Blake Scholl: "The Future Was Supposed to Be Faster"
Boom's Blake Scholl at Startup School 2026 on breaking the sound barrier, conviction as fuel, and picking a mission that finds your limits.
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.
Timestamps
00:08 — Why the Future Stopped Moving Faster
03:14 — Why I Started Boom Supersonic
05:57 — Building a Supersonic Jet From Scratch
08:33 — The Worst Day and the Best Day
10:14 — How We Changed US Law
11:36 — How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet
15:05 — Designing Hardware Like Software
17:54 — Financing a Multi-Billion-Dollar Startup
19:30 — Great Ideas Are Hiding in Plain Sight
24:05 — How AI Is Changing Hardware
27:16 — Working With Regulators
30:55 — Build Something You Love
36:27 — How to Build Confidence
39:35 — Learning Hard Things From First Principles
44:17 — When Should You Start a Company?
Transcript
Blake: 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 faster than 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. 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.
But I guess it’s all okay because flying’s really great, right? For me personally, there is nothing so moving as flying. Think about that experience of going down the runway, 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. 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 as they doubled 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. 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? 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-twenties, 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 twenties, 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 could 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. 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. 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 are 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. I spent time at early Amazon. I’d 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 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 mockup 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 mockup 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. 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. 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.
[Video: XB-1’s supersonic flight, Mojave Desert]
Video: 20 to 45 hours. Historically, the human race has always wanted to go faster. Test control, you are go for accel to Mach 1.1.
Blake: Go for accel, Castrol Gate.
Video: There we are. XB1 is supersonic, faster than the speed of sound. Congratulations, Geppetto. You made history today. Congratulations to the whole team. Super thankful for you guys. The future of supersonic travel is looking incredibly promising. It’s not just about speed. It’s about making the world more connected.
Blake: Thank you. I’ve come to believe as a startup founder, you really have to optimize for two days: the worst day and the best day. There’s no such thing as a startup that doesn’t have tough days. Along the way to that flight, Boom nearly failed several times. There was a moment where we got down to seven days of cash and the board told me to shut the company down. But I told them, “No, we’re getting through this. We just haven’t found the way through yet.” And we did. Because I believed that what we were creating was important, because I wanted it to exist in the world, I was able to keep going even when it seemed almost impossible. And because of that, we had to have the best day—that moment where I got to watch the team pull the airplane out of the hangar, watch the pilot push the throttles forward, and see that we’d broken the sound barrier.
This is why you have to build things that matter. Things that matter not just to yourself, but to the world. Things that inspire you, things that keep you going through the inevitable ups and downs. So XB1 accomplished some radical things. Not only did we break the sound barrier, but we did something that we didn’t even think was part of the original plan, which is related to solving sonic boom. XB1 broke the sound barrier on two flights, six times through the sound barrier. Each time, no audible sonic boom on the ground. We actually demonstrated a principle that had been talked about for a long time called Mach cutoff, where if you break the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude and at the right speed for the current weather, the sonic boom actually makes a U-turn in the sky and never touches the ground. So it’s like if a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, did it really make a sound?
So by making the sonic boom disappear entirely, we were able to put aside a question that had long plagued people talking about supersonic flight, which is how quiet is quiet enough? If there’s no boom at all, there’s nothing to argue about. And so it was about 24 hours from breaking the sound barrier to being invited to the West Wing. And 115 days from breaking the sound barrier to an executive order making supersonic flight legal again in the US.
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. Supersonic flight is coming back. Thank you.
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. It was 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 live stream filmed on an iPhone, streamed via Starlink. And of course, 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 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. So what does that look like? If you’re coming at this from a software perspective, we all know that great software is modular. If you change something in this bit 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. The best airplane design is interplay of propulsion, aerodynamics, structures, all kinds of optimizations, how you fit the systems into it. If we do something like add 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.
Classically, the 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. Iteration would take very large teams, enormous amounts of time. Eventually you’d have to just say, good enough, it’s time to move on and actually build. But instead, we took a different approach. We said all of this engineering that historically exists in spreadsheets really should exist in software. The spreadsheet engineering is 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. MakeBoom lets you literally define an airplane in a configuration file.
Then you can run a script that does a whole aircraft simulation. 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? This would allow us not just to evaluate design ideas, but to 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. 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. We built a tool called Blade Runner. Blade Runner allows us, with really just a couple of engineers, 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. Investing in iteration in the world of bits is very important. Thanks to AI, the cost of software development is dropping. 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. 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.
