Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban

In 1969, we landed on the moon and flew Concorde. Half a century later, we could do neither. Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic (YC W16), the startup building America’s first supersonic airliner, to change that. At Startup School 2026, he shares how a cardboard mockup with Office Depot seats became XB-1, the first independently developed jet to break the sound barrier, and why founders have to build for both the worst day and the best day. He also answers founder questions about teaching yourself hard things, breaking into hardware without the right resume, and finding work-life harmony while building something ambitious.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  I want to start by saying, Houston, we have a problem. In 1969, we landed on the moon for the first time. And the same year, we flew Concorde, the faster-than-the-speed-of-sound airliner. The future was supposed to be faster and better. We were supposed to look forward to innovation in air and in space. And yet, half a century later, we can't go to the moon and we can't fly fast in the speed of sound. And not only have we lost the ability to go fast, we've lost the ability to do things even at any kind of reasonable speed. This was the Wall Street Journal just a couple of weeks ago.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  It now takes Lockheed more than two years to build a new Patriot missile interceptor. This is crazy. This is no way to build the future, and this is no way to win a war. If we look back at history, this is the Boeing 707. This is the airliner that brought us into the jet age. But if we fast-forward half a century, this is the 787, their latest airliner, which, by the way, was launched more than 20 years ago. You can't spot the difference. It doesn't fly any faster. It doesn't make the world any more accessible. Prior to Boom, the closest America ever got to a supersonic airliner was a mock-up.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  But I guess it's all okay because flying's really great, right? But for me personally, there is nothing so moving as flying. Think about that experience of going down the runway, of gathering speed, rushing to hundreds of miles per hour, then climbing into the sky, having this thing that we call a bird's-eye view, but it really is a human's-eye view. In near-perfect safety, being able to look down at the beauty of the natural world, as well as the beauty of everything that humanity has created. We get to ride aboard the wings of Newton and the Wright Brothers while taking in the creations of Edison and Rockefeller.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Yet, flying, which should be one of the most inspiring experiences we could ever do, we've turned into something that most people dread. But if we look back in history, it wasn't always this way. Those first jetliners truly did double the speed of what had come before them. And it was a double the speed of air travel. The most important changes were on the ground. Hawaii was simply not a tourist destination before the speed of the jet. It was the ability to get from the US to Honolulu in seven, eight, nine hours that turned Hawaii into a mainstream tourist destination. Shoes. There's a connection even between air travel and the shoes we wear.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, started the company in the 1960s on a chance trip to Japan when he fell in love with Japanese-style running shoes. And Nike got their start importing Japanese running shoes to America. Or music. Long before Spotify or Napster, music started to become global. The Beatles took the first world tour in the late 1960s, a tour that simply would not have been practical 10 years earlier with slower airplanes. So, I'd like to invite you to imagine with me, what would happen if we had another doubling of speed? What would happen if we could cross the Atlantic in three and a half hours?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  What would happen if Sydney were as easy to get to as Honolulu is today? What would be the Beatles, the Nikes, and the Hawaiis of a supersonic age? In my mid-20s, I started to think about what it would take to bring back supersonic passenger travel, and I set a lifetime goal of breaking the sound barrier. So, like any tech nerd in my 20s, what did I do? I put a Google News alert on supersonic. And yet, there was more progress in supersonic music than supersonic flying. So I started to wonder, how would it be that supersonic travel could come back? The obvious thing seemed to be that it would be a private jet, a business jet, made by somebody like Gulfstream, for the wealthiest people on the planet.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  But one of the fallouts of the Concorde era was that we actually banned supersonic flight in the US. And since most Gulfstream miles are overland in the US, there simply wasn't much of a business case without a regulatory change. And nobody in the business jet world wanted to try to change the regulations. They didn't want to build an airplane that might not be legal. What about an airliner? Wouldn't you expect Boeing to carry us forward into a supersonic age? Well, no. They're not even building new airplanes anymore, let alone innovative new airplanes. So could a startup do this? Not all that long ago, the idea of a startup supersonic airliner seemed laughable.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  One of my very many failed investor pitches was in 2015, when Jeff Bezos passed on our seed round at Boom. And then he wrote the 2015 Amazon shareholder letter about how there's certain things that only big companies can do, and he cited airliners as one of these. So, an even more laughable idea was, what if I could do this? I was a software engineer by training. We spent time at early Amazon. I founded an apps company that got acquired by Groupon. Could I do this? My knowledge about airplanes was limited to a pilot's license. I could fly a Cessna. But one of the things I learned from that time was, I didn't think I could really know

