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Carolyn and I are thrilled to have Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic with us; so much has happened since YC Winter 2016, and we want to rewind to the pre‑YC days when you sold your first startup to Groupon.
My first company was built at the intersection of my resume and the trends of the moment, not from a clear product vision, and even though we shipped a lot, it didn’t matter, so we sold to Groupon and I focused on making investors whole.
That experience taught me to only work on what I desperately want to exist, because the pain level in startups is set by the founder, and I never again wanted to wonder if the struggle was worth it.
I’ve loved flying since college, and after seeing an SR‑71 and a Concorde in a museum I couldn’t accept that the most jaw‑dropping aircraft live behind velvet ropes, so I dug into the received wisdom and found the industry’s answers didn’t add up.
The key insight came fast: design an all‑business‑class supersonic airliner, because if the flight is short you don’t need beds, which means more seats can fit where lie‑flats would go.
A simple spreadsheet showed we only needed about a ten percent operating‑cost improvement over 1960s tech to match business‑class economics, and scraping route data suggested a roughly twenty‑five billion dollar annual market without charging a premium.
On paper I was wildly unqualified, so I relearned physics and calculus on Khan Academy, worked through aerospace textbooks, and kept a product model and a market model in sync so every assumption had a revenue reality check.
I had zero industry connections, so I used LinkedIn to find a second‑degree intro to SpaceX, flew myself to meet engineers in Mojave and Hawthorne, and asked each expert for the five people they’d want in the trenches, which quickly surfaced top talent.
To solve the chicken‑and‑egg, I hosted a two‑day working session at Sequoia’s office to impress both investors and recruits, hired from that room, moved the company to Denver, and bootstrapped early salaries from family savings while raising a seed from half my prior investors.
Sam Altman had met me years earlier, wrote a modest check, and kept nudging us into YC; once I realized capital was the existential risk, YC became a must.
YC forced me to tell the story crisply and show traction, so we pursued Virgin alongside a startup airline, cut the fluff in our pitch, and focused on hardware we’d actually built.
We met Richard Branson in Mojave with a scale model in Virgin colors and asked for purchase rights rather than cash; when emails went quiet, we pushed harder, then suffered a brutal Bloomberg launch with that infamous orange‑chair photo, and the very next day Virgin emailed “we’re in,” which flipped the narrative right before Demo Day.
Backstage I refreshed my phone and saw an email from Paul Graham asking to invest, which steadied me for the pitch, and we raised a healthy seed right after.
So post‑YC, what was the build plan?
We decided to learn by doing, so we built XB‑1 as a single‑pilot supersonic demonstrator to train the team, while in parallel maturing Overture, the commercial jet.
We initially partnered with Rolls‑Royce, but the deal structure and performance limits weren’t viable, they pulled back during a leadership change, and overnight the press framed us as a glider company, which forced us to own the engine.
Owning the engine was the best hard thing we ever did: it cut development cost to roughly a quarter, enabled boomless cruise, and let us co‑optimize airplane and engine to regain range and improve the cabin experience, with one more major benefit we’ll share later.
On sonic boom, the trick is using atmospheric refraction so the shock waves curve upward and never reach the ground, and software adjusts speed and profile to stay in the boomless envelope using real‑time weather, which requires reliable acceleration above around thirty thousand feet.
Take us to the Mojave flight; it felt like the whole internet was watching.
After eleven subsonic flights, we streamed the first supersonic run using a Starlink Mini on the T‑38 chase plane and an iPhone feed, with former Concorde chief pilot Mike Bannister calling it like a championship match.
My personal moment was when the crew chief hooked the tow bar; that’s when I knew it was a go, and I promised myself to actually savor the win when Jepetto touched down.
And then policy moved almost overnight; what happened there?
Within days of announcing boomless cruise and a second supersonic flight, I was invited to the White House, we got a model into the President’s hands, the photo went viral twice—Elon’s reflection in the mirror helped—and a bipartisan push led to an executive order undoing a fifty‑plus‑year speed limit in about one hundred fifteen days.
When can we ride it?
If we hold plan, first passengers are in roughly four and a half years, and then it is a race to build enough aircraft.
Let’s make a girls’ trip when it launches; Blake, thank you for the stories, the candor, and the ride, and I cannot wait to book a seat.
Huge thanks to YC and to both of you; without that push, Boom wouldn’t exist.
Wow, I need a minute to process; that was a masterclass in tackling a crazy idea with rigor, persistence, and good storytelling.
I loved the through‑line about treating people well, like making early investors whole, because half of them wrote new checks later, and the other theme was owning the hardest part can unlock surprising advantages.
Supersonic feels inevitable now, and Boom’s engine pivot turning into boomless cruise, better range, and a stronger product is the perfect example of lemons into lemonade; I cannot wait for that first flight and our girls’ trip.