Started from Zero at 33 — Now He’s Building a $1B Airline | Blake Scholl

Marina Mogilko 0:00 So you worked at Amazon?

Blake Scholl 0:01 It was just an absolutely incredible place. They were paying me very well, and I was 33. Groupon had, like, acqui-hired my first company. Uh, I was running the world's largest spam operation.

Marina Mogilko 0:10 Do you have a family?

Blake Scholl 0:11 Yes, 14-month-old daughter, and, like, twins who had just been born.

Marina Mogilko 0:14 And you decide to quit your corporate job and start something completely new?

Blake Scholl 0:19 I guess. There has not been a startup in aviation for a century. There is opportunity, and we have to take advantage of it quickly enough. We raised $150 million from, like, some of the most amazing investors: Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Y Combinator, Bessemer-

Marina Mogilko 0:31 Congratulations

Blake Scholl 0:31 ... Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman. Like, all of those people put in at least $10 million. The world is very open to supersonic right now. Now we've got runway, and then we broke the sound barrier, and it was 24 hours from breaking the sound barrier to being in the West Wing of the White House.

Marina Mogilko 0:43 Can you give advice to someone who's stuck with their idea of building a Boom-sized company-

Blake Scholl 0:48 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 0:49 ... but they just can't take this leap of faith? They have a family.

Blake Scholl 0:52 Oh, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 0:53 Blake,

Marina Mogilko 0:54 thank you so much. I'm so excited about this conversation because you did something [chime] a lot of people are dreaming of, but they don't have enough courage. And I wanted to focus, um, this conversation on basically how you changed your mindset and went from a corporate job at Amazon to building the next-generation airline. So you worked at Amazon, right? You were a tech guy for 13 years?

Blake Scholl 1:20 Uh, I was at Amazon for about five, and then another startup, and then a startup I founded, and then that got acqui-hired by Groupon. But so yeah, I was bopping around tech for, like, 14 years. I started my first company in my parents' basement in high school, and, uh, and I always just wanted to go where the most interesting stuff was happening and, like, build something new. It was one of the things that was sort of a, like, mind fuck for me is, like, I didn't see myself as radically different. And the decision... I remember really struggling with the decision to, to start Boom. And, uh, and it was like, this is- like, if by going and starting a supersonic jet company, I'm almost, like, telling the world that I'm different. Uh, because if it succeeds, it will, like, by definition, be historic. And I'm like, "Who am I to do this? I don't have the resume for this." Um, like, and then I, I... T- the way I kinda got my mind around it was a couple

Blake Scholl 2:12 things. One was I was very inspired by that 1997 Apple ad campaign, where the, the tagline was, "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world-

Marina Mogilko 2:21 Uh-huh

Blake Scholl 2:21 ... are the ones who do." And it's, it's really true. And then, and then I thought of Bill Gates, you know, who had started Microsoft in the '70s and had set a goal of, uh, putting a computer in every home and on every desk running Microsoft software. And, and it was- like, at the time he said that, that was, like, absurd. A- and yet he did it.

Marina Mogilko 2:41 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 2:41 And I was like, "Wow, okay." So people have to be willing to declare big things in order for the big things to actually happen. And the ones, the ones who try and succeed, you know, we k- we know who they are. History knows their names. You know, it's the Wright brothers, who were bicycle entrepreneurs turned i- inventor of literally the airplane.

Marina Mogilko 3:01 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 3:01 You know, Jobs, Gates, like, everyone else we know at that level. And, and there's probably also, like, a dark matter of entrepreneurs, the people who, the people who tried, and they didn't succeed.

Marina Mogilko 3:13 Exactly, and we don't hear about those people, right?

Blake Scholl 3:15 We don't hear about them. And I was like, "Okay, really my choice is, like, do I wanna be in that category if I fail, or would I rather be in the category of people who didn't try?" And once I saw it that way, like, I was like, "I'd rather be in the dark matter of entrepreneurs than in the, like, didn't try."

Marina Mogilko 3:31 Did you have an opportunity to work with, uh, Jeff Bezos directly when you were at Amazon?

Blake Scholl 3:33 I did a little bit. Like, you know, I was approximately engineer number 200. So it was, it was after IPO, like, the place was established. You know, I think I got in two weeks before the dot-com hiring freeze.

Marina Mogilko 3:45 Oh.

Blake Scholl 3:45 So the bubble, the bubble was, like, imploding as I was, like, rushing in the door. [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 3:50 [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 3:50 Um, and yeah, I was something like engineer number 200, and the, the... Like, Amazon, um, I mean, I don't know what it's like now, but, like, back then, it was just an absolutely incredible place. And, uh, everyone worked hard. There was, like, more important stuff to be done than people to do it, which, um, makes it very apolitical. There's like, no one's, like, competing for what work and projects. So, like, projects are, like, sitting on the floor, and if you wanna do one, just, like, pick it up and just do it. And so I got to work on something that, that Jeff cared about, uh, just 'cause I was excited about it and did it, and it was basically doing, um, Amazon's first ad buy from Google. This was, like, 2003, so it wasn't obvious that web search was gonna be important. It wasn't s- uh, obvious that, like, search engine marketing was going to be important. And, uh, and we ended up building this thing that was the first automated ad management system on the internet. Um, and it, at one time, I think it was responsible, at the same time, for 7% of Amazon's revenue-

Marina Mogilko 4:43 Wow

Blake Scholl 4:43 ... and 7% of Google's revenue.

Marina Mogilko 4:45 Wow!

Blake Scholl 4:46 And, and it was just like... Like, I, I managed to, like, extract my, you know... I sort of visualize it as I'm standing next to a rocket, and my, like, jacket, like, gets caught on the rocket, and the rocket launches, and I'm, like, up there with the rocket, like, kind of hanging on.

Marina Mogilko 4:57 [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 4:57 Like, wow, can I... You know, and I, like, you know, so, like, Jeff cared. It got a lot of visibility into Amazon, and I always felt like I was just, like, an inch from screwing it up enough that they would fire me and put somebody who actually knew what they were doing in charge of it. [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 5:08 What was your key learning? What- you did this amazing project with Jeff.

Blake Scholl 5:11 Yeah. I mean, there was, like, a bunch of key learnings out of it. Um, and like, one was sort of the, the experience, um, is it re- reflecting back on it many years later, uh, the, the experience of looking at a space, everyone's doing it one way. So back, back then, search engine marketing, it was all done by hand. Like, people would, people would choose their keywords, write their ads, and so they could only have a few keywords and only a few ads, and Amazon had millions of products. But, like, most of the competitors would, like, they'd buy, like, the keyword, like, camera or, like, cellphone, and those, those would be, like, bid up with tons of ads on them. But there were 300 million unique searches per month. Most of them had no ads.... I was like, "Oh, we should just buy, like, ignore the popular things."