• 5:49Speaker 00

  what I was capable of, except by picking a mission that inspired me, something that I wanted to create in the world, and giving it everything I could. Only that way could I find my limits. So in 2014, we got started, and it wasn't a very auspicious start. That's right. This is a supersonic airliner mock-up made of cardboard, plywood, and seats from Office Depot. That was before YC. And by the end of YC batch, this is what Boom looked like. Now we had a cardboard mock-up of our first airliner prototype, and people laughed. Who would name an airplane startup after the sound of an explosion? But we didn't let this deter us, and we kept going.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  We started building our first prototype airliner, XB1, which started life as baby Boom. We didn't know what it would really take to build a supersonic passenger plane, and so we figured the only way to learn the lessons was to go build. To go build the first supersonic jet made outside of a government or military. And that was how XB1 got started. Last year, XB1 became the first independently-developed jet to break the sound barrier, more than a decade after founding the company. I'd like to invite you to relive that moment with me from just about a year ago in the Mojave Desert. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

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• 10:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, people talk about isn't it a bad idea to build in a regulated industry? Turns out you can change the regulations. And the way you do it is just by building the thing and communicating why it's okay. By demonstrating that we could have supersonic flight without a sonic boom, everybody got excited about it. And I like to say that supersonic flight isn't red or blue. It's red, white, and blue. After the executive order, a bill dropped in the House and the Senate to make the supersonic legalization permanent. It passed the House unanimously. And just last week, it got out of the Senate Commerce Committee again with a unanimous vote. The supersonic flight is coming back. Thank you.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  We were able to do many things for the first time on that airplane. First, the first privately developed supersonic jet. Previously, this had been the work of governments and militaries with enormous budgets. There's also the first supersonic jet made in America. The first human piloted airplane landed solely on augmented reality with no natural view of the runway. And the first supersonic air-to-air livestream filmed on an iPhone, streamed via Starlink. And of course, the most importantly, legalizing supersonic flight in the US. We did all of this with a remarkably small team. The XB1 team was just 50 incredibly committed, passionate men and women

• 12:19Speaker 00

  who were willing to keep going when other reasonable people would have given up. So how is it that something that used to take billions of dollars and thousands of people was suddenly done by a small team with a comparatively small budget? The key thing is to make hardware development look more like software development, to reduce the cost of iteration, both in the world of bits and in the world of atoms. What does that look like? If you're coming at this from a software perspective, I think we all know that great software is modular. If you change something in this pit of code over here, it shouldn't change something in the behavior of this code over here, not if it's well-designed. But great airplanes are incredibly integrated, and everything affects everything else.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  The best airplane design is interplay of propulsion, of aerodynamics, of structures, of all kinds of optimizations, how you fit the systems into it. And if we do something like at another row of passenger seats, it makes the fuselage heavier, the engines have to get more powerful, the wings have to get redesigned, everything changes. And so classically, this pace of iteration for complex integrated hardware has been very slow. Imagine a whole bunch of engineering specialists, each working in an Excel spreadsheet on their own discipline, and then handing off the results of analysis from one engineer to another. So iteration would take very large teams, enormous amounts of time. And eventually, you'd have to just say, good enough, it's time to move on and actually build.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  But instead, we took a different approach. We said, all of this engineering that historically exists in spreadsheets really should exist in software. This spreadsheet engineering is like, it's like baby software. It's really code, but it's getting treated like a second-class citizen with no automated integration, no automated testing, no continuous integration, none of that stuff. So we said, let's fix it. And we built a system called MakeBoom. And MakeBoom lets you literally define an airplane in a configuration file. And then you could run a script that does a whole aircraft simulation. And in just a few minutes, you could have a good idea of how well your design performed. How far could it fly? What would its fuel burn be? How many passengers could it carry? What would the trade-offs be?

