaking of investors, theairline industry is historically just a
terrible way to make investor money.
It's always being subsidized by the government.
How is Boom gonna make money for investors inthe space?
By building something very large and veryprofitable is the the short answer.
But if I I can put some color around that.
Today, if you look at the stalwarts ofcommercial aviation, we've got Boeing and

(23:31):
Airbus.
It's a duopoly.
You know, each's product portfolio is basicallya photocopy of the others.
Like the seven thirty seven is really the sameas an a three twenty.
A seven eighty seven is roughly the same as ana three fifty.
And so we've got we've got duopoly players withnearly identical product lines.
What that means is market forces push it tovery low gross margins.
You you see roughly 8% margins out of Boeing orAirbus.

(23:54):
And because the product capability hasn'tchanged in decades, it's low growth.
So aviation grows like slightly faster thanGDP.
And so it doesn't get big multiples.
And the fundamental margin structure thereisn't awesome.
And so, okay, enter supersonic flight.
Here's the thing with actual differentiation.
Inherently, because people will fly more andflights are faster, the market's going for

(24:16):
supersonic flight is going to be larger thanfor subsonic.
And because we have no near competitor and amulti year head start, we're not competed down
to, you know, perfect competition level grossmargins.
We can we can actually sell the airplane forwhat it's worth, which is way more than it
costs to build.
So to to give you one idea of this, just withour very first airplane, the very first
airplane is all business class.
So it's taking the passengers that today are,20% of seats, but more like 80% of

(24:41):
international airline profits, and giving thema product that they will switch for and pay
more for.
Yet because the airplane is all business class,it's actually much smaller than a typical
Boeing or Airbus.
But because it's faster, it can do twice theflight to the same airplane and crew.
So here we have a machine that is moreprofitable than a seven eighty seven that's
much larger.
Literally, the time to pay back on an overtureis gonna be about half or less the time to pay

(25:03):
back on a large Boeing or Airbus airplane.
But yet, because it's a smaller airplane, it'sphysically smaller, there's less stuff in it,
so it's cheaper to build.
So, okay, worth more, cost less to build.
This this is like econ, you know, one zero one.
That's a great recipe for a great gross marginstructure, so long as you're not in a highly
competitive environment.
And here here we are with a massive head starton something that's inherently takes a while to

(25:23):
develop with great fundamental margins, with amarket that will inherently get bigger than the
current markets.
I think boom has a long winded way of sayingthat.
I think we have a shot here at creating likeone of the most valuable companies on the
planet.
And so what that means is from an investorperspective, you can deploy like growth size
levels of capital into the company, but getventure like returns.

(25:44):
Now this is not for the faint of heart, becausethere's also it also has some element of
venture like risk in it.
We could totally fail.
But you could put very large sums of capital towork here with a venture like return profile.
So you demonstrated XB1 on X and then twentyfour or forty eight hours later you were at the
White House.

(26:05):
Talk to me about the regulatory landscape andhow is that changing and how do you see that
changing in the next few years?
The first thing to know is that, and this goesback to kind of constructing the optimal risk
profile for the company from day zero.
We designed around 20 old proven 77 leveltechnology, like our first airplane.
It's not new materials.
It's not new science.

(26:26):
It's not new technology.
It's just taking seven eighty seven, pin itdown, making it long and skinny, putting twice
as many engines so it can go twice as fast.
And what that means is from a regulatoryperspective, everything we're doing is pre
approved.
We need to go demonstrate that our design issafe, and that our manufacturing is reliable,
but we don't need to prove anything fundamentalthat hasn't been proven before.
So every single thing on the airplane has aregulatory precedent on it.