Marina Mogilko 5:50 Mm-hmm.

Blake Scholl 5:51 "We'll buy, we'll buy all the rest of them and do it with automation." And so at the meta level, it was this experience of, like, looking at a space, everyone's doing it one way. There's actually a completely different way. Let's go do that, and then we actually made it work. And I, I hadn't really had this thought until right now, but probably that, like, ticked something in me of like, "Okay, we can go look at a space, think differently about it than everyone else has ever done-

Marina Mogilko 6:12 Yeah

Blake Scholl 6:12 ... and, like, make something successful."

Marina Mogilko 6:13 [upbeat music] When I was preparing for this interview, I jumped on a call with the CMO of Boom, and I was fascinated by the strategic approach they used to build the company. She told me that before they actually designed the passenger seats, they researched what their target audience might like, what type of seats they prefer, what type of service they prefer, and only then they build the product, the airline. And this customer-first approach should be the foundation for every company's product strategy. If you understand how important marketing is, you will find this report by HubSpot very interesting. It's HubSpot's newly released marketing strategy report for 2025. It unveils cutting-edge trends, powerful tools, and proven strategies that will boost your 2025 marketing approach and help you stay ahead in an AI-first world. They interviewed over 1,200 marketing leaders across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and this report offers practical strategies for seamlessly integrating AI tools into your marketing workflow, data-backed approaches to ensure success in both B2B and B2C marketing, actionable steps for building content-driven, social-first strategies that resonate with your audience. It's not enough to just keep up with the AI in marketing. You need to lead it. Download the report now, and turn these cutting-edge insights into immediate results for your marketing efforts. It's absolutely free. Link in the description below. Do you remember

Marina Mogilko 7:38 that day when you woke up, and you thought, like, "I want to take this leap and build an airline?"

Blake Scholl 7:43 Oh, yeah, a couple threads that connected up to it. Like, one was I'd seen a Concorde in a museum in my 20s, and I'd set a lifetime goal of flying supersonic, and I put a Google alert on it. That was, like, one thread. Like, another thread was, uh, every time I would get on an airplane, I would ask, "What would this be like if somebody like Johnny Ive had designed it, not like whoever actually did at Boeing?" And so that would, like, rattle around my head, and I, I sort of had in my head, like, "Oh, I wanna become an internet billionaire and then start an aviation company." And then the, the first part never happened. [chuckles] And so I had this thing on my to-do list that was like, "Figure out how to start an aerospace company," and, like, nothing happened with it-

Marina Mogilko 8:17 Wow. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 8:17 ... for 10 years.

Marina Mogilko 8:18 [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 8:18 Uh, and eventually,

Blake Scholl 8:20 you know, uh, Groupon had, like, acqui-hired my first company. Uh, I was running, I was running, like, the world's largest, like, spam operation, and it was just so demoralizing.

Marina Mogilko 8:30 Mm.

Blake Scholl 8:30 And I... And like I, I... They were paying me very well, and I was, like, saving up money. In my head, I was saving up money to buy myself an airplane. And at some point, I'm like, "It's not worth staying here longer for the airplane to be better. I'm just gonna fire myself and, like, go do something else." Um-

Marina Mogilko 8:45 How old were you?

Blake Scholl 8:46 I was, uh, 33.

Marina Mogilko 8:47 33.

Blake Scholl 8:47 33.

Marina Mogilko 8:48 Do you have a family back then, or?

Blake Scholl 8:50 Uh, I had just... Yes. Uh, I think I had s- a 14-month-old daughter-

Marina Mogilko 8:56 [gasps]

Blake Scholl 8:57 ... and, like, twins who had just been born.

Marina Mogilko 8:59 And you decide to quit your corporate job and start something completely new?

Blake Scholl 9:05 I guess. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 9:06 Uh-

Marina Mogilko 9:06 Were you scared? Like, for me, I have a three, a three-year-old and a five-year-old for us-

Blake Scholl 9:10 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 9:10 ... with my husband.

Blake Scholl 9:11 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 9:12 To, like, change our lives completely, just unimaginable right now.

Blake Scholl 9:14 Um, it didn't feel so crazy to me at the time. Uh, my, my then wife was like, "Well, okay, honey, you've got a year to screw around with this jet thing."

Marina Mogilko 9:24 Oh, she gave you a year. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 9:24 "And then, and then, you know, and then I expect you to get a job."

Marina Mogilko 9:27 Yeah. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 9:28 [chuckles] But I, I'd saved up enough money that... I, I, I think this is actually important. I had, I had saved up enough money. In my head, I'd budgeted for two failed startups.

Marina Mogilko 9:35 Mm.

Blake Scholl 9:35 So I, I could, I could, like, start one, seed it with a little bit of money, fail, start another one, seed it with a little money, and fail before I'd actually have to get a job.

Marina Mogilko 9:42 But it's also about time, right?

Marina Mogilko 9:44 It's not just about money, 'cause-

Blake Scholl 9:45 Right

Marina Mogilko 9:45 ... at a startup, you work, like, what? 20 hours a day?

Blake Scholl 9:49 Uh, you know, maybe 28 some days.

Marina Mogilko 9:50 Yeah, but, like, [chuckles] how, how do you manage that with kids?

Blake Scholl 9:54 Um-

Marina Mogilko 9:54 Do you, do you regret, like, missing that time when they were so young, or you were able to?

Blake Scholl 9:58 I mean, I str- I struggled with it, uh, for sure, and in some ways, in some ways, I was a very reluctant father back then. Um, and then, uh, you know, a- a- along the way, you know, I got divorced, and it actually made me a better father. Um, 'cause I, I realized, like, when I... You know, I, I only have the kids half the time, and when I have them, I wanna be really present.

Marina Mogilko 10:16 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 10:17 And, and so I think it, you know, it's not like this is the situation I ever would've designed, but it probably actually made me a better father and a better CEO, and it sort of forced just getting efficient. Uh, like, "Okay, I'm not gonna be the dad that spends the most time, but the time I spend

Blake Scholl 10:30 better, better be good."

Marina Mogilko 10:31 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so you decide to start an airline company with no formal education in aerospace engineering whatsoever.

Blake Scholl 10:39 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 10:40 Can you walk me through this mindset where you're like, "Yeah, I can just learn it by myself?" [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 10:44 A- a- again, I think it mattered that I'd sort of given myself a year to wander around. And, um, you know, I sort of thought, "Okay, supersonic jets would obviously be great. No one's doing it." Conventional wisdom says that means there's something wrong with the idea. Like, you get told that in Silicon Valley all the time. "If your idea is any good, there are three or four teams already working on it." And by the way, it's total bullshit. It's terrible advice.