• 14:33Speaker 00

  And this would allow us not just to evaluate design ideas, it would allow us to go do studies of what airplane we should build. Out of the infinitely many conceivable supersonic jets, what is the correct one to build? How do we get to product-market fit? You can't get to product-market fit on a supersonic jet by building it and seeing if anybody likes it. You have to analyze very carefully the art of the possible and also what will maximize the market opportunity. And by being able to understand the universe of conceivably buildable airplanes digitally, we're able to narrow in on the one that we would actually want to go build. We're also taking the same approach to how we design our engines, which we're now building for the first time. And we built a tool called BladeRunner. And BladeRunner allows us, with really just a couple engineers,

• 15:18Speaker 00

  to change a blade design in real-time and see exactly how it's going to behave structurally and aerodynamically. This reduces literally to real-time a process that previously would have taken dozens of engineers many months. So investing in the iteration in the world of bits is very important. And with thanks to AI, the cost of software development is dropping. And it's now possible to have many more software tools than previously would have been possible to build. But you also have to iterate in the world of atoms. And one of the most important things we discovered along the way is it's extremely difficult to iterate with outside suppliers, particularly outside suppliers in aerospace, which are, let's just say I have no kind words for them.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  So we chose to build our own machine shop. And now we can go from a digitally designed engine part to a prototype part in about 24 hours. This is our R&D shop in Denver. This is a room that does not exist at GE or Rolls-Royce or Boeing or any other large aerospace company. So our engineers are able to work hand-in-hand with our manufacturing technicians. And we're able to go from design idea to part in hours and then iterate much faster than is otherwise possible. We're also vertically integrating our own test assets. We're building our own engine stand about half an hour from where the engineers and the manufacturing facility exists. This means that when we've got something ready to test, we can test whenever we want.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  We don't have to reserve time in someone else's test cell and wait for that slot. So what happens next? As we're scaling up from XB1, the test airplane, to Overture, the passenger airliner that we all get to fly on, we have to go big. We're taking our vertically integrated manufacturing and building a super factory that will allow us to build engines and ultimately airplanes at scale. This is what it'll look like when it's complete in just a few months. And this is what it's been like over the last few months. In January, this was an empty building with a lease that we had just signed. And now, six months later, the first machines are going in. And in just a couple of weeks, we're making our first production engine parts.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Along the way, we solved what was the other hard problem with building a supersonic airliner, just how do you finance the development? When you're building something that you know is going to take billions of dollars in R&D capital, and when it's impossible to predict exactly how much capital it will take or exactly how long it will take, it's very, very difficult to raise financing. But we discovered along the way that because we had made a choice to vertically integrate our own propulsion, we were able to take the engine that we were building for supersonic flight and sell it separately on the ground as a natural gas power turbine. And that's what we call superpower. This is a supersonic engine adapted for ground power generation that can ship without the rest of the airplane,

• 18:15Speaker 00

  thereby generating the test data, the learnings, the reliability, and also the capital that we need to go big. The first superpower turbine is under construction right now and goes to the first customer in less than 12 months. So let's take a step back and think about why we're doing this. I think it's important to create things that we want to exist in the world. And I think it's important to create things that inspire other creators. Because of that, we chose to livestream XB1's supersonic flight. This was the first supersonic installation of Starlink, the first supersonic air-to-air livestream. And when we turned that stream on, millions of people around the world tuned in. And some of my favorite shots were from classrooms around the country