(26:47):
And that means from a FAA perspective, we'reskating downhill, and this will be much easier
to do than a new subsonic airplane with a bunchof new technology on it that's never been done
That said, there's what kind of one, I'll callit nice to have exception, which is, it was not
part of the original business plan.
The original business plan was we'll flysupersonic over water, we'll fly subsonic over
land, but we don't need to repeal this, thespeed limit over land, we don't need to fly

(27:08):
supersonic over land to have a gigantic market,at least not for version one.
And, but it turned out along the way, we didactually find a solution for Sonic Boom.
And of course, when you say, you know, you cango to from New York to London in three and a
half hours, the next question is, well, long isit New York to LA?
And, you know, and it's kind of a downer of ananswer, like, well, we're not really allowed to
do that, and maybe the rules will change oneday.
But we proved in February, we proved inFebruary that we can fly supersonic without an

(27:31):
audible sonic boom, and that we can do thatreliably.
Obviously, we should repeal this really stupidregulation that says thou shalt not fly
supersonic, and change it to something far morereasonable, like thou shalt not make bad
noises.
And if there's no sonic boom, that shoulddefinitely be okay.
So we are we're working really hard to get thatregulation changed to to legalize supersonic
flights, so that everybody can fly coast tocoast supersonic, and I'm I'm actually quite

(27:54):
optimistic that will happen.
Maybe it'll even happen quickly.
One of DOJ's mandate, most people only knowabout the cost cutting, it's actually a
regulatory cutting.
There's a lot of these regulations that werewritten in the sixties, seventies that don't
even have context.
It's like one of these things that gets passeddown with no first principles thinking and no
incentive to change.
It's it's really stifling a lot of differentindustries, especially startups.

(28:15):
Yeah.
It really it really is.
This this my least favorite one is federalaviation regulation part ninety one eight
seventeen that says, Thou shalt not flysupersonic.
So if if, you know, a couple months ago when wewe did our our, you know, boomless
announcement, we we announced that in themorning.
I think that afternoon I tweeted about my leastfavorite regulation.
Elon responded and said, This administrationwill solve this and all the other dumb

(28:38):
regulations that don't make sense.
And I flew to DC that night for a whole bunchof meetings.
And by the time I landed, I had an invitationto come to the White House.
And since then, we've been making a full courtpress on getting getting that regulation
repealed as quickly as possible.
Because what can happen here is if we if werepeal that regulation, the the already large
market gets even larger, and it and it createsdynamics where we will be able to accelerate a

(29:02):
lot of our development.
And so the the the goal is to have the firstfull scale airplane flying within within four
years.
You alluded to this earlier, but you believethat there are second order effects of being
able to fly to London more often, flying fromNew York to LA.
What do you foresee to be the impact tobusiness, to society?
The best clue of this is to kind of look backfor historical precedents.

(29:24):
And one of my favorite things to ask people iswhen when Uber first launched in San Francisco
and they were in the black car market, whatpercentage of the black car market did they
actually take?
David, do you know do you know the answer or doyou have a guess?
Percentage of the black car market that theytook in the first year, 10%?
It turns out the answer is 300.
Right?
Because they made it so much easier to accessthis desirable product that people used it way

(29:47):
more.
So it was it was a massive, like, grow the pie,not not steal a piece of the pie.
And if you look back at the closest aviationprecedent for that, it's in the 1960s when we
went from props to jets.
And say, West Coast to Hawaii went from, youknow, call it fifteen hours to more like the
seven that it is today.
But travel to Hawaii went up like six fold inthe first ten years of the jet age, and it kept

(30:11):
on growing, because we we we broke, we brokereally the time barrier to travel.
If it takes if you've got a long weekend andHawaii is fifteen hours away, you go to Napa
instead.
But when Hawaii is six or seven hours away,he's like, oh, we could take a weekend, and
then have an island vacation.
And so it's incredibly demand stimulative.
And and you can look across other so Hawaii wasnot a tourist destination before Jets.

(30:34):
Nike got their start in the nineteen sixtiesafter Jets when the founder fell in love with
Japanese style running shoes and wanted tobring them to America.
The Beatles took the first world tour innineteen sixties after the speed of the jet.
They could not have done it earlier.
And so the the the second and third ordereffects of, more world travel, we know whether
it's for personal things or business, I thinkare are gigantic.

(30:58):
And history shows that when you speed up travelat a at a price point that a market can afford,
demand skyrockets.
It's like this compounding force.
If you think about how many more deals couldget done in person versus on a Zoom, the
incremental trip that gets done, you do thebusiness deal, you start the company, that
company has an innovation and it goes goes outto the entire ecosystem.