Marina Mogilko 11:09 Thank you. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 11:09 Terrible advice. Um, as-

Marina Mogilko 11:11 It's great to hear that.

Blake Scholl 11:11 What, what, what happens-

Marina Mogilko 11:12 Refreshing. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 11:12 ... what that does is it creates a herd mentality. On one hand, it's like, oh, like, you know, there's a zillion people building ChatGPT wrappers. Back in the day, there was a zillion people building photo-sharing apps, and then there are entire things that have nobody working on them, and nobody will work on them 'cause they don't want to be alone. Or they, they figure, "If this were good, there'd be another team," and it's just, it's just terrible advice. And so, um, I thought, "Okay, well, it probably it will be a bad idea, but I wanna know for myself why." And the internet was full of conventional wisdom about, um, why supersonic jets couldn't exist. You know, like, oh, people won't pay more for speed, and it's inherently more expensive, and you can't have a big enough market unless you can solve supersonic flight over land, which is technical and regulatory.... and so decades of R&D is going to be required to solve all these things. And, uh, observe those are all qualitative claims about quantitative questions. Like, supersonic flight costs more. Okay, why, and how much more? People won't pay more for speed? Well, that doesn't seem right.

Marina Mogilko 12:12 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 12:12 People pay more for direct flights than connecting flights all the time.

Marina Mogilko 12:15 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 12:15 It's a question of how much. Um, the market's not big enough for that supersonic flight over land. Is it? How big is big enough? It's a measurable thing. And so, uh, and so I just started building spreadsheets.

Marina Mogilko 12:26 I like this approach. Quantify everything.

Blake Scholl 12:28 Quantify everything-

Marina Mogilko 12:28 Yeah

Blake Scholl 12:28 ... and don't accept other people's conclusions about quantitative questions. I've seen that over and over again, where, like, yeah, there are these, like, claims, and like sometimes I still make the mistake of accepting them, and then I go build the spreadsheet model, and I find it's very surprising what the real truth is. So at any rate, I discovered that if you could build, um, basically a single-digit efficiency improvement, um, like just a few percent better than Concorde designed in the 1960s, you could build a supersonic seat with the economics of a business class flatbed.

Blake Scholl 12:57 And then-

Marina Mogilko 12:58 And then once you had those calculations, you're like, "I need to hire the best people?"

Blake Scholl 13:01 Well, there was a little bit more. Like, that was a three-line spreadsheet, and it was like, okay, it doesn't... On the face of it, it seems plausible. At that point, I bought every textbook I could find, and I started reading it. I did remedial calculus and physics, 'cause I hadn't had any since high school, and I started building a more detailed spreadsheet model of the airplane and a more detailed spreadsheet model of the market. And in the middle of '14, I, you know, kind of had it developed a bit, and I took it to a professor at Stanford, 'cause these things are sometimes, like, assumptions in-

Marina Mogilko 13:27 Yeah

Blake Scholl 13:27 ... you know, conclusions out, but the, the, the quality of the answer is only as good as the quality of the assumption. And, you know, there were assumptions in there about, like, lift-to-drag ratios, which is aerodynamic efficiency, specific fuel consumption, which is, like, how efficient an engine is, and, like, where could we get on a couple of those key parameters would impact whether the end product was practical or not. So I took it to a professor at Stanford who had done a bunch of supersonics research, and I'm like: Dude, I have not... You know, I've been at this for, like, two seconds. I don't know what I'm doing. Like, you know where R&D is at on these things now. Are any of these assumptions reasonable? And he said, "Blake, if you're gonna do this, you need to push your team way harder, because all of these are conservative." And I remember, like, leaving his office in this, like, like, stupor in a way of like: Wow, I don't know how it could be that I'm the human that, like, stumbled across the practicality of supersonic passenger flight when nobody else did, but either I have no courage, or I'm gonna go find some people and, like, see how far we can get this. Um, and, and it... That decision really did come down to just... It, it felt like a choice of courage.

Marina Mogilko 14:29 How

Marina Mogilko 14:30 was it hiring people from major airline companies-

Blake Scholl 14:34 Yeah, the, the-

Marina Mogilko 14:34 ... without having the experience, right?

Blake Scholl 14:36 So people, people think that, like, the engineering of building a supersonic jet must be really hard, and, you know, it, it is in a way, but it's, like, the third-hardest thing at Boom. Like, the third-hardest thing at Boom is engineering. The next-hardest thing is financing, and the actual hardest thing is team. And, and the reason team is so hard is that, um, there has not been a startup in aviation for a century.

Marina Mogilko 14:58 Oh.

Blake Scholl 14:58 Like, literally-

Marina Mogilko 14:59 Yeah

Blake Scholl 14:59 ... the last new commercial airplane company was Douglas Aircraft, founded in 1921. So all the founders retired in the 1960s, which is a big part of why we don't have supersonic already. Um, and then, you know, and so these, and so then you've got the founders, and then the founders retire, and then you've got the people who work with the founders, and then those people retire, and then, God help us, the accountants take over. Um, and, uh, and that's, uh, that's very much the story of Boeing, but, like, the, the Bo- there, you know, there's PayPal mafia.

Marina Mogilko 15:27 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 15:28 Right? There's, like, Amazon mafia. There is no Boeing mafia. [chuckles] Like, there are no entrepreneurial-minded people who come out of these big companies, and so we had to, like, find people from bizarre other corners of the universe-

Marina Mogilko 15:40 Mm.

Blake Scholl 15:40 ... um, uh, or find people who had, like, gone to Boeing and are- were still early in their career, and we could, like, rescue them before they were destroyed.

Marina Mogilko 15:48 Was it hard to persuade them?

Blake Scholl 15:50 Well, yes and no. Like, the, the, the... When I would tell people I'm building a supersonic passenger jet, the first question was always, "Are you crazy?" [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 15:57 [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 15:58 And, and they, they didn't always say it out loud-

Marina Mogilko 16:00 Mm-hmm

Blake Scholl 16:00 ... but I could always tell-

Marina Mogilko 16:01 But you could tell. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 16:01 I could tell it was the real first question.

Marina Mogilko 16:03 Mm-hmm.

Blake Scholl 16:03 And I could persuade them that the answer was maybe no. Uh, then the second question is, "How do I get involved and help?" And I, I can... I'm thinking of, like, the person we hired as our first, like, chief engineer, um, and we met, um... Like, we, like, we, uh, we sort of networked my way to him, like, you know, like, the whole, like, six degrees to Kevin Bacon kind of a thing. And, uh, a- uh, and, and he, he and I, like, met in, like, the subway outside SFO, and, and I'm like: Hey, dude, I wanna show you my spreadsheet and, like, like, what I've figured out so far.