• 19:00Speaker 00

  where kids who were otherwise not tuned into aviation or to science tuned in. And some of them stood up, and some of them jumped up and down. And one of those classrooms somewhere in the world is the next chief engineer of another supersonic jet. I just haven't gotten to meet him or her yet.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  We think it's important to do that inspiration. And so we build in public. The best way to follow along is to follow me or follow the company on X. And now we have actually quite a bit of time for Q and A. So I'd love to make this interactive. I'd love to make this a conversation. And if you can send your question to the Y Combinator agent, they are filtering them backstage and we'll pop them up here and we'll talk about them. So what is something widely believed in tech that's just not true? Boy, lots of things. But there was one false belief that almost stopped me from founding Boom.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  You tend to get told that every technology gets created kind of at the earliest moment of history that it could be. And therefore, if your idea is any good and nobody else is working on it, there's probably something wrong with the idea. Maybe there's something wrong with you. And then investors ask you the question, why now? And so all of this kind of compounds to a whole bunch of founders running at a relatively small space of ideas that are only recently possible. This is why we've got an explosion of AI companies now and why a little while ago we had an explosion of like photo sharing apps. It's not true.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  There are many, many unsolved problems in the world, many great ideas hiding in plain sight that were actually solvable, that could have been multi-billion or multi-trillion dollar businesses a while ago, but nobody's building them. And not for any reason other than nobody went and did it. The technology for supersonic flight existed actually a long time before Boom was founded. Technologically, the company could have been created 10 years earlier, but nobody started it. The law of large numbers you might think applies to startups just doesn't. The world is a smaller place than we're told. So I deeply believe that you should pick a problem that you want to go solve in the world and don't worry too much about the answer to why now.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  The answer to why now can be because I started now. Okay. Is it possible for America to actually compete with China on manufacturing at scale? Yes, absolutely. But we have to do it smartly. It won't work to try to repatriate the manufacturing that left the US. You don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing and build that here. And I can give you some examples of that. So one of the ways that China hollowed out American manufacturing was by kind of hoovering

• 22:21Speaker 00

  up the tool and die industry, which used to be big in the US. So for any of you who are not hardware people, one of the things you need to understand about building hardware is you have to make custom precision molds, tools and fixtures to create your precise parts. And so for example, for a carbon fiber wing, there is a mold the size of the wing, the contour of the wing, in which you lay up layers and layers of carbon fiber fabric and then cure in that mold to make your wing. Or for metallic parts, you might have stainless steel tools in which you injection mold or make wax masters that then go through some other complex process.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  And the downside of all this tooling, a couple fold. One is because so much manufacturing went to China, the tool and die industry in the US basically died. And it's very, very hard to find tool and die engineers in the US. But if you throw a baseball in China, you'll hit one. So a lot of what we're doing at Boom is trying to figure out how to get rid of the tooling entirely. For example, for our turbine blades, we're working in an all digital manufacturing process that will let us go in 24 hours from a digital design to the most advanced turbine blade in the world with absolutely no tooling. And that example matters because this is, I think, how we win versus China.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  We don't win in a game where the most labor is what matters. We don't win in a game where having the tool and die industry is what really matters. We need to invent the next generation of manufacturing, scale that here. Because what America is still best at is invention and freedom and innovation. Okay. In what ways has AI made building in the physical world easier? What things remain really hard? The first thing I think we've seen is that the AI has dramatically reduced the cost of software development. And what that means is that we can have custom engineering tools that otherwise would have been unaffordable to create.