Speaker 1: You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what you've already done. What matters more
Speaker 1: is what you can learn to do. Skills are variable
Speaker 1: in a way that passion is not. I have consistently
Speaker 1: found that following my passion and being willing to reinvent
Speaker 1: myself and learn new things takes me to places where
Speaker 1: I'm happier and able to do more than I ever
Speaker 1: thought I could. I I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to
Speaker 1: Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontier's Marketing. Businesses and
Speaker 1: industries grow from bold steps and from ignoring conventional wisdom
Speaker 1: and heard mentality. Our guest today embodies all that he's
Speaker 1: taking Commercial aviation back in the Supersonic Flight is the
Speaker 1: founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake Shoal Blake is
Speaker 1: a pilot with a lifelong fascination with aviation. He describes
Speaker 1: himself as having been a socially awkward child, but clearly
Speaker 1: a smart one. He loved summer science camps and even
Speaker 1: started a web hosting and consulting business while in high school.
Speaker 1: He skipped his last year of high school and started
Speaker 1: college early. Went on to Amazon, tech startups and groupon
Speaker 1: before he took matters into his own hands and followed
Speaker 1: his passions and his dreams to start Boom Supersonic. Now
Speaker 1: I have to disclose as we began that I've been
Speaker 1: a pilot since I was sixteen. I have seven thousand
Speaker 1: hours of flight time, have an airline transport pilot's license,
Speaker 1: and until the pandemic hit when I skipped flight school
Speaker 1: for a few years, I flew left seat in a
Speaker 1: Falcon nine hundred for the last twenty years, as well
Speaker 1: as a helicopter. I'm a former board member of the
Speaker 1: Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and basically love everything about
Speaker 1: airplanes and flying. I'm a plane geek. As you can imagine,
Speaker 1: I'm really excited to spend this episode with Blake. Welcome.
Speaker 1: Great to be here, Bob. I guess you and I
Speaker 1: are both playing crazy. Thank goodness, Blake. Before we dig
Speaker 1: into the meat, I'd like to put you in perspective
Speaker 1: with a little feature we do called you in sixty seconds. Ready,
Speaker 1: let's do it. Do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs?
Speaker 1: Cincinnati or Denver? Denver? Definitely introvert or extrovert. Introvert who
Speaker 1: plays an extrovert on TV, window or aisle. If it's
Speaker 1: a long flight, I'll take aisle. If it's a shorter
Speaker 1: flight before the window. Amazon or Groupon Definitely Amazon pilot
Speaker 1: or passenger pilot. All day long, Video games or board games,
Speaker 1: Board games, Arctic or Desert, Desert, Virgin Galactic or SpaceX,
Speaker 1: SpaceX hands down, X fifteen or X one. Let's go
Speaker 1: X one. Moon or Mars. Definitely the Moon. Favorite astronaut
Speaker 1: Neil Armstrong. Secret talent, I don't know dad jokes except
Speaker 1: for Boom, your favorite plane, the SR seventy one Blackbird.
Speaker 1: Smartest person you know, Jeff Bezos, childhood hero, Bill Gates. Okay,
Speaker 1: final one. Most exciting airport where you've landed yourself. My best,
Speaker 1: most exciting, maybe not proudest landing story was at Mimmolous, Oregon. Wow,
Speaker 1: let's jump in and start with a history lesson. I
Speaker 1: used to take the Concord when it had regular service
Speaker 1: to London. In Paris, I could wake up in Paris,
Speaker 1: have breakfast, leisurely, get to the airport for noon departure,
Speaker 1: and land in New York three hours earlier at nine am.
Speaker 1: Truly magic. I have taken two of my three kids
Speaker 1: on the Concord, and then before my youngest can make
Speaker 1: or flight get stopped. Can you tell us why Concord
Speaker 1: stopped and maybe why it never really had a real
Speaker 1: business plan my view, as Concord was stillborn, if we
Speaker 1: started at the surface level, it shut down because it
Speaker 1: was too expensive to fly relative to the passenger demand
Speaker 1: a ticket on Concord adjusted inflation today it's upward of
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars, and yet one hundred not necessarily very
Speaker 1: comfortable seats on the airplane to fill. And it's just
Speaker 1: very difficult to find a hundred people who want to
Speaker 1: spend twenty grand to go somewhere really fast. So even
Speaker 1: on the most popular routes like the ones you're mentioned
Speaker 1: in New York, London and New York Paris, the airplane
Speaker 1: was typically half empty and it did not have the
Speaker 1: economics or the range to achieve economies of scale. So
Speaker 1: why did that happen? In my view, the deepest cause
Speaker 1: here is that this was a Cold War era glory project.