Marina Mogilko 16:32 Oh, wow.

Blake Scholl 16:33 And he's, he's like: "Man, I'm used to seeing all these internet people who have crackpot airplane ideas." Um, and he's like, "This is not a crackpot airplane idea." [chuckles] "And I had no idea you'd be this far."

Marina Mogilko 16:42 Mm.

Blake Scholl 16:43 And he's like, "This actually makes sense." And he's like, "I want you to hire me as a consultant, and I'll, like, consult with you." And I'm like: Nope, that's not an option. It's full-time or nothing. [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 16:50 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 16:51 And, uh, and he's like, "Oh, I, I don't wanna do a full-time job. This will burn me out." And I, and I'm like, "Okay," and he... But he couldn't stop himself, 'cause he was, like, in love with the idea, and he comes back, like, the next week, and he's like, "I built a spreadsheet an order of magnitude, like, more sophisticated than what you built-"

Marina Mogilko 17:06 Wow.

Blake Scholl 17:07 "... and it gives the same answer."

Marina Mogilko 17:08 Oh, that's awesome.

Blake Scholl 17:09 Uh, and, like, it looks like this works.

Marina Mogilko 17:10 So you had the first, like, actual industry confirmation?

Blake Scholl 17:13 Yeah, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 17:14 And then it just started from there, right?

Blake Scholl 17:15 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 17:16 Well, I remember I read something

Marina Mogilko 17:18 that the industry was still, like, criticizing you and saying it's not viable.

Blake Scholl 17:21 Oh, they still are.

Marina Mogilko 17:22 They... And they still are.

Blake Scholl 17:24 [chuckles] Right.

Marina Mogilko 17:24 How do you navigate this? This is one thing, you know, if general public says, "Oh, this is-

Blake Scholl 17:29 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 17:29 ... not possible," but when the industry experts are like, "You know, we've been there, we've done that."

Blake Scholl 17:33 Yeah. Industry experts don't know what they're talking about. [chuckles] Like, the, uh, like, the quote-unquote experts are, are often just repeating the same conventional wisdom and haven't done any first principles analysis. And, uh, and sometimes it gets fed by, like, the lore. Like, like, the big jet engine companies tell everybody that only the big jet engine companies can build jet engines, because of course they do, right? But then that gets repeated, and, like, people accept it as if it's like physics, but it's not physics.... like, like SpaceX started from nothing, and they put stuff into orbit. And by the way, they built their own rocket engines. And, you know, and I was very inspired by that. I was like, "Wow," you know, "Elon was an internet guy, and he put stuff into orbit," and like, that seems way harder than a supersonic jet. A- actually, it's not. I think the supersonic jet's actually harder, but I didn't know that back then.

Marina Mogilko 18:18 Would you agree with the phrase that's kind of related to this, "Ignorance is my superpower"? Is it true or not, that-

Blake Scholl 18:24 I don't think it's ex- I, I don't think that's actually true. Ig- ignorance is definitely not good. I think the superpower is coming into a new domain and seeking out first principles. It's about w- actually getting rid of ignorance quickly, and not by hoovering up opinions. Like, uh, the, the wrong way to come into a new domain is to go around and ask a bunch of people what they think.

Marina Mogilko 18:45 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 18:46 Uh, a much better way to do it is to go into a new, new domain and, like, ask a bunch of people to teach you what they know. And so my favorite interview question at Boom was, "Teach me something," and still is. By the way, you- I, I don't mind if everybody knows that, 'cause you can't fake your way through that interview question, even if you know it's coming.

Marina Mogilko 19:00 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 19:00 Uh, like, 'cause you can't teach something unless you actually understand it.

Marina Mogilko 19:03 Absolutely.

Blake Scholl 19:04 And so w- on one hand, this is a great filter for people who really understand. On the other hand, I learned a lot just interviewing people. And so my, my approach was not find out people's conclusions and, like, fit them all together into a picture, but rather, like, hoover up all that knowledge myself. So it was very much the opposite of ignorance is a superpower. I,

Blake Scholl 19:20 I think, like, getting rid of ignorance quickly is a superpower.

Marina Mogilko 19:23 But also believing that you can crack a problem that a lot of people tried to crack-

Blake Scholl 19:27 Y-

Marina Mogilko 19:27 -and then gave up on it.

Blake Scholl 19:28 Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I actually had that belief, and, like, some days I still don't have that belief. Um, the... I, like, a thing I believe is, it is impossible to know one's own limits except by picking something incredibly motivating and going all in. Like, what can someone do or not do? How do you know on day one? Like, the SAT doesn't tell you.

Marina Mogilko 19:46 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 19:46 Your grades in college don't tell you. Um, your friends don't tell you. The only way to find out is pick something you'll never give up on and see how far you can go.

Marina Mogilko 19:55 I love that. What

Marina Mogilko 19:56 if you're later in your life? Like, because some people will tell, like, "Oh, if you're talented, you should have had some wins already," right?

Blake Scholl 20:03 Yeah. Um, I think it's irre... My experience has been it's irrelevant. Like, I had some really big early wins, you know. Like, wow, I'm 24. I've got a P&L at Amazon. I got to work with Jeff, you know, and then, then bam, two failed startups. Um, and, uh, you know, so I could've been like, "Oh, I guess I'm not so good." Like, "I guess I shouldn't try anything." And I don't know. Like, it's- it could've been true. Uh, hell, it could still, still be true. We could, we could screw this Boom thing up, but we've gotten, you know, we've gotten pretty far so far.

Marina Mogilko 20:31 What was your hardest day building

Marina Mogilko 20:33 Boom?

Blake Scholl 20:34 It seems like we have, like, a near-death experience about once, once a year. Um, you know, like, I'm thinking of last year. So l- la- last year we had... We got down to seven days of cash, and, uh, like, the HR team and the legal team had, like, a plan to, like, file for bankruptcy and, like, you know, like, you know, that we'd been, like, on the verge of for, like, a long time. And, like, everyone was nervous. Like, a bunch of people would quit over it. Like, I had board members quit over it.

Marina Mogilko 21:00 Oh, wow.

Blake Scholl 21:00 Um, it was really obnoxious, actually. Um, and it was like a filter for people who are really committed is what it turned out to be. Uh, but, like, that was incredibly tough, and then we had to do, like, a down round and a recap to, like, get the company back together, and that was, like, one of the most painful things I've ever gone through.

Marina Mogilko 21:16 Have

Marina Mogilko 21:17 you ever thought of giving up, like, "Oh, it's not working?"