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  I was lucky to start my career at Amazon in 2001, when my family thought it was a bookstore. And one of the things that was, I think, great about Amazon culture is they built their own business software to run their own business. Like the personalization algorithms that powered the recommendations on the websites, the things that powered people who bought this item also bought. All of that was in-house software. The backend software was also completely custom, the things that would power the warehouses and the delivery trucks, et cetera. And I think that is a part of why Amazon was able to be the winner in e-commerce, is that they had software that fit the business operation like a glove.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  But to do that in the early 2000s required scale. That much software couldn't have been created by a small company with a small operation. And what AI does is reduce the cost of building custom software, which I think allows more businesses to have software that fits them perfectly. And one of the things that's traditionally inefficient about custom software, or really software at all, is that people building the software, the people using the software are in two different companies and two different organizations, and they don't necessarily understand each other very well. But AI allows anybody who is a user to become a tool builder. And I think that's a really, really big deal. And so I think that's what AI has already made better about building the physical world.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  I think what's left is we don't really have great physical world AI yet. Like programming a CNC machine is still an incredibly manual task. And despite lots of pitches about AI for industrial automation, we haven't yet seen much that works, but I think that's going to come. Okay. What do I look for when hiring people? This is one of, for me, this has been one of the most difficult things to really learn and to get right, is building the team. And in particular at Boom, the last company entrepreneur founded that went on to build a commercial airliner was Douglas Aircraft in 1921.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  So this is an industry that has not had startups for an incredibly long time. And it has only kind of big companies, Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera, that are really terrible cultures. And so we often found that we had this tension between being able to hire people who are technically competent, who are good culture fits and who are really experienced. And so what I found is that when looking for, to really value early career talent, people who are young, ambitious, smart, who have not yet been destroyed by working at one of the legacy big aerospace companies, value people who are hands-on, who've gone out into the world and built, smart, gets things done, optimistic.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  At senior levels, it gets even harder. And that's one of the reasons why when you're building a company, if you can manage to promote from within, people that you have grown up in your own culture, that is much, much better. Okay. What are some products that Boom or I wished existed? From a Boom perspective, actually delivering on physical AI for manufacturing would be huge. Like imagine a large format manufacturing capability that could go from a CAD design to an automatically QAed part with one machine without a programmer.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  That would be incredible. There's no reason to believe that's impossible. It just hasn't been created yet. For an early hardware startup in a regulatory gray zone, do you engage regulators before deploying or deploy first and legitimize after? How do we make that call with Boom? I don't think this is one size fits all. I think this is very contextual, what you should do. So for example, in building Uber, Travis basically ignored the regulators and built the service anyway, built a fan base of customers that he could use against the regulators that were trying to shut him down. And I think if Uber had tried to befriend the regulators first, it just wouldn't have worked.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  And one of those reasons is that there was an active opponent, right? Like the entrenched taxi industry was using the regulators to block their competition. By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time. And so if you can do what Travis did and go launch your product and have your customers be your ally, I think that can work great. That was never going to work in aviation.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  And on the other hand, we didn't really have an entrenched enemy. Boeing has plenty of its own self-inflicted problems. They thought Boom was kind of cute, would probably never succeed. So in a certain sense, we were flying under the radar. And in that context, and also building a product that was safety critical, it made a lot of sense to engage regulatory early. So when we started the company, started building XB1, I went to the FAA. I told them what we were doing, why we were doing it, why we thought it mattered, and we asked them to help us. We asked them for feedback. We said, hey, come anytime you want, see anything you want to see. If you see us doing something that we can do better, please tell us. We're going to show you our plans before they're finalized, so you can give us feedback