Speaker 1: This was not a commercial venture. Concord was established in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two via a treaty between the French and
Speaker 1: British governments, and the goal was really fly fast, try
Speaker 1: not to crash and show up the Russians. And it
Speaker 1: was at that level mission accomplished, but it was never
Speaker 1: something that was designed to be commercially successful or commercially valuable.
Speaker 1: Very much akin to Apollo and in fact your nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine first moon Land first Concord flight, neither of
Speaker 1: those had any sort of thought of economics or commercial viability.
Speaker 1: And while they both looked like tremendous technological progress. And
Speaker 1: as we sit here, if you want a lunar lander
Speaker 1: or a supersonic airliner, we got to go to a museum,
Speaker 1: not look up into the skies. And I think that
Speaker 1: goes back to the importance of commercial consideration on day's
Speaker 1: zero and doing things for national prestige. Yeah, we can
Speaker 1: show up the Russians, but it's not really a bridge
Speaker 1: to change in the world. So let's give people who
Speaker 1: don't know much about Concord a little lesson. It flew
Speaker 1: mock two. Oh, that's about thirteen hundred miles per hour.
Speaker 1: It flew up to sixty thousand feet. You could see
Speaker 1: sort of the curvature or the earth up there, and
Speaker 1: was a small cabin. The galley was in the middle,
Speaker 1: so there was a front and a back, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't first class and coach or business, and he got
Speaker 1: incredibly warm in that cabin, especially around the galley as
Speaker 1: you were flying at What else should they know about Concord? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's all about right. It was a long,
Speaker 1: skinny airplane, a triangular delta wing, and expensive to fly.
Speaker 1: And also a first impression of smallness that the boarding
Speaker 1: door was small. You have to duck to get in,
Speaker 1: and then before you even get to the passenger cabin
Speaker 1: there's the equivalent of maybe three or four rows of sea.
Speaker 1: It's worth of kind of Florida's ceiling equipment racks, and
Speaker 1: so it has sort of a first impression of a
Speaker 1: really tight space before you even get back into the
Speaker 1: passenger cabin. And today you can see Concord. There's one
Speaker 1: at the Intrepid Museum on the Hudson River in New York,
Speaker 1: and there's one at the Air and Space Museum out
Speaker 1: of Dullas Airport in DC. So why did the airlines
Speaker 1: and consumers lose interest in supersonic or did they? I
Speaker 1: think there's always been tremendous consumer excitement and supersonic. The
Speaker 1: problem was that it wasn't offered at a price or
Speaker 1: an experience or with the root network that made it
Speaker 1: make sense. And so twenty thousand dollars round trip New
Speaker 1: York to London for most people, that's a bucket list item.
Speaker 1: It's not transportation. And if we look back at you
Speaker 1: know what happened when we went in the fifties and
Speaker 1: sixties from props to jets. There has always been consumer
Speaker 1: interest in more speed. And when more speed is offered
Speaker 1: at a price point and in locations that people can
Speaker 1: really afford, it changes where we do business, it changes
Speaker 1: where we vacation, It even changes who we can fall
Speaker 1: in love with. But supersonic flight really only offered on
Speaker 1: one airplane and never offered at a price point that
Speaker 1: was attainable to any other than a relatively small number
Speaker 1: of people. So let's go to the big question, why
Speaker 1: will you succeed when the others failed? Well, it's certainly
Speaker 1: not guaranteed that will succeed. There's a lot of challenge
Speaker 1: ahead of us. Fortunately, there's also some challenge in the
Speaker 1: rearview mirror. I can talk about why I think the
Speaker 1: time is right and why if Boom doesn't succeed, it'll
Speaker 1: be our failure of execution, not a failure of opportunity.
