Blake Scholl: building Boom Supersonic from scratch at 33

Executive overview

Blake Scholl left a well-paid role at Groupon at 33 — with newborn twins and a 14-month-old — to found Boom Supersonic, despite no aerospace background. Conventional wisdom said supersonic passenger flight was dead. He built spreadsheets instead of accepting that consensus, found a Stanford professor who confirmed his assumptions were conservative, and kept going through near-bankruptcies, board defections, and years of skepticism.

Boom has now broken the sound barrier six times on its XB-1 test jet — the first civil supersonic aircraft since Concorde and the first ever built outside a government or military program. Passenger flights are targeted for 2029.

Getting rid of ignorance quickly — through first-principles analysis, not opinion-gathering — is the real superpower, not ignorance itself.

From Amazon to aerospace

• Joined Amazon as ~engineer 200 in 2003; built the first automated ad-management system on the internet.
• That system briefly drove 7% of Amazon's revenue and 7% of Google's revenue simultaneously.
• Key lesson: look at how everyone does something, find the completely different approach, execute it.
• Left Groupon (which had acquired his first startup) feeling demoralized — "running the world's largest spam operation."
• Had mentally budgeted for two failed startups before needing to return to employment.

The decision to start Boom

• Saw a Concorde in a museum in his 20s; set a lifetime goal of flying supersonic.
• Asked on every flight: what would this look like if Johnny Ive had designed it, not Boeing?
• At 33, decided to "fire himself" from Groupon and pursue the aerospace idea.
• His then-wife gave him one year to "screw around with this jet thing."
• Reframed risk: he'd rather be in the "dark matter of entrepreneurs who tried and failed" than in the category of people who never tried.

First-principles over consensus

• Internet was full of qualitative claims about why supersonic couldn't work — he treated them as quantitative questions and built spreadsheets.
• Key finding: a single-digit efficiency improvement over Concorde's 1960s design could produce supersonic seats at business-class economics.
• Bought every aerospace textbook he could find; did remedial calculus and physics from scratch.
• Took his model to a Stanford supersonics professor, who told him all his assumptions were conservative — he needed to push harder.
• Mantra: don't accept other people's conclusions on quantitative questions; build the model yourself.

Building the team in a field with no startup tradition

• Engineering is the third-hardest problem at Boom; financing is second; team is hardest.
• No commercial aviation startup has been founded since Douglas Aircraft in 1921 — there is no "Boeing mafia" of entrepreneurially minded alumni.
• First chief engineer initially refused full-time work; built his own, more sophisticated spreadsheet independently, got the same answer, and joined.
• Hiring filter: "Teach me something" — can't be faked, filters for genuine understanding, and he learned by doing it.
• Recruited from "bizarre corners of the universe" or caught Boeing engineers early enough to rescue them before institutional culture set in.

Navigating near-death experiences

• Company has had roughly one existential crisis per year.
• Got down to seven days of cash; HR and legal had a bankruptcy plan ready; board members quit.
• Survived via a down round and recapitalisation — described as one of the most painful things he has done.
• Called Paul Graham with three weeks of cash: "Aren't you shutting it down?" — his answer was no, unconditionally.
• Belief: companies fail when founders give up, not when cash runs out.

XB-1 test results and the path to 2029

• XB-1 is the first supersonic jet built outside a government or military program; first civil supersonic aircraft since Concorde; first built from modern airliner technology (787-level).
• Has broken the sound barrier six times — all six without an audible sonic boom.
• Goal: first passenger on Overture by end of 2029.
• Routes in scope: New York–London, Miami–Madrid, Seattle–Tokyo, DC–Paris — all three to four hours.
• Fares targeted at business-class levels (~$5,000 round trip); 65-seat cabin with lie-flat-style comfort for short supersonic legs.

The regulatory battle

• US and Canada have an outright supersonic ban (14 CFR 91.817: thou shalt not exceed Mach 1).
• Boom started with the assumption the ban would not change; discovered the technical sonic-boom solution was not as hard as described.
• Within 24 hours of breaking the sound barrier, Scholl was in the West Wing of the White House.
• Bipartisan congressional support for replacing the speed limit with a noise limit.
• Secretary of Energy took a model of the airplane to the president the same day they met.

Carbon emissions and the energy abundance argument

• Supersonic is more energy-intensive than subsonic; designed around next-generation sustainable aviation fuel, with potential for zero net carbon on synthetic fuel.
• Scholl's framing: humanity shifted from an abundance mindset to a conservation mindset around 1970; per-capita energy growth flattened; he argues abundance is the right goal.
• Every generation of technology has pros and cons — the trajectory is to increase the pros and decrease the cons, not to stop.

Why speed matters beyond efficiency

• Before the jet age, tourism to Hawaii was tens of thousands per year; the jet cut travel time in half and tourism exploded.
• Phil Knight discovered Japanese running shoes on a chance trip to Japan in the 1960s — Nike exists because the jet made that trip feasible.
• Speed is not just efficiency; it is the binary difference between something happening and not happening.
• Vision: a future where people have genuine friends on other continents they can visit for a weekend.

Advice on taking the leap

• Visualise failure concretely and accept it in advance — it is never as bad as imagined.
• His first company was acquired by Groupon, which shut the product down — "failure" became his best-paying job with time to reflect.
• Don't build around what you're qualified for; build around what you won't give up on.
• Failure is acceptable; failing dishonestly (Theranos-style) or giving up prematurely is not.
• You cannot know your own limits except by picking something deeply motivating and going all in.