• 30:18Speaker 00

  and we want to listen. And so what we found was that the approvals process for XB1, that even for an R and D airplane, could stretch on for months, actually happened in 90 minutes. From when we said, we think we're ready to fly, and FAA said, here's the paperwork, we agree, go. We got the first ever permit for flying a civil supersonic airplane, supersonic, even before the airplane had flown for the first time. Why? We engaged early, we made the regulators part of the team, and we worked together. We made it Boom plus FAA versus the problem, not Boom versus FAA.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  What's the best piece of advice I ever received?

• 31:02Speaker 00

  I think about what Steve Jobs talked about in his Stanford's Commencements Address, which I assume many of you have seen, but if not, you should watch it. If you've watched it, go watch it again. And he talks about what it takes to do great work and how it's important if you're going to do great work to work on something you love. And the importance of not compromising on that and holding out to find that thing that you really want to go build, that you really want to go do, because that's the only way to build something great. And I think this also harkens back to the earlier question about what do I look for in people? One of the most important things to look for in people are those who actually care. Because you can teach skills, you can teach knowledge, you can learn any kind of engineering. But the one thing I've never been able to teach somebody else is to care when they

• 31:47Speaker 00

  just didn't care. And that is an important thing to look for in your partners personally, professionally, and your employees, people who care.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Ooh, what's the worst piece of advice I've received and why?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  The worst piece of advice, so my mom, hi mom.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  My mom told me not to start Boom. And you know, what she said was, shouldn't you work on something you know something about? And this is, this is common well-meaning advice, right? You know, when I started my first company, I had, I figured I knew e-commerce from my time at Amazon. I'd been at one of the very first mobile app companies, so I thought I knew mobile. So I thought I should work on mobile e-commerce because my resume said that's where I would have expertise. And yeah, so I actually knew how to do mobile e-commerce, but I had no idea what mobile e-commerce should be. And I actually didn't really give a shit about anything we were building. And so although I cranked out, you know, high-quality apps, I wasn't having a good time and I had no product vision. So I think the worst advice is like, work on what you know.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  What you know can be changed, particularly in a world where you, everyone has personalized AI tutors. Anybody with passion and dedication can learn new knowledge and learn new skills. But what you can't change easily is what you love.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Knowledge is changeable, passion is not. And there never has there been more reason to work on what you love.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  It took Boom about 10 years just to break the sound barrier. Yeah, oof. How do you convince investors to give a deep tech company enough runway to survive that long before there's a real payoff? So I don't recommend following our footsteps in this regard. Boom nearly died many times. It took a lot more time and a lot more money, even to get to a real proof of concept than I expected. And so, two things. One is, I mean, with the benefit of hindsight, we were very early to deep tech. And we should, had we known on day one what I think the whole community knows today, it wouldn't have taken five years. It'd have taken more like two or three. And it would have been much easier.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  And so if I say, okay, what are the, what are the specific lessons behind that? Part of it's about iteration. And the most important iteration in hardware, by the way, is to integrate, iterate at the product level. We bit off an extremely challenging prototype challenge in XB1. What we should have planned is something simpler and easier that would give us multiple shots on goal. Because that is how you discover, not only have you gotten engineering decisions wrong, maybe you've gotten requirement decisions wrong. And if you do that, you can iterate faster, you can get to proof points faster, and the fundraising challenge that Boom had is not one you'll have. So I guess I recommend, I recommend not following our footsteps in that regard.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Okay. What would I work on if I was 20?

• 34:46Speaker 00

  I think founders should work on the most exciting thing that they can imagine themselves doing with a stretch, wherever they are in life. So if you're 20, if you have a startup that is like calling you, that you think about day or night, maybe you're not even sure whether you can pull it off. But if you're in that state, you should go build that thing.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  And if you don't have that, you should go work with the best people you can find, solving the problem they're working on that you're most excited about solving. The magic happens early in your career when you find an intersection of what you love doing, that you can become really good at, that matters to the organization around you. When you hit all three of those, your career goes vertical. At early Amazon, I was lucky to get to work on something that Jeff Bezos cared about, that mattered to Amazon. So there I was, I was like 23, 24. I had a $300 million P and L with a project that one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs cared about. So when I screwed up, I had the most significant people at Amazon telling me how I screwed up and trying to help me not fail.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  Those are the kinds of things that are game-changing experiences to have early in your career. So go work with great people on a problem you care about, that matters to the organization you're in. And if it's a startup that you want to go create, that you love, that you can't get out of your system, then don't wait, just go start it.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  On paper, you didn't have the credentials to start Boom, but you did it anyway. Where did that self-belief come from? Can it be cultivated?

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Truth be told, I didn't have the self-belief on day one. I had nowhere close to the resume to build a supersonic airliner. When I told my friends I was thinking about it, I could just watch their eyes roll back and the oxygen would left the room. One friend told me like, call me back when you got something less pie in the sky. But I started thinking about the founders that I admired the most. The Steve Jobs's, the Bill Gates. And I think in particular about something that Bill said in the 1970s. Bill said his goal for Microsoft was to put a personal computer in every home and on every desk, running Microsoft software. And this was at a time where personal computers mostly didn't exist. And not only does he want to make them exist, he's going to put them everywhere and he's going to own the market.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  And of course, Microsoft did that and then some. But you know, what was it like to be Bill on that day? Nobody comes down and taps you on the shoulder and says, by the way, you're the one, out of all the billions of people that could have done this incredible thing, like, you're the one that's actually to do it. So like, here's the confidence, go. Like that, that conversation never happens. No one gives you that permission. And a thing I came to believe was that the only way to know what I was capable of was to pick something that I'd worked really hard at and give it everything I got. And to stop worrying about whether I could do it and to put all my mental energy on a how to do it. And so the self-belief actually came late. You know, and there's still some days I get up and think, oh man, this is hard. Can I pull this off?