Speaker 1: You know, fifty years after Concorde was designed, we've had
Speaker 1: both significant progress in basic airplane technology and huge growth
Speaker 1: in the market. So imagine Concord twenty thousand dollar ticket.
Speaker 1: If airlines were charging a quarter of that, say like
Speaker 1: five grand on airplane on overture, that'd be incredibly profitable.
Speaker 1: And it has the legs not just to do a
Speaker 1: couple of headline routes, but it's economically viable one hundreds
Speaker 1: so not just New York London, but Seattle to Tokyo,
Speaker 1: and La to Sydney and Miami to Madrid, just to
Speaker 1: give a few examples. And we're able to go build
Speaker 1: that airplane using only technologies that have been proven safe, reliable,
Speaker 1: and efficient. So from a technological perspective, this is at
Speaker 1: the same level as a Gabowing seven eight seven, meaning
Speaker 1: it's a carbon fiber composite fuselage, it's got advanced turbofan engine,
Speaker 1: fly by wire, flight controls. We could keep nerding out
Speaker 1: about it. Every single thing on the airplane has a
Speaker 1: precedent of flying on other commercial airplanes and being accepted
Speaker 1: as safe by regulators around the planet. So your range
Speaker 1: is about twice what Concord was, not quite twice. It's
Speaker 1: forty two fifty nautical miles or about five thousand statute miles,
Speaker 1: and that's with all the seats filled and everyone checking
Speaker 1: a big heavy bag. And Concord was three thousand and change.
Speaker 1: So we've got not quite fifty percent more range. However,
Speaker 1: with sixty five seats on the airplane and the operating
Speaker 1: cost and overall efficiency being better roots like La Sydney,
Speaker 1: that's a very long route. So today that's a fourteen
Speaker 1: fifteen hour flight with overture, it's about eight and a
Speaker 1: half hours including stopping in Tahiti for gas. Wow, that's great.
Speaker 1: And the speed is two O like Concord, slightly slower
Speaker 1: actually Mack one point seven. We initially aim to be
Speaker 1: a little bit faster, but as we learn more about
Speaker 1: the details, what we found was going very slightly slow
Speaker 1: or generated significantly better economics, significantly better sustainability, and also
Speaker 1: allowed us to reduce the technological challenge, for example, being
Speaker 1: able to operate with improven material systems. That is I
Speaker 1: guess always to question is speed versus range? But it
Speaker 1: sounds like you still got a lot of speed. There'll
Speaker 1: be an overture two, and our goal is to make
Speaker 1: it significantly faster. As an airplane nerd, I get very
Speaker 1: excited about that stuff, but as a passenger, I want
Speaker 1: to put this airplane in the hands of airlines and
Speaker 1: passengers as quickly as possible. And so a phrase they
Speaker 1: got drilled into me kind of growing up in tech,
Speaker 1: growing up in Silicon Valley was minimum viable product, and
Speaker 1: overture one is really a minimum viable supersonic airplane. We've
Speaker 1: kept it as small and simple as we can because
Speaker 1: we want to get it out as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1: I want to dig into some questions about the how
Speaker 1: and probably more importantly for this podcast, to management lessons
Speaker 1: you learn. But first I want to get some perspective
Speaker 1: on you by going back to your childhood. You grew
Speaker 1: up in Cincinnati. Your dad was an engineer, your mom
Speaker 1: was a French teacher. Paint the picture of growing up
Speaker 1: in the Midwest in the eighties and nineties. I was
Speaker 1: an only kid, so I sort of grew up by myself.
Speaker 1: Didn't have a lot of friends, and I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time playing on my own, thinking on my own.
Speaker 1: I was obsessed with model trains throughout much of my childhood,
Speaker 1: and as I got a little bit older, became obsessed
Speaker 1: with computers. And I love that gratification cycle of how
Speaker 1: easy it was to do something in software and be
Speaker 1: able to see a result quickly. I remember thinking about
Speaker 1: airplanes and wanting to learn to fly, drawing little pictures
Speaker 1: of cartoon airplanes that you know, I dream of building.