Blake Scholl 21:19 Uh, I mean, there are all kinds of days where I'm like, I'm looking at a problem, and I feel like I'm staring down the barrel of a gun, and it's like, "That could be the thing that kills us." And then the answer has always been, like, "Don't give up." Like, I remember when we got down to, like, three weeks of cash, and I called, uh... I called Paul Graham, and I was like: Dude, I need your advice. We've got three weeks of cash. I'm trying to figure out a bridge our way to the next milestone. Uh, and he's like, "Aren't you shutting the company down? Usually, when people call me and they say they've got three weeks of cash, they're telling me they're shutting the company down." I said, "No, I'm not giving up." [chuckles] "We're finding our way through this. I don't know the way right now, but I'm absolutely not shutting the company down. I don't care if I have to take it through bankruptcy and restart it. I'm not giving up."

Marina Mogilko 21:57 That's amazing. I think this is what really

Marina Mogilko 22:00 defines success for, for entrepreneurs.

Blake Scholl 22:02 The... You know, some people say, like, companies fail when they run out of money, and in a certain sense, it's true, but I think they actually fail when the founder gives up. And, and so, uh, the whole, like, I'm just... You know, I will put myself through whatever quantity of hell it takes to succeed-

Marina Mogilko 22:16 Yeah

Blake Scholl 22:16 ... is really powerful.

Marina Mogilko 22:17 Yeah. Yeah.

Blake Scholl 22:18 I guess I could spend the rest of my life, like, foolishly failing, but, um, uh, I don't think that's what's gonna happen.

Marina Mogilko 22:24 That's awesome. And t- let's talk about what's going on right now. You just had your supersonic

Marina Mogilko 22:30 flight. Congratulations. Uh, the test flight, right?

Blake Scholl 22:33 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 22:34 Just, uh... So what's going on? How far are you from actually launching?

Blake Scholl 22:38 About four years from carrying passengers. Our goal is first passenger on board by the end of '29. So it's, uh, it's not that far away. And to, and to just concretize wh- where we are right now, we, we've built and flown the first-ever supersonic jet outside of a government or military. Like, I, I think I asked ChatGPT a few weeks ago, "Which governments have made supersonic jets?" And ChatGPT is like, "Here are the seven governments that have done it, but there's an eighth that's not a government. It's called Boom." [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 23:04 Oh, that's awesome.

Blake Scholl 23:05 And I was like, "I love you, ChatGPT." [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 23:06 [laughing]

Blake Scholl 23:07 Um, but yeah, so we, we- it's the first, um, supersonic jet outside of a government or military. It is the first, um, civil supersonic jet made in America. It's the first one since Concorde, and it's the first one made out of airliner technology. So we, we basically took 20-year-old proven 787, Boeing 787-level technology, and we said, "Let's go build a supersonic jet that is safe enough to put a person on, that it can break the sound barrier, and learn 100% of what it takes to actually do that, uh, technically, team, uh, management-wise, um, and, and then we can take it and scale up." And so that, that's where we are now. We've broken the sound barrier. We've done it on two flights. We've broken the sound barrier six times. We did it all six times without any audible sonic boom, and now it's time to take all those lessons, scale it up, and build the airplane that you and I can fly on.

Marina Mogilko 23:59 And also,

Marina Mogilko 24:00 the legal ban, right?

Blake Scholl 24:02 ... Yeah, yeah, we have, um, so we, we actually started the company with the assumption no new technology and no change in regulations. Uh-

Marina Mogilko 24:11 Mm

Blake Scholl 24:11 ... because otherwise it would just be, like, way too much for a startup to take on.

Marina Mogilko 24:14 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 24:14 And so our assumption was that, that we would not solve the sonic boom problem. We wouldn't solve it technically, and we wouldn't solve it politically, at least not for version one. And but it turned out as we got down path, there was a technical solution. Um, and it wasn't even that hard. Like, it- like, the problem was described as way more difficult than it actually is. Um, and, uh, a- and now when I look at, you know, the administration we have today and how the, the political climate has shifted in the last 12 months, like, I'm very confident that, that the, the supersonic ban, it, over the continental US is going to be lifted.

Marina Mogilko 24:47 But then you will have to work with, uh, other governments as well, 'cause you-

Blake Scholl 24:50 Well, it's actually, um, worse in the US than it is elsewhere.

Marina Mogilko 24:53 Mm.

Blake Scholl 24:53 Um, US and Canada have an outright supersonic ban, and it doesn't exist everywhere. Uh, the rules are a little bit different in the rest of the world, and I think the reason is that Concorde was a European project, and there was an American competitor, which got canceled, and only after the American competitor was canceled was it like, "Oh, we can't have this sonic stuff." So I think, I think the actual... You know, the, uh, many times regulations have, like, a moral cover story.

Marina Mogilko 25:19 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 25:19 Like, "Oh, we have to do this because sonic booms are bad," or, "This is to protect children," or whatever. But then the, the real li- reality is it's to protect Boeing.

Marina Mogilko 25:26 Yeah. Got it.

Blake Scholl 25:27 And but no one wants to say that out loud.

Marina Mogilko 25:29 Oh, wow, okay.

Blake Scholl 25:29 So they, like, they, like, invent the, like, you know, they just tell everybody booms are bad, and that's why we have to have the regulation. But it was a speed limit. Like, literally, 14 CFR 91.817 says, "Thou shalt not exceed Mach 1."

Marina Mogilko 25:43 And that's, uh... Can you explain again?

Blake Scholl 25:44 The speed of sound. Mach 1 is the speed of sound.

Marina Mogilko 25:46 Okay. Mm-hmm.

Blake Scholl 25:47 It's a speed limit in the sky, and what it should say is, "Thou shalt not make bad noises." [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 25:53 Mm-hmm.

Blake Scholl 25:53 It's real... I mean, there it's a really, really stupid regulation. My suspicion is that the reason it's a speed limit and not a noise limit, because if it was a reasonable noise limit, a whole bunch of things would have passed.

Marina Mogilko 26:04 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 26:05 And, um, [lips smack] so, uh, so I think we'll get that changed.

Marina Mogilko 26:10 How soon?

Blake Scholl 26:10 And then we can fl-

Marina Mogilko 26:10 What-

Blake Scholl 26:10 ... And then we can fly coast to coast.

Marina Mogilko 26:12 What are you hoping? How soon?

Blake Scholl 26:13 I d- I don't know how to predict this, but the, the, th- things are moving-

Marina Mogilko 26:16 Are you less, less than four years or more than four years? 'Cause you have-

Blake Scholl 26:18 Oh, I mean, it could be four weeks.