(31:19):
So you have this magnifying force.
It's almost impossible to predict.
I think that's right.
You know, and people have predicted for a longtime that various forms of telecom were gonna
obviate the need for travel.
Like, was the story around email.
We can remember back that far.
Email was gonna kill business travel, and itdidn't.
And I and I think actually the the reality isthe exact opposite.

(31:39):
The better the ability to maintain some kind ofa relationship at distance, the the more
feasible it becomes to have that relationshipand the more important it is to show up in
person.
So when when flights to Australia take as longas flights to Hawaii do today, now all of a
sudden it makes it a lot more feasible to maybeput a remote office in Australia than it is

(32:00):
today.
Stay in touch over Zoom for part of it, butsometimes it's gonna be really important to get
together.
And all of that's gonna be new travel demand.
Another, the evolutionary purpose for in personmeetings.
One is nonverbal communication.
93% of communication is nonverbal, so itdramatically increases communication in person.
Two is social bonding.
When you're in person it releases oxytocin, thebonding hormone, which promotes trust and

(32:25):
cooperation.
Three is increased creativity.
Face to face interactions spark more ideas.
13.36 per session compared to virtual meetings,which is our about 10 per session.
And trust building, 85%, more trust building inin person meetings.
So that's just my quick, perplexity search,but, I'm sure there's there's other side

(32:46):
effects as well.
All of that sounds right.
I mean, you know, if you're falling in lovewith somebody, you don't wanna Zoom.
You wanna go.
Right?
Do you ever plan to make Boom a retail productand something that every man could could
access, or is it always gonna be businesstravel?
The road map here looks a lot like Tesla's roadmap.
The XB one was sort of like the Tesla Roadster.
And here here's a proof that, you know, theTesla Roadsters will take a cell phone battery

(33:08):
and a Lotus Lee's body and prove you can make acompelling electric car.
But it wasn't for very many people.
And the Overture one is sort of like the ModelS.
There are tens of millions of people.
Anybody who's flying business today will beable to afford to fly Supersonic.
And that's tens of millions of people a year,but it's not quite everybody.
And, you know, I want to get to the point whereeverybody from the president to every family
can benefit from faster flight.

(33:28):
You know, I want I want a universe in which wetalk about second order effects.
What happens when our kids grow up with friendsfrom other continents that they actually know
and spend time with?
And then to do that, you need speed and youneed affordability.
And so there's ultimately gonna be a wholefamily of products here.
You know, we'll go from the Model S to theModel three.
There will be second generation airplanes.
There'll be some that are bigger, and therebycan reduce the cost per seat.

(33:50):
And there'll be some that are smaller that arefor more private use cases.
So just like a way Boeing has an entire familyof subsonic products.
We're gonna have an entire family of supersonicproducts.
And the art is really to just pick the rightfirst things to build.
The XP-one, then the Overture, and then there'sa whole roadmap behind that.
You have over a decade of of experience, whichI like to call mistakes building something, and

(34:11):
you've built this world class company.
What do you wish you knew before starting Boom?
And how would you counsel the next generationof hardware entrepreneurs?
What lessons would you give them to make iteasier for them to build the next Boom?
The single biggest lesson learned out of XP Onewas how to how to be more pragmatic.
We set the set the original design goals forXB-one and Overture quite, quite high.

(34:32):
We wanted to be faster than Concorde.
We wanted the very first prototype to be ableto carry at least one passenger.
That that drove us into technical challengesthat were far more, well, challenging than than
they really needed to be.
Like, at Mach 2.2, 10 percent faster thanConcorde, it drove us to a really skinny wing
and a very long, slender fuselage.