Speaker 1: So where did the love of airplanes come from? There
Speaker 1: must have been someone who planet that seed in there
Speaker 1: for you. If you believe my parents, It goes back
Speaker 1: to when I was six months old and they had
Speaker 1: taken me to this little airport in suburban Cincinnati to
Speaker 1: watch the Cessina's takeoff and land, and I had a
Speaker 1: little Fisher Price toy airplane. As they tell the story,
Speaker 1: that was the first time I made the connection between
Speaker 1: a toy thing and a real thing, and I just
Speaker 1: lit up. So I don't know, maybe it imprinted somehow,
Speaker 1: But as long as I can remember, like, I've found
Speaker 1: flight inspiring and it is such a uniquely human thing
Speaker 1: to be able to do. I mean, we weren't born
Speaker 1: to fly. We're you know, we're far heavier than air,
Speaker 1: and we don't have wings like birds. We had to
Speaker 1: go vent the airplane, and you know to this day
Speaker 1: looking down out the window, it's a uniquely human vantage
Speaker 1: point where we can take in everything that we've built
Speaker 1: as humanity is, as well as the natural beauty of
Speaker 1: the world, and doing it aboard one of the most complex,
Speaker 1: safety critical machines ever created. It's like we're riding on
Speaker 1: the wings of Newton and the right brothers. You're looking
Speaker 1: down on the creation of Edison and Rockefeller and Ford,
Speaker 1: and it's just an incredibly unique thing and an incredibly
Speaker 1: human thing. More on math and magic right after this
Speaker 1: quick break. Welcome back to math and magic. Let's hear
Speaker 1: more from my conversation with Blake seul So. You have
Speaker 1: said you were a socially awkward kid. How did that
Speaker 1: contribute to your later success? Bob, That's not a question
Speaker 1: I think I've ever been asked before. It's really thought provoking.
Speaker 1: I have vivid memories of sitting by myself like an
Speaker 1: elementary school, just thinking, and I remember being told, I
Speaker 1: think in first grade, that we couldn't fly faster than
Speaker 1: the speed of light, and that didn't make any sense
Speaker 1: to him that I remember sitting by myself at recess
Speaker 1: and elementary school, thinking about how we could fly faster
Speaker 1: than the speed of light. I didn't understand anything about
Speaker 1: aerospace or physics or rockets, and so I didn't know
Speaker 1: that rockets were, you know, not empty on the inside.
Speaker 1: I remember there's like Russian dolls that are nested, you know,
Speaker 1: you take one apart and then there's another doll on
Speaker 1: the inside to take it apart there on the inside.
Speaker 1: Like I remember thinking about like, well, couldn't you build
Speaker 1: a rocket like that? And it'd be like one nest
Speaker 1: that inside, the next nest that inside the next. And
Speaker 1: it seemed like if we had a contraption like that,
Speaker 1: well couldn't you go arbitrarily fast? And I look back
Speaker 1: now and it's like, you know, not only did I
Speaker 1: not understand physics and relativity, Like I didn't understand that
Speaker 1: rockets they had stuff on the inside that there was
Speaker 1: not like they were empty. You could put another rocket
Speaker 1: in there. So it was incredibly naive. But I spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time because I guess I didn't have friends,
Speaker 1: just kind of by myself thinking, so let's talk about
Speaker 1: science camps. What's the power of a science camp? What
Speaker 1: do they mean to you. The single biggest thing I
Speaker 1: think it meant to me was a chance to see
Speaker 1: what a good education could actually be, like, how engaging
Speaker 1: it could be, and how fun it was to be
Speaker 1: around other kids that I considered my peers like. I
Speaker 1: did not like school growing up. I was bored, was
Speaker 1: not engaging. I'm so grateful to Mom and Dad. And
Speaker 1: mom researched all this back when there was no internet
Speaker 1: and she had to go to the public library to
Speaker 1: kind of figure out what was out there. But she
Speaker 1: sent me to programming camps and electrical engineering camps and
Speaker 1: various Today we call it STEM type stuff. And I
Speaker 1: loved it. It was a chance to be challenged, a
Speaker 1: chance to learn, and the teaching was great, and I
Speaker 1: got to hang out with other kids that were like
Speaker 1: me that I just didn't really have in suburban Cincinnati,
Speaker 1: a public school kind of environment. So tell us the
Speaker 1: story of how you skipped your last year of high school.