• 37:55Speaker 00

  I think that kind of self-doubt is, is normal. You have to put it aside, do it anyway, and become the person you need to become to succeed at what you've set out to do.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Okay. What did I learn from working at Amazon in the early days and any lessons from Bezos? I have, I have an enormous, enormous respect for Jeff and I was very lucky to get to work with him even a little bit when I was young. I think one of the things that, that Amazon did really well, that is difficult to do together, is, is to think very long-range while having incredible operating discipline in the moment. So Jeff liked to make kind of seven-year business plans.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  And because of that, he would tackle things that seemed bizarre to much of the rest of the world. He was laughed at internally and laughed at by his board when he launched Amazon Web Services. He was laughed at by the world for e-commerce. And yet both of those stories ended really well. I think you can tell a lot of a character of a company, particularly a public company, by its quarterly behavior. And you know, when it got to the end of a quarter, Amazon would never like massage, you know, their choices to try and make earnings look good that quarter. They'd just take the long-term cash flow decisions. And yet at the same time, there was incredible operating discipline. There were goals, operational excellence, focus on the here and now.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  I think doing those two things together, a vision that exists long-range and the operational excellence day-to-day, that's unusual, it's rare, but this is what great companies are made of.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  You taught yourself the fundamentals of aerospace engineering. Do I have any advice about how to teach yourself hard things?

• 39:43Speaker 00

  I think it's important to know the difference between knowing enough to pass a test and really understanding something. And at least for me going through school, you know, I got mostly good grades, but I didn't understand half of what I was actually doing. Not really deep down, not for first principles. But as I was learning aerospace engineering, I bought textbooks, I went back and I did remedial Khan Academy Physics and Calculus because I hadn't had any since high school. I was doing the problem sets. And I started making a list that I called my confusion list, which is my list of things I didn't think I really understood, even if I could answer the question on a test or answer the question plausibly.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  And my goal was every week to take one thing off the confusion list. It turns out that was wildly optimistic. The confusion list grew without bound because I was always finding things that I wished I understood completely that I just didn't understand yet. But what it created in myself is a mental awareness of that difference between I really get this and I'm kind of waving my hands. And so that self-awareness, I think, really matters because when there's a thing that you don't know yet that you need to know, you can stay on it and do whatever it takes cognitively until you have that internal sense of clarity of not being confused.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Let's see, there's a lot of uncertainty about what jobs will look like as AI develops. Do you have advice to early career technical people about what skills to learn?

• 41:18Speaker 00

  I think all this AI dumerism is like deeply wrong and confused. So my biggest piece of advice is don't worry about it. Just go do useful things. And as an example, the notion that software engineering is dead, I just don't buy it. At Boom, we need far more software engineers in a post-AI world than we need in a pre-AI world. Why? Because the cost of software development has dropped. Anybody, including hardware engineers, can now become a coder. And we need software engineers to make sure the architectures are right and make sense and are coherent. So our need for software engineers has actually gone up as the cost of software engineering has gone down. So the thing that, you know, again, I think let's go back and think about, you know, what

• 42:02Speaker 00

  really matters from first principles, what will be true over a long period of time.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Being able to discover what's useful in the world and go learn how to do it and go create something that's real, working with other people, being multidisciplinary. Like, one of the reasons I went to Amazon early in my career is I knew that I'd be able to work on software for marketing and I didn't know jack about marketing and I wanted to learn it. And so finding a way to kind of see things from multiple perspectives matters, but mostly go find something you want to create and go create it.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  And I don't worry too much about being replaced.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  In software, young builders have an edge. In hardware, experience seems to win. High barriers, deep expertise required. How does a young engineer break in and actually stand out? I don't believe the premise of the question. This like in hardware, experience wins? This is one of these lies told by old people at big dumb companies and it's just not true. And by the way, all those people suck. So don't worry about it. Go build real things, go have hobbies. Like, if you're into airplanes, do RC model airplanes.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  And, you know, and learn not just how to design things, but learn how to actually make them. And the barriers are not actually that high. You can just go do this stuff. So don't try to become a deep expert. The moment you become an expert, what you're steeped in is the past and then you're completely useless. So and you don't listen to all the people that tell you age is an age of experience. There is one thing about experience that matters, though. And a rule, we have developed a rule about this at Boom. It is totally okay for a young engineer to do something they've never done before, just the way it's okay for them to do something that nobody has ever done before. But if somebody has done it before in the world, our rule is you have to go find one of those people, call them and ask them your advice.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  You don't have to take it, you just have to hear it. And I find it's very rare that there are experienced, accomplished people that aren't willing to take that call in some form of passion and to give you that, give you that advice. So so go seek that wisdom where it's out there, but don't listen to it too much and just go build.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Do I recommend starting a company or working at a company early in your career? I don't think this is a one size fits all. I think the moment you have a startup that you desperately want to start, a thing that you want to go create, even if you're not sure how to do it, even if you worry you might fail, but you can't get that idea out of your head, I think at that point you should go start it.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  And don't wait. And the world is full of examples of great companies that were started by young people. The world is also full of great companies that were started a little bit later in life. I started Boom when I was 33.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  I started my first company in my parents' basement in high school, an internet service provider that I basically started because I wanted to get a better internet connection. And I needed a way to finance it and starting an ISP was the way to do it. Right out of college, I didn't really know what startup I wanted to start. And so I went to work at Amazon and got some great experience there. So I don't think this is any size fits all. And don't start a company just to start a company. That's a good recipe for misery. And the worst, the worst thing you can do is start a company that you don't love and then get stuck. And this sounds like a champagne problem, but it's actually pretty bad. And I know, I know like successful founders that have had this problem, who are running