(34:53):
And that meant, well, with a long skinny,fuselage, tiny wing, all the low speed handling
becomes much harder to make it work.
The landing gear becomes harder to designbecause it has to fit in this really tiny
space.
And so we made the engineering challenge for XBone dramatically higher than it really needed
to be.
As we went along the way and we found thosechallenges, we sort of backed off on some of

(35:13):
what the initial targets had been, but we werestill sort of stuck with the legacy of those
decisions.
Like, once we started building the airplane,well, it was gonna be long and skinny, and we
had to solve all the long and skinny problemseven if we'd convinced ourselves that it didn't
actually need to go Mach 2.2 And so the thesingle biggest lesson learned out of XB one was
really how to build a pragmatic supersonic jet.
And we changed a lot of what Overture was goingto be.

(35:34):
We we we backed off on speed from 2.2 Mach to1.7, which is really about a fifteen minute
difference in a flight time across theAtlantic, but a dramatic difference in the
challenge of the airplane, dramatic differencein the development cost.
And so I'm really glad I'm really glad we didXB-one, because otherwise we would have set out
to build actually what would have been thewrong overture.
Overture needed to be actually bigger becausethe passenger demand was higher, but it needed

(35:57):
to be simpler so it'd be easier to birth.
And so my, you know, my my put to hardwarefounders is constantly challenge what you think
you have to do.
And what you what you wanna be is on the happyside of a lot of market demand, and also on the
happy side of of where the really hardtechnical problems are.
And so always challenge always challenge therequirements.
Always challenge what you're setting out to do,and ruthlessly try to simplify simplify the

(36:21):
mission.
I put the speed, I was very afraid the teamwould compromise on speed.
And so I I put it on my license tag.
My license tag was 2.2, and the Wi Fi passwordwas Mach two point two or bust.
And, but it was a design parameter, and it wasreally the wrong one.
And it made it much slower to get pragmatic.

(36:41):
So don't get wedded to design parameters andconstantly challenge them.
Try to find a thing that's really important andvaluable to customers, but is dead simple as it
possibly can be.
You know, you don't start SpaceX by buildingStarship first.
You started by building Falcon one and thenFalcon nine and then you make Falcon nine
reusable, right?
And that is, I think that is the arc ofpragmatic hardware development.

(37:02):
Keep early things as dead simple as you can.
Just like first principles thinking, also wantfirst principles goals.
What are you actually trying to achieve?
Or else you start to get into these arbitraryconstraints.
What made you evolve from the 2.2 to 1.7?
We ran the math and we looked at what thechallenges were.
And we knew it up upfront because we've beenfighting it all on XB-one.

(37:26):
At 2.2, we were gonna be fifteen, twentyminutes faster across The Atlantic, but we were
gonna burn something like 40% more fuel.
And we were gonna have to qualify an entirelynew material system that was different from
what was already proven on the seven eightyseven.
I I, it was a very sad day for me.
Mach 2.2 just was, I don't know, I just likethe number, but it was the right pragmatic

(37:46):
decision.
And, and we, you know, you had to you had tomake these decisions on the fact base.
You're willing to cut off the arm to let, letthe body survive.
Yeah.
But also there's another mindset here.
Like, so the development, like short cycles,big at short cycles, and long cycles big at
long cycles.
And the extreme example of this is like, thingsare at Boeing and Airbus now, which literally
been twenty years since since either of thoseguys has launched an all new product.

(38:10):
So if you're an engineer at Boeing and there isactually a new airplane coming, who knows when
they'll ever do another one, but eventually,hopefully they will.
And you've got a an idea you're excited about,you're gonna fight really hard to get it on
that airplane.
Because if you don't, who knows when there'sanother one coming?
It might not happen in your career.
Think of it like catching a train.
If the trains come every five minutes and youmiss one, it doesn't matter.
You get on the next one.

(38:30):
But if the trains come every like twenty years,you're really, really sad if you don't make
that train.
And so it leads to this sort of, you know, overoverburdening of every product with with
features.
But but instead of you operating the assumptionthat we're gonna develop new airplanes much
faster, and we're gonna have new products thatcome out frequently, and then it allows each
step to be a smaller step and therefore farmore tractable.