Marina Mogilko 26:20 Okay. Oh, okay.

Blake Scholl 26:21 Yeah. But, like, it's...

Marina Mogilko 26:21 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 26:21 It could ha- We'll see, but it could happen very quickly.

Marina Mogilko 26:23 Fingers crossed.

Blake Scholl 26:24 Fin- fing- fingers, toes, and eyes are crossed.

Marina Mogilko 26:26 Awesome. I had another question about carbon emissions, 'cause when I posted a story of your talk from that party, people were like, "But this is, like, three X more carbon emissions than, like, a business class seat."

Blake Scholl 26:36 Yeah, so it's, it's, um... [lips smack] Supersonic is more energy intensive, and, um, we... We're designing around next-generation sustainable aviation fuel, uh, so that when enough of that is available, actually, the carbon, the carbon could potentially go all the way down to zero-

Marina Mogilko 26:51 Mm

Blake Scholl 26:52 ... on syn- synthetic fuel. But a, um, it, it, it is more, it is more energy intensive. And I think there's a big mindset question around this. Like, you know, the, uh... And it's one of the reasons why we haven't had supersonic already is, in the, the '70s, humanity shifted from an abundance mindset to a conservation mindset. And there's this amazing chart. Like, up until about 1970, there was an exponential increase, like a Moore's law of energy. Uh, like, energy per human is going up rapidly. Standard of living is going up rapidly. Um, all kinds of new technologies are possible because we have energy abundance, uh, including, by the way, things that make climate livable, like air conditioners and heaters.

Marina Mogilko 27:30 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 27:31 Um, and, and then the mindset shifted, and it got into a conservation mindset. The exponential curve flattened and became a linear, like a s- a, a small-slope linear growth curve. And, and I, I, so I think it's very, very important that we, like, plan for and create an energy abundance future and then find a way to do it that works out writ large for humanity and for the planet. And, and we can do that. And by the way, if you look back at the history of energy, it shows it over and over again. At some point, somebody invented fire or discovered it.

Marina Mogilko 28:00 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 28:01 And, uh, and then like, oh, but fire has, you know, it has the obvious pro, we don't freeze, and it has these cons. Like, it's actually not super healthy to bring in this, the... breathe the smoke, right? Oh, okay, so now we invent the log cabin-

Marina Mogilko 28:11 Turn it off, yeah

Blake Scholl 28:12 ... and the pot-bellied stove, and we put the fire in the stove, and there's a smokestack. You know, and, like, okay, that's much, much better. It's much healthier. It's much better for our environment. My point is, every generation of technology, uh, has pros and cons, and as you go from generation to generation, you can increase the pros and decrease the cons, and that's the story of why, like, we're not in a cave anymore. And, and so I think that's where we have to go with energy and supersonic jets, and it's okay to use more energy. It's a good thing to use more energy. Let's figure out how to have more abundant, reliable, cheap energy, and let's minimize the downsides, and let's, you know, if there's a, if there's, like, too much carbon, great, let's figure out how to synthesize jet fuel. Let's figure out how to synthesize it more affordably than you can pump it out of the ground. And there is, there's good work happening on that. It's difficult to do, but it's progressing.

Marina Mogilko 28:55 Yeah. So that gives me hope. Uh, what do you

Marina Mogilko 28:58 think, uh, would be the cost for the average person?

Blake Scholl 29:01 Yeah, so our ultimate goal is to make supersonic flight attainable for anybody. Um, but there's a question of, where do we start? And, and Concorde, marvelous technical accomplishment, but, you know, like, we talk in the Valley about product-market fit, and this is a great example of something that never had product-market fit. There were 100 seats on the airplane. They're really uncomfortable. Like, if you s- we have some Concorde seats in our office. You might think they came out of, like, the back of a Ryanair or Southwest jet. Um, those are really small, and, uh, and yet it's $20,000 a ticket. And so Concorde was for, like, rock stars and royalty, and especially with '70s, '80s, kind of-

Marina Mogilko 29:37 And back in the day, $20,000 back in the day, that was-

Blake Scholl 29:39 Well, that's adjusted for inflation.

Marina Mogilko 29:40 Oh, adjusted, okay.

Blake Scholl 29:40 But it's still a lot, right?

Marina Mogilko 29:41 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 29:42 Like, like, who wants to pay $20,000 to go somewhere really fast? Well, it's not nobody, but it's rock stars and royalty.

Marina Mogilko 29:47 Exactly.

Blake Scholl 29:48 And it only kind of works on a couple routes, 'cause you can't, you can't fill 100 seats.

Marina Mogilko 29:51 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 29:51 Um, and, and so with, uh, that was kind of no man's land. And then Overture one, it's like the Model S of supersonic jets. It's not for everybody, but it's for a whole lot of people.... and, uh, and so the fares will be like business class. So I think like $5,000 round trip-

Marina Mogilko 30:08 Nice

Blake Scholl 30:08 ... would be a typical fare.

Marina Mogilko 30:09 It's gonna be a nice seat.

Blake Scholl 30:10 Be a nice seat.

Marina Mogilko 30:10 Lie flat.

Blake Scholl 30:11 Well, not lie flat-

Marina Mogilko 30:12 Oh, no?

Blake Scholl 30:12 ... 'cause that, 'cause that was the whole unlock-

Marina Mogilko 30:13 Oh, 'cause you don't need-

Blake Scholl 30:14 You don't need a lie-flat bed-

Marina Mogilko 30:15 Yeah

Blake Scholl 30:15 ... for a three or four-hour flight.

Marina Mogilko 30:17 So it's gonna be three to four

Marina Mogilko 30:18 hours from New York to London, right?

Blake Scholl 30:19 Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 30:20 Fascinating.

Blake Scholl 30:21 You know, you know, but also just not, not just New York to London, Miami to Madrid, and Seattle to Tokyo, and DC to Paris, right?

Marina Mogilko 30:27 That's in four years, or this is like a-

Blake Scholl 30:29 Like, it could- like, it, it will all be possible in about four years.

Marina Mogilko 30:32 That's awesome.

Blake Scholl 30:32 Um, and now, now we won't have enough of the jets yet, 'cause we'll be, like, starting-

Marina Mogilko 30:36 Mm

Blake Scholl 30:36 ... production.

Marina Mogilko 30:36 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 30:37 You know, the, the whole boom skeptic thing is gonna be like, "Oh, they can't build a supersonic jet." Oops, they did. Then it's gonna be, "They can't build a jet engine," uh, and then it's gonna be like, oops, they did. And it'll be, "They can't certify an airliner," but then be like, oops, they did. And then maybe, "They can't make enough of them." Like, oops, they did.