• 45:34Speaker 00

  like successful companies that they actually don't love, but they feel the debt of responsibility to their employees and their investors. And it's very hard to replace a founder CEO. So now they're like trapped. So start a company, but only if one, only if it's a company you want to keep.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Okay. It says we've got time for three more questions.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Okay. Do founders need to move to San Francisco? No. This founder moved from San Francisco to start Boom. You know, we, I left San Francisco and moved to Denver to put Boom, to put Boom there because it did not seem feasible to build in the physical world affordably at scale in the Bay Area. That said, I do think there's enormous benefit in being surrounded by other ambitious people. And there is, there is no ecosystem better than that than what exists, you know, here in San Francisco. So unless there, let me put it this way.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Unless there is a specific reason why the, you should not be in an ecosystem, you should be in an ecosystem. Like, think San Francisco, LA, Austin.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Be around other people that will inspire you.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  What would I look for in a freshman or sophomore in college who doesn't have work experience yet?

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Side projects. When I was something like 15, I got my first real software job at what was probably the only software company in Cincinnati where I grew up.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  I think because I did okay in an interview and I built some things on the side and they felt like they just kind of had to give me a chance. And at Boom, we will, we will hire people early career with no work experience, but they have to have done something else that demonstrates having been extraordinary. So if you want, for example, to come work at Boom, go to boomsupersunat.com/careers and there is a, there's a job opening. It's called your dream job. And it's basically go create whatever you want to go do. But in doing that, you have to tell us something extraordinary about yourself, something that makes you really stand out. And if you don't have work experience yet, just show the most impressive thing that you've built on the side and show it with pictures.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  And that's how you can bootstrap yourself. And I find this is true of a lot of good people. They find a way to do things that at normally young ages. And you see this notion of like, oh, you have to be like a junior in college to get an internship. Nope, that's baloney. All the best people have gotten internships way earlier than that and you can do it too.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Okay. Does work-life balance matter?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  I think, I believe in work-life harmony. Like this, this notion that like there's like life and work and there's somehow an opposition, it doesn't, doesn't make any, doesn't make any sense to me. If you have meaningful work, it is a big part of your life and the meaning of your life. And, you know, I believe we spend so much of our, you know, so much of our energy doing our work that we should find work that we love, that is meaningful, that is not just punching in and punching out. And I've, I've never, I've never found that when there was one more thing I wanted to like add to my life, but I couldn't find a way to do it. When I, when I started Boom, I had three kids under the age of two.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  And, and, you know, it wasn't easy, but I, but I, but I made it work. And you can have a family and be a good dad and be a good CEO too. It's not easy, but it can be figured out. And in fact, I find that like doing, you know, being a parent and being a good CEO is very synergistic. Sometimes I take a parenting lesson and, and bring it, bring it to work and find it's the exact same leadership lesson at the office that was part of helping with the kids. It's across polonades all the time. Just do things in your life that you love. Don't let detritus into your life. Don't let things that are not meaningful soak up your time and energy and passion. Okay, we are done. All right. Well, thank you all very much for coming.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  And if I leave you with just one thing, go build something you love, go build something that should exist in the world, leave this planet better than you found it. Thank you all very much.