(38:53):
You had this huge goal and this visionary goal.
Talk to me about how you take a really big goaland chunk it down into a way to build momentum
in the product cycle.
So one way that looks internally is somethingwe call mission success events.
And I'll you the story of how we got to that.
Mission success event is like an incrementalmilestone on the road to success.
The way we got to is we were we were buildingXP one, and we'd thrown down the gauntlet, and

(39:17):
we'd said, we're gonna roll it out in October.
And we hadn't finished building it yet.
And the team committed to the goal.
We went to, like, seven day work weeks.
People were working long hours.
They're working incredibly hard to to to tofinish this product in a in a way that we'd be
really proud to show the world.
Literally down to, like, scrubbing theairframe, polishing it, giving it the most

(39:39):
incredible paint job.
When we rolled that thing out, we get we put inthe most unforgiving lighting environment you
could possibly imagine with these light bars.
Like, you could see you could see animperfection on it if it was there.
And and the team just busted their asses to getthat done.
After the milestone, I said, okay.
We're gonna give the whole company a week off.
And then we're gonna come back.
We're gonna run again.
And the next goal is to fly the airplane.
The the team the team came back, and everyonewas, like, whining about being burned out.

(40:03):
At first, I was like, what are you talkingabout?
Like, I just gave you a week off.
Like, what do you mean you're burned out?
Eventually, what I realized was burnout isn'twhat everyone says it is.
Burnout is not like, I'm working too hard fortoo long.
Burnout is, I'm working, but the the emotionalpayoff is too far out in the future and not
tangible enough.
Side, like, think, you know, I think each of uskinda has like a I I call it a gratification

(40:26):
window, which is like, you know, how long outin the future does can a goal be, before it,
like, loses its its ability to inspire us?
What I learned was that most of the teamprobably had about a it was healthy to plan for
kind of a one month gratification cycle.
And so instead of saying our goal is to go flythe airplane, we chunked down the work such
that there was one major milestone about everymonth, and we'd work really hard for that

(40:49):
milestone, and then the whole company wouldcelebrate it.
And we we do we do this now across the entireentire company.
And by the way, the entire company celebrates amission success event from any team.
Like, if we close a government contract, thewhole company has a party.
If we release a big part of the airplane out ofengineering and into manufacturing, the whole
company has a party.
And so scheduling those with regularity,engineering emotional payoffs is a big deal

(41:13):
because otherwise, the the goal just feelsintractable to too much of the team, and the
pace slows down, the motivation drops, andburnout sets in.
And so teams can actually work at insanely highintensities for long periods of time without
feeling burned out, so long as there isengineered emotional payoff along the way.
It's a difference between invigoration andburnout.

(41:35):
Both could be working really hard, workinghundred hour weeks.
One is actually accelerating and and moremotivated.
The other one is actually burning up.
I looked up there's a famous study, HarvardBusiness School study by Theresa Amabill and
Steven Kramer on the benefits of celebratingsmall wins.
I looked up some of the some of the outputs.
Recognizing small accomplishments can boostmood and confidence, improve motivation, help

(41:58):
form good habits, enhance skills like focus,goal setting, create a sense of purpose,
inspire, motivate others.
So there is actually a study on this fromacademia.
Science and practice absolutely 100% lined upthere.
Break a big goal down into regular payoffs andhave like a relatively low bar for celebrating
victories is important.
And it relates to another thing which kind ofgoes to scheduling philosophy.

(42:19):
And we went in a bunch of different directionson this before I think we really cracked the
nut on it.
For long projects, tend to create a schedule.
And and schedules are schedules, you you'dthink they would be, ah, this is the thing that
tells us when everything is going to happen.
No, it's not.
Nothing ever goes according to schedule.
And if you try to make everything go accordingto schedule, now everything in the schedule is
sandbagged because nobody wants to miss a date.
Now the schedule is bloated.

(42:41):
There's no chance to, there's no overachieve.
And inevitably something is still challengingand you miss even the bloated schedule.
And so, eventually we threw that out.
We said, I I actually, it's not a schedule,it's a work plan.
And what it tells you the interdependencies oftasks, and it is the tool that you use to
adjust when when something doesn't go accordingto expectation.
We sort of build our schedules with, you know,everything is kind of 15% optimistic.