Marina Mogilko 30:50 It gives me so much energy just hearing you say that, and I see how excited you are. That's awesome. 'Cause we fly so much, and that would be a game-changer for the travel industry. Awesome. So c-

Blake Scholl 31:00 But actually, can I... I'd love to riff on that with you. Like, it's not just about making it faster. The thing a lot of people don't appreciate about speed, s- speed is not just like, oh, how efficient are we with our time? Speed is often the difference between doing something and not doing something, between something happening and not happening. So for example, before the speed of the jet, basically nobody went to Hawaii.

Marina Mogilko 31:21 Mm.

Blake Scholl 31:21 Took too darn long. Like, literally tou- tourism to Hawaii pre-jets was, like, tens of thousands of people per year.

Marina Mogilko 31:26 Yeah, 'cause it was, like, t- a 10-hour flight or something?

Blake Scholl 31:28 It was, like, 16 from-

Marina Mogilko 31:29 Oh, 16.

Blake Scholl 31:30 Yeah, 16 from San Francisco-

Marina Mogilko 31:32 Wow

Blake Scholl 31:32 ... on a flying boat, you know?

Marina Mogilko 31:33 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 31:33 And then jets kind of cut that in half. Um, you know, or like, uh, Nike got their start when Phil Knight fell in love with Japanese-style running shoes on a chance trip to Japan after business school in the 1960s. Couldn't have done it 10 years earlier. Japan was way too difficult to get to, and you wouldn't take, like, a random vacation to Japan without a jet. And so, like, the, the, the shoes that we wear are a result of the speed of the jet. Um, and, and I think that is... y- a- and it's whether we're talking travel speeds or, like, speed of iteration and development, uh, or s- or, like, speed of a supply chain, like, the speed is very, very important, and, like, latency is fundamentally evil, and it's not just efficiency, it's a binary thing of do you do something or not?

Marina Mogilko 32:17 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 32:17 And so I think speeding up travel... Imagine a future in which our kids have friends that they actually know and have met from other continents.

Marina Mogilko 32:25 And they can visit them for a weekend.

Blake Scholl 32:26 And they can visit them for a weekend, right? Like, they know each other in person, not just like, "You know, I watched a video about them."

Marina Mogilko 32:33 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 32:33 Like, that is a very different future for humanity, and we can create that future if flights are faster, and they're affordable, and they're convenient, and they're safe.

Marina Mogilko 32:42 Yeah. That's fascinating. So let's

Marina Mogilko 32:45 talk about your day-to-day. How many kids do you have?

Blake Scholl 32:48 Four.

Marina Mogilko 32:48 Four.

Blake Scholl 32:49 Four, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 32:49 And you're still able to take them on flights. I saw your pictures. You know, you're flying together.

Blake Scholl 32:54 Yeah, I mean, it's, you know... i- I, I live a very full life. Um-

Marina Mogilko 32:58 How do you balance that? Like-

Blake Scholl 32:59 With, with great effort. [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 33:01 Yeah. [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 33:01 Um, you know, I try to really be present when I'm with the kids, and, like, whenever I can find a way to kind of check two boxes at the same time... Like, as an example, I took my older three on a vacation a couple years ago that was like a f- like a road trip in the sky, and, uh, 'cause I love flying little airplanes, it's like my one hobby.

Marina Mogilko 33:18 You fly yourself?

Blake Scholl 33:19 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 33:19 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 33:19 And so we, like, did four cities in seven days, and it was like, "Guys, we can't do that on United," you know? And, and now they're like, "Dad, when do we get to go on, like, Air Dad?"

Marina Mogilko 33:28 Nice. How... So how many hours a week do you work?

Blake Scholl 33:32 Oh, I have no idea.

Marina Mogilko 33:33 Well, do you-

Blake Scholl 33:33 It varies

Marina Mogilko 33:34 ... do you have days off,

Marina Mogilko 33:35 or...?

Blake Scholl 33:35 I haven't, I haven't had a day off since, like, I don't know, four months or something.

Marina Mogilko 33:40 How do you feel?

Blake Scholl 33:41 A little tired, but-

Marina Mogilko 33:42 Passion keeps you going, or you-

Blake Scholl 33:42 Passion keeps me going.

Marina Mogilko 33:43 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 33:44 Yeah, I mean, like, 20, 2024 for me was, like, terrible busy-

Marina Mogilko 33:48 Mm

Blake Scholl 33:48 ... because it was, like, survival mode for the company. And, like, 2025, we got out of that. We raised $150 million from, like, some of the most amazing investors, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Y Combinator, Bessemer-

Marina Mogilko 33:59 Congratulations

Blake Scholl 33:59 ... Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman. Like, all of those people put in at least $10 million in, in our, like, late 2024 financing, and so now we've got runway, and then we broke the sound barrier, and then we broke it again, and then we, like, did it boomless, and then it feels like we broke the internet. And people got really excited.

Marina Mogilko 34:13 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 34:14 And it was 24 hours from breaking the sound barrier to being in the West Wing of the White House. Um, and, and now it's like, holy crap, the world feels like it just cracked open for us, and the, the... There is opportunity, and, and we have to take advantage of it quickly enough.

Marina Mogilko 34:27 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 34:27 And it goes back to the same point I was making about, you know, speed is the difference between things happening or not happening. The world is very open to supersonic right now, and, you know, I think that, like, regulation change, it's either gonna happen quickly or it's not gonna happen. And so, like, I feel-

Marina Mogilko 34:40 So you've gotta move fast.

Blake Scholl 34:40 We've gotta move fast.

Marina Mogilko 34:41 Yeah. I, I have a question right away. Speaking of the White House-

Blake Scholl 34:45 Yes. [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 34:46 ... can you talk about this photo, how it happened, and-

Blake Scholl 34:49 Yeah, so, uh, so I, I like to say, um, no, no, uh, no lobbyists were harmed-

Marina Mogilko 34:56 [chuckles]

Blake Scholl 34:56 ... in the creation of that photo. [chuckles] Uh, so it was Monday, geez, two weeks ago?

Marina Mogilko 35:02 Two weeks ago.

Blake Scholl 35:02 Two weeks ago Monday, um, we broke the sound barrier. Uh, we did it boomless. We announced boomless. Uh, and, uh, I was, like, in the Mojave Desert, and I'm, like, tweeting about, "We've got to repeal this silly regulation." And, like, Elon responds, like, "Yes, this administration will fix it." I was on a flight, a, a terrible, terrible flight, a, a pink eye flight to DC that night, uh, which we should totally speed up, um, and, uh, was planning to go, like, lobby the next day, and, like, by the time I landed in DC, I had an invitation to visit the White House.