Speaker 1: Got a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. So
Speaker 1: went to public high school in suburban Cincinnati. Did not
Speaker 1: love it, felt mostly socially disconnected, felt mostly academically disconnected.
Speaker 1: And my high school girlfriend was a great ahead of me,
Speaker 1: so she was gonna exit high school a year before
Speaker 1: I was, and I think she said, like, hey, she'd
Speaker 1: figure out how to do that too. And on my
Speaker 1: short list of schools that were my dream schools was
Speaker 1: Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and it turned out they had this,
Speaker 1: in my view, brilliant program where you could apply as
Speaker 1: a junior basically ride an essay about why high school
Speaker 1: sucks and there's nothing left for you there. Then they
Speaker 1: would run you through an interview, which I think was
Speaker 1: basically a maturity test, and if you passed the maturity
Speaker 1: test and they liked your essay, they would just treat
Speaker 1: you like you're a high school senior. And they let
Speaker 1: me come be a freshman without ever finishing high school,
Speaker 1: without ever getting a ged, and I was like every
Speaker 1: other freshman in campus. I look backwards and it was
Speaker 1: one of the best things I've ever done. And obviously
Speaker 1: you did well at university. I did all right. I
Speaker 1: also rushed through. I did my undergrad in three years,
Speaker 1: but I did actually graduate that time. So you dropped
Speaker 1: out of high school, Soldier High School, Ara Business, and
Speaker 1: off you went to college, and there I think you
Speaker 1: took your first flying lesson two thousand and eight, you
Speaker 1: got your private pilots license two eleven, you got your
Speaker 1: instrument rating. Do you still fly today and what do
Speaker 1: you fly? Yeah? I still fly today all my time.
Speaker 1: Recently isn't a serious SR twenty two t which for
Speaker 1: the folks who don't know, is it's basically, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: the best single engineer plane you can get today. So
Speaker 1: it's a four or five seed airplane, single engine propeller,
Speaker 1: has the legs to go maybe at tops one thousand miles,
Speaker 1: but it's a real nice little airplane, great for kind
Speaker 1: of regional trips and for the layman, sounds really exciting.
Speaker 1: It has a parachute, right it does. If something goes
Speaker 1: really badly wrong, there's a handle that you can pull
Speaker 1: and a rocket fires out the back of the airplane
Speaker 1: and a parachute wrap inflates and the entire airplane just
Speaker 1: flows to the ground. And this is saved dozens, if
Speaker 1: not it's probably approaching one hundred lives now that have
Speaker 1: been saved through the ballistic parachutes as they call them.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the Sirius is based here in
Speaker 1: Centennial that I used to fly was in a mid
Speaker 1: air collision about a year ago, and typically midair collisions
Speaker 1: like everybody dies, it's really bad. And in this case,
Speaker 1: the Sirius was able to pull the parachute miraculously. The
Speaker 1: air planet collided with landed straight ahead and was fine.
Speaker 1: It was really a miracle day where everyone lived in
Speaker 1: part because of the parachute on the Sirius. After college,
Speaker 1: you started as a software engineer at Amazon in two
Speaker 1: thousand and one. You left in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1: What lessons did you learn at Amazon that you still
Speaker 1: use today. We can probably talk for hours and not
Speaker 1: days on things I learned at Amazon. One of them
Speaker 1: was something that Jeff would just drill into everyone's mind,
Speaker 1: which was, if you wanted to build something enduring, don't
Speaker 1: focus on what's new and trendy. Focus on what's going
Speaker 1: to stay the same over a long period of time.