(43:03):
We we we assume we don't run into any majorroadblocks.
So it's kinda like assuming you don't get anytraffic lights on red, there's no there's no
traffic jam and you speed by 15 miles an And,and now do you ever hit those dates?
No.
But sometimes you do at elements.
And when you find a challenge, now you go intothem with energy and you find a way to overcome
them.
And, and then that feeds back into the cultureof you celebrate all the victories.

(43:23):
And this creates a reward cycle versus like,well, we had this time based goal, it was too
optimistic, we missed it, and now we feel likewe lost, but actually we busted our asses and
we want to feel like we won.
When building something so ambitious, youreally have to look after your psyche and what
goes in your environment.
Talk to me about your information diet and whatwould you read?

(43:44):
Who inspired you as you're building Boom?
If I go back to day zero, the Apple ThinkDifferent campaign from 1997 was a huge
influence.
And that was that was the one that Steve didwhen he came back to Apple, and they were like
ninety days from bankruptcy.
And he he did the most, I think, unintuitivething, which is let's launch a brand marketing
campaign.
And I I I think the real audience for that wasactually the employees, not the external

(44:07):
audience.
The the refrain was the people who are crazyenough to think they can change the world are
the ones who do.
I I think that's what gave him the internalpermission to go off and do iPhone.
And before that, do iPod, and redefine whatApple was when it was busy getting its ass
kicked by the, you know, the Wintel PC domain.
That you're gonna build supersonic jets.
It was a very like heady thing for me.

(44:28):
It was a very weird thing for my ego.
It's like almost sort of declaring to myfriends, or anyone I'm gonna talk to about
this, that I'm gonna be in that club.
Because if it if it worked, it's historic.
And and yet, like, there's absolutely noguarantee it would work.
And and, you know, it's most likely to fail.
And, and I remember thinking about the peoplelike Steve who laid those goals out, the people
like Bill Gates, said he was gonna put acomputer in every home and on every desk

(44:52):
running his software, like, the nineteenseventies when that was laughable.
The people who who set audacious goals and thenachieve them, like we know who they are.
History remembers their names.
But I have to believe there's also a darkmatter of entrepreneurship, the people who set
lofty goals and don't get there for whateverreason.
I made a very conscious choice.
I'd rather be in the dark matter ofentrepreneurs than the wantrepreneur.

(45:14):
I didn't want to ever be like 80, lookingbackwards, having taken a whole series of safe,
big company jobs with guaranteed big pay, andwondering what if I'd ever had the courage to
pursue my dream.
And I was thinking like it probably wouldn'thave worked, but what if it had?
It's become almost fashionable to talk aboutegotism and how egotism is bad, but sometimes
you have to actually say something that soundsabsurd or that sounds egotistical.

(45:38):
I'm gonna do this thing that nobody has everdone and the only difference that separates an
egotist from an inspirational figure is whetherthey actually execute.
So it's not the goal, it's not thinking thatyou're better than or that you have a chance to
do something remarkable.
It's that you're willing to do the hard workafter making these kind of statements.
Yeah.
You know, do the hard work before and after.
And it's not a, know, it's not a blind jump.

(45:59):
Like, had a spreadsheet model that saidsupersonic flight should exist and it was
practical.
Did I want do I wanna have them the courage togo make a run at it or not?
And I I think, you know, the the ego thing isinteresting.
So I think a lot of what we our culturalvocabulary about ego is like reversed.
And, you know, talk about somebody's got a bigego and they run around bragging.
I think that's actually the hallmark of areally small self, a really small ego.

(46:21):
So a lot of our terminology on this isbackwards.
And I think there's some still figuring out tobe done there almost at a cultural level.
Yeah, healthy ego is kind of like good plasticsurgery or good sales.
It's hard to see because you don't cringe at itwhen you look at it.
That's right.
And it's quiet.
It's not braggadocio.
When when you're successful, when could we seethe fruits of your labor?

(46:42):
When could I take either an international ordomestic flight as a civilian living in The
United States?
Our goal is a little over four years.
We wanna be ready for passengers by the end oftwenty twenty nine.
To to put that in a bit of context and why, youknow, why I believe in that, you know, although
there's certainly no guarantee.
Today, we are about where the triple seven wasfive years before it carried passengers.