So we chose to build our own machine shop. 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 at Boeing or any other large aerospace company. 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 exist. This means that when we’ve got something ready to test, we can test whenever we want. 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 XB-1, 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. Now, six months later, the first machines are going in. In just a couple of weeks, we’re making our first production engine parts. Along the way, we solved what was the other hard problem with building a supersonic airliner, which is 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. They can ship without the rest of the airplane, 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 live stream 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. Some of my favorite shots were from classrooms around the country where kids who were otherwise not tuned into aviation or science tuned in. Some of them stood up and some of them jumped up and down. 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.
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&A. So I’d love to make this interactive. I’d love to make this a conversation. 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. You tend to get told that every technology gets created 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 and maybe there’s something wrong with you.
And then investors ask you the question, why now? All of this 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 photo sharing apps. But it’s not true. 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. 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 hoovering up the tool and die industry, which used to be big in the US. And so if any of you 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. 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.
The downside of all this tooling is a couplefold. One is because so much manufacturing went to China, the tool and die industry in the US basically died. It’s very, very hard to find tool and die engineers in the US. But if you go 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. That example matters because this is, I think, how we win versus China. We don’t win in a game where the most labor is what matters. We don’t win at 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 we’ve seen is that 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. I was lucky to start my career at Amazon in 2001 when my family thought it was a bookstore. One of the things that was great about Amazon culture is they built their own business software to run their own business. The personalization algorithms that powered the recommendations on the website, 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. I think that is part of why Amazon was able to be the winner in e-commerce: they had software that fit the business operation like a glove.
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. What AI does is reduce the cost of building custom software, which allows more businesses to have software that fits them perfectly. One of the things that’s traditionally inefficient about custom software, or really software at all, is the people building the software and the people using the software are in two different companies and two different organizations. They don’t necessarily understand each other very well. But AI allows anybody who’s a user to become a tool builder. I think that’s a really big deal. So I think that’s what AI has already made better about building the physical world. What’s left is we don’t really have great physical world AI yet. 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? For me, this has been one of the most difficult things to really learn and to get right: building the team. In particular at Boom, the last company an entrepreneur founded that went on to build a commercial airliner was Douglas Aircraft in 1921. So this is an industry that has not had startups for an incredibly long time. It has only big companies—Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera—that are really terrible cultures. 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. What I found is that when looking 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 things, get things done, optimistic. At senior levels, it gets even harder. 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 wish existed? From a Boom perspective, actually delivering on physical AI for manufacturing would be huge. Imagine a large-format manufacturing capability that could go from a CAD design to an automatically QA’d part with one machine without a programmer. 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 did 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. For example, in building Uber, Travis basically ignored the regulators and built the service anyway, built a fan base of customers who he could use against the regulators that were trying to shut him down. I think if Uber had tried to befriend the regulators first, it just wouldn’t have worked. One of those reasons is that there was an active opponent—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 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. 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. 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 sense, we were flying under the radar. In that context, and also building a product that was safety critical, it made a lot of sense to engage regulators early. So when we started the company, started building XB-1, I went to the FAA, 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 we could do better, please tell us. We’re going to show you our plans before they’re finalized so you can give us feedback and we want to listen.” What we found was that the approvals process for XB1, which even for an R&D airplane could stretch on for months, actually happened in 90 minutes from when we said we think we’re ready to fly. And the 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.
What’s the best piece of advice I ever received? I think about what Steve Jobs talked about in his Stanford commencement 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. 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. 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. I think this also hearkens back to the earlier question about what do we 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 just didn’t care. That is an important thing to look for in your partners personally, professionally, and your employees—people who care. Ooh, what’s the worst piece of advice I’ve received and why?
The worst piece of advice. So my mom—hi mom—my mom told me not to start Boom. What she said was, “Shouldn’t you work on something you know something about?” This is common, well-meaning advice. When I started my first company, 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, I actually knew how to do mobile e-commerce, but I had no idea what mobile e-commerce should be. I actually didn’t really give a shit about anything we were building. So although I cranked out high quality apps, I wasn’t having a good time and I had no product vision. So I think the worst advice is work on what you know.
What you know can be changed, particularly in a world where 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. Knowledge is changeable. Passion is not. Never has there been more reason to work on what you love.
It took Boom about 10 years just to break the sound barrier. Yeah. How do you convince investors to give a deep tech company enough runway to survive that long before there’s a real payoff? 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. Two things. One is, with the benefit of hindsight, we were very early to deep tech. Had we known on day one what I think the whole community knows today, it wouldn’t have taken five years. It would have taken more like two or three and it would have been much easier. If I say, okay, what are the specific lessons behind that? Part of it’s about iteration. The most important iteration in hardware, by the way, is to 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. If you do that, you can iterate faster, you can get to proof points faster. The fundraising challenge that Boom had is not one you’ll have. So I recommend not following our footsteps in that regard.