Marina Mogilko 35:36 Wow.

Blake Scholl 35:37 Uh, and so we had, um, had that first meeting, and, uh, uh, you know, we're starting to build support in the White House for it. It wasn't with the president. And then the next day I'm on the Hill, and, and, and we're sort of rapidly discovering there's bipartisan support for repealing the speed limit. Like, everybody agrees that we shouldn't have a speed limit, that we should have a noise limit instead.

Marina Mogilko 35:58 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 35:58 Um, and, uh, and then, and then Thursday, um, I had coffee with, uh, the Secretary of, of Energy-... uh, who I met because he- uh, so our landlord at Boom is friends with him, and so it was, like, me to our landlord to the Secretary of Energy.

Marina Mogilko 36:15 Landlord meaning owns the-

Blake Scholl 36:17 Owns the building that Boom is in.

Marina Mogilko 36:18 Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Blake Scholl 36:19 Um, and, uh, and so, like, y- he and I had a great conversation. He's like, "I love this. I think the president will love it." He's like, "You should make a model of the airplane." And I was like, "Well, I actually have one in my hotel room."

Marina Mogilko 36:30 [chuckles] Convenient.

Blake Scholl 36:30 And I'm like, I'm like, "Do you have five minutes?"

Marina Mogilko 36:32 Uh-huh.

Blake Scholl 36:32 "I'll, I'll sprint and get it and bring it back."

Marina Mogilko 36:34 Uh-huh.

Blake Scholl 36:34 "And, uh, but the question is, how do we get it to the president?"

Marina Mogilko 36:36 Uh-huh.

Blake Scholl 36:36 And he's like, "Well, I'm seeing him later today. I'll give it to him."

Marina Mogilko 36:38 [gasps]

Blake Scholl 36:39 I was like, "Okay, how did this happen so quickly?"

Marina Mogilko 36:42 Amazing.

Blake Scholl 36:42 But, um, but no, I'm incredibly, incred- uh, that, that whole just getting people... Like, the, the, the magic of Boom is everybody wants supersonic flight to exist, and if we can show them that we're not crazy, um, then they wanna help.

Marina Mogilko 36:55 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 36:55 And so, like, a lot of pe- a lot of people have helped.

Marina Mogilko 36:58 Can you give advice to

Marina Mogilko 37:00 someone who's stuck, uh, with their idea of building a Boom-sized company?

Blake Scholl 37:04 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 37:04 But they just can't take this leap of faith. They have a family. They're like, "I haven't had proven success yet."

Blake Scholl 37:10 Yeah. Um, my experience has been is f- failure is never as bad as I think it's going to be. And, and, like, there's a little bit... Like, when I could get comfortable with the idea of failing, it was much easier to try. So, like, my first company, we were building a barcode scanning game, which is, like, the least inspiring thing anybody could ever choose to do. And, and I, I was doing it 'cause I thought I knew e-commerce from Amazon and mobile from this other startup, so I thought I should work on mobile e-commerce 'cause it's something I'm qualified to do. So I end up building this mobile e-commerce thing that I, like, care- I, I don't care about at all. And I, you know, and yet it's hard because, like, every startup is hard, and every startup could fail. And I would get up in the morning and think, like, "Ugh, I'm gonna screw this up. Um, I'm gonna lose all the investors' money. No one's ever gonna wanna hire me again." And, uh, and then e- effectively, the company did fail. Like, we acquired it to Groupon, and they shut the product down

Blake Scholl 38:00 and put us on other stuff. And, and yet, like, failure in that case was the best-paying job I'd ever had, um, a lot less stress than I'd had as a startup founder, a couple years where I could, like, reflect on what I'd learned and think about what I wanted to do next. And, you know, there were, um... And mostly, people respected me for trying. And so this notion I'd had in my head of failure would be, like, the end of my career really wasn't true. And, and, you know, and so, um, I think I, I learned to be a little bit less afraid of failure.

Marina Mogilko 38:33 Yeah, so basically visualize the failure, what it looks like-

Blake Scholl 38:35 And just accept it.

Marina Mogilko 38:36 And just go all in.

Blake Scholl 38:36 And then, and then-

Marina Mogilko 38:37 Yeah

Blake Scholl 38:37 ... and then m- move on from it.

Marina Mogilko 38:38 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 38:38 And, you know, like, a thing I tell Boom, uh, the Boom team is, "Look, there is no guarantee we're gonna succeed. We could totally fail. If we fail, just make sure we fail honestly. Don't fail like Theranos. Don't, don't fail by, like, being a jerk-

Marina Mogilko 38:52 Yeah

Blake Scholl 38:52 ... or being bad. Like, like, fail by giving it everything we have, and then somehow it didn't work. But also, don't give up. Don't fail."

Marina Mogilko 38:58 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 38:59 Like, you know, when XB-1 broke the sound barrier, I sat down with the team, and I was like, "Look at the airplane. Why is this here? It's, it's here because all of us didn't give up when it would've been very reasonable to give up. Like, in fact, some people gave up along the way, but those of us standing here today didn't give up, and that's why it's here."

Marina Mogilko 39:15 Yeah.

Blake Scholl 39:16 "Don't give up."

Marina Mogilko 39:17 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 39:18 What would you say to this small guy right here?

Blake Scholl 39:21 [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 39:21 Any advice for him?

Blake Scholl 39:22 Uh, you know, um-

Marina Mogilko 39:25 Just words of encouragement.

Blake Scholl 39:26 Like, talk to your grandpa more.

Marina Mogilko 39:28 Yeah?

Blake Scholl 39:28 Like, um, I... He didn't, uh, he didn't live to get to know his great-grandkids, really. And, uh, and he'd, he'd, um, he'd fought in the Pacific Theater in World War II. He'd actually repaired propellers. And I, I think back about, like, all the conversations I could have had with him that I didn't have, and now that I can have-

Marina Mogilko 39:46 You inherited that, right? The love for, for aviation.

Blake Scholl 39:49 Yeah, I didn't even realize I got it from him. I don't know if I did get it from him. Uh, I wish I'd talked to him way more.

Marina Mogilko 39:54 That's, that's a great thing to say. Thank you. Thank you so much, Blake. You're amazing. A lot of inspiration. There are so many takeaways for everyone who's watching.

Blake Scholl 40:03 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 40:04 And thank you.

Blake Scholl 40:04 Well, th- thank you for the fun conversation and the chance to just, like, I don't know, tell the real story.

Marina Mogilko 40:08 Yeah. Thank you, and hopefully, in four years, we're all flying supersonic.

Blake Scholl 40:12 Fingers, toes, and eyes are crossed.

Marina Mogilko 40:14 Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.