(47:03):
Meaning we just had a design freeze.
The outer lines of the airplane are frozen.
We've got the high level design, the high levelschematics are all done, and we're proceeding
into more detailed development.
And and so if we execute as well as the oldgood Boeing of the nineties did on the seven
seventy seven program will be ready forpassengers in about five years from where we
are today.
And of course, you know, our goal will be to dobetter than Boeing of the nineties did, because

(47:27):
we've got a whole lot of tools that didn'texist back then.
The triple seven was actually the firstairplane that was built in CAD to put that in
context.
And today we have all kinds of digital tools onone hand.
On the other hand, we're also building thecompany as we build an airplane, and that
brings with it all kinds of new challenge.
When you build your investor base, you've hadto really curate it towards people that aligned
with your vision and your mission.

(47:48):
Tell me about how you get to somebody's coremission as investor.
How do you vet the right investors to goalongside your journey at Boone?
The early days was a lot of trial and error,and we we got a lot of no's from from VC.
And it took me a long time to understand why.
And the I thought, well, VCs are in the moneyin the business of making money making
investments.
And, you know, I could I could show a planwhere this was gonna be a great IRR and and a

(48:13):
huge multiple on invested capital.
Like, why are people saying no?
Well, it it turned out to be a bunch of things,but what one of them was just that the the the
time lines didn't make were an impedancemismatch for for fund dynamics.
So, you know, if the you if you got a ten yearfund, you're gonna raise a new fund every
twelve to twenty four months, you need thingsthat are gonna exit in a reasonable timeframe,
important to show good marks along the way,full fit pattern matches for LPs and other

(48:38):
things have been successful.
And like none of those things were part of ourbusiness.
And so so pretty quickly we realized, you know,VCs aren't, know, it's easy to think as an
entrepreneur, VCs are the people with money.
But they're not really.
Like they're actually money managers.
And their customers are LPs, and the startupsare the product getting sold.
And, you know, like you think back at the thewhat used to be said about Facebook, like, you
know, if the product's free, you're theproduct.

(48:59):
Well, if the product pays you, you aredefinitely the product, right?
And so the the the the dynamics that made a lotof sense for software companies did not make a
lot of sense for what we were doing.
And so what we ended up doing is skipping theVCs and going straight to the LPs.
And that turned out to be tremendouslysuccessful because it removed this sort of
mismatch layer of the fund dynamics that were,you know, fundamentally just, you know, not a

(49:21):
good fit for Boom.
And so, you know, as an example, you know,Sequoia never invested in Boom, but Michael
Moritz did, and he wrote a Sequoia size check.
Greylock never invested in in Boom, but ReidHoffman did, and he wrote a Greylock size
check.
And, you know, I could keep going like that.
Many of our you know, a whole lot of the Boomfunding is direct relationships with LPs or
SPVs that were created outside of the funddynamic ecosystem that fundamentally wasn't a

(49:45):
fit.
And that's kinda how we got XB1 done.
But now we sit here and we are under five yearsfrom flying a full scale airplane.
We're hopefully five years from carryingpassengers and earning like billions in
revenue.
And I think all of a sudden now that we'reinside that envelope where it's no longer the
fun dynamics are no longer a mismatch.
How should people follow you on this journey?

(50:06):
Where could they learn more about Boom?
And anything else you'd like to share?
We are extraordinarily open.
Know, tell the team, like if we took everythingwe had in our CAD database and just published
on the internet, probably our odds of successwould actually go up because people don't
realize all the stuff we have that we reallyhave.
And so we are we're super open.
Follow me on on X bshoal.
Follow the company boomero, A E R O.

(50:28):
And we we try to try to sort of cut a hole inthe the side of the building and just let
people peek in, because we're on a we're on apretty fun journey, I want others to be to come
along and follow along and enjoy it along withus.
Thank you, Blake.
Thank you for sharing your time, and thank youfor being an inspiration to so many.
Well, thank you, David.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you for having
Thanks for listening to my conversation withBlake.
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(50:50):
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