What would I work on if I was 20? 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 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. 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, 23, 24. I had a $300 million P&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. 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 create, that you love, that you can’t get out of your system, then don’t wait. Just go start it.
Okay. 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?
Truth be told, I didn’t have the self-belief on day one. I had nowhere close to the résumé 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 leave the room. One friend told me, “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 Jobses, the Bill Gateses. 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.
And of course, Microsoft did that and then some. But 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, you’re the one that’s actually going to do it. So here’s the confidence, go.” 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 work really hard at and give it everything I’ve got. And to stop worrying about whether I could do it and to put all my mental energy on how to do it. And so the self-belief actually came late. And there are still some days I get up and think, oh man, this is hard.
Can I pull this off? I think that kind of self-doubt 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.
Okay. What did I learn from working at Amazon in the early days and any lessons from Bezos? I have 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 Amazon did really well that is difficult to do together is to think very long range while having incredible operating discipline in the moment. So Jeff liked to make seven-year business plans. 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 about the character of a company, particularly a public company, by its quarterly behavior.
And when it got to the end of a quarter, Amazon would never massage 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. 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.
You taught yourself the fundamentals of aerospace engineering. Do I have any advice about how to teach yourself hard things? 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, I got mostly good grades, but I didn’t understand half of what I was actually doing. Not really deep down, not 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. 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.
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? I think all this AI doomerism is deeply wrong and confused. So my biggest piece of advice is don’t worry about it. Just go do useful things. 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, make sense, and are coherent. So our need for software engineers has actually gone up as the cost of software engineering has gone down.
Again, let’s go back and think about what really matters from first principles—what will be true over a long period of time.
Being able to discover what’s useful in the world, learn how to do it, and create something that’s real, working with other people, being multidisciplinary. 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. I didn’t know anything about marketing and I wanted to learn it. So finding a way to see things from multiple perspectives matters, but mostly, go find something you want to create and go create it. And don’t worry too much about being replaced.
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, that 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. If you’re into airplanes, do RC model airplanes and learn not just how to design things, but learn how to actually make them. 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.
Don’t listen to all the people that tell you you need ages and ages of experience. There is one thing about experience that matters though. 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. You don’t have to take it. You just have to hear it. I find it’s very rare that there are experienced, accomplished people that aren’t willing to take that call in some form or fashion and to give you that advice. So go seek that wisdom where it’s out there, but don’t listen to it too much and just go build.
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 might fail, but you can’t get that idea out of your head—I think at that point you should go start it. And don’t wait. 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. 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.
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. 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. The worst thing you can do is start a company that you don’t love and then get stuck. This sounds like a champagne problem, but it’s actually pretty bad. I know successful founders that have had this problem—who are running successful companies that they actually don’t love, but they feel the debt of responsibility to their employees and their investors. It’s very hard to replace a founder CEO. So now they’re trapped.
So start a company, but only if it’s a company you want to keep.
Okay. It says we’ve got time for three more questions. Do founders need to move to San Francisco? No. This founder moved from San Francisco to start Boom. I left San Francisco and moved to Denver 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. There is no ecosystem better than what exists here in San Francisco. Let me put it this way: unless there is a specific reason why you should not be in an ecosystem, you should be in an ecosystem. Think San Francisco, LA, Austin—be around other people that will inspire you.
What would I look for in a freshman or sophomore in college who doesn’t have work experience yet? Side projects. When I was about 15, I got my first real software job at what was probably the only software company in Cincinnati where I grew up. I think because I did okay in an interview and I built some things on the side, they felt like they just had to give me a chance. At Boom, we will hire people early in their careers with no work experience, but they have to have done something else that demonstrates being extraordinary. So if you want, for example, to come work at Boom, go to boomsupersonic.com/careers. There’s a job opening called Your Dream Job. It’s basically: go create whatever you want to 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. That’s how you can bootstrap yourself. I find this is true of a lot of good people. They find a way to do things at abnormally young ages. So this notion of, oh, you have to be 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.
Okay. Does work-life balance matter? I believe in work-life harmony. This notion that there’s life and work and they’re somehow in opposition 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. I believe we spend 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. I’ve never found that when there was one more thing I wanted to add to my life, I couldn’t find a way to do it. When I started Boom, I had three kids under the age of two. It wasn’t easy, but I made it work. 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.
In fact, I find that being a parent and being a good CEO is very synergistic. Sometimes I take a parenting lesson and bring it to work and find it’s the exact same leadership lesson at the office that was part of helping me with the kids. So it cross-pollinates 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.
All right. Well, I thank you all very much for coming. 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.