Speaker 1: In the context of Amazon, he would talk about selection
Speaker 1: and availability and price as being things that people would
Speaker 1: always care about and therefore being things where you could
Speaker 1: make significant investments over a period of decades and trust
Speaker 1: that you're going to be creating something of value. You
Speaker 1: know that thinking directly applies to Boom because you know,
Speaker 1: people are going to always want flights that are faster
Speaker 1: and more affordable and more convenient. On those are vectors
Speaker 1: in which we can invest over a period of decades
Speaker 1: to build something great. Another one that comes to mind
Speaker 1: was this notion of individuals and companies doing things that
Speaker 1: they didn't have the resume for. You know, so when
Speaker 1: I joined Amazon, it was always a debate is it
Speaker 1: a bookstore or is it a software company? And I
Speaker 1: got to be there. I didn't work directly at it.
Speaker 1: I got to be there when they built aws, and
Speaker 1: I got to be there when they built Kindle and
Speaker 1: Amazon the retailer slash software company, and have the resume
Speaker 1: to do any of those things, and yet they did.
Speaker 1: They figured it out. And that left me with sort
Speaker 1: of the very distinct impression that it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: you've already done. What matters more is what you can
Speaker 1: learn to do. Skills are variable in a way that
Speaker 1: passion is not. And so I have consistently found that
Speaker 1: following my passion and being willing to reinvent myself and
Speaker 1: learn new things takes me to places where I'm happier
Speaker 1: and able to do more than I ever thought I could.
Speaker 1: You did a couple of tech startups, and in twenty
Speaker 1: twelve you were acquired by Groupon. Could not have been
Speaker 1: a hotter company at the time. A couple of questions,
Speaker 1: what did you do there, why did you learn? And
Speaker 1: why did groupon lose its mojo? To set the stage
Speaker 1: here a little bit, So it was twenty twelve, I
Speaker 1: had founded my first company was called Keema Labs, and
Speaker 1: I looked back and that was really a case study
Speaker 1: and everything not to do. But it was twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: The valley was hot, and if you had a decent team,
Speaker 1: you could basically sell it for team and technology. And
Speaker 1: so groupon bought my startup for team and technology and
Speaker 1: they put me on what in my view should have
Speaker 1: been group On two point zero. And so if you
Speaker 1: think back about the foundation of Groupon with this local coupons,
Speaker 1: there were so many at that time business plans that
Speaker 1: were pitched that were about reinventing how we transact with
Speaker 1: a local business. But they all had a chicken and
Speaker 1: egg problem because they needed a digital connection to local businesses,
Speaker 1: and they did it a digital connection to consumers. Group
Speaker 1: On crack the chicken and egg problem basically with a
Speaker 1: viral coupon the company was super hot. But Andrew Mason,
Speaker 1: who was basically the founding CEO, had a really compelling
Speaker 1: vision about how to take that collection of chickens and
Speaker 1: eggs and parlay it into something really inspiring, really great.
Speaker 1: That was about reinventing the way we would transact at
Speaker 1: a local business. So they bought my company, and then
Speaker 1: we went off and we bought another company that was
Speaker 1: a iPad based wint A sales start up. What we
Speaker 1: were going to go do is basically bring all that
Speaker 1: onto the internet. So the vision was something like, imagine
Speaker 1: you go online and you book a restaurant reservation, and
Speaker 1: when you book your reservation, it says, hey, would you
Speaker 1: like some calamari and a picture of margaritas on the
Speaker 1: table when you arrive? And you know who doesn't say
Speaker 1: yes to that? And because the consumer front end would
Speaker 1: connect to the restaurant back in, the whole thing could
Speaker 1: work seamlessly. You know, it's like ten months for your reservation.
Speaker 1: The bartender starts making your drink and they start frying
Speaker 1: up your calamari, and you can sit down, you can
Speaker 1: have your whole meal, you can interact with a server,
Speaker 1: you can order on your phone, kind of whatever, is
Speaker 1: the right experience, and then when you're done, you just
Speaker 1: get up and walk out and it's all built to
Speaker 1: your group On account. That was the vision. And in
Speaker 1: my view, it's so sad because groupon could have built
Speaker 1: these things that I think the world still needs to
Speaker 1: exist that no one's built yet, like the experience I
Speaker 1: just described, and they could have parlayed the attraction around
Speaker 1: the coupon's business into building that and it would be
Speaker 1: a you know, a multi at least a deca billion
Speaker 1: dollar company today if if that had happened. But instead
Speaker 1: there were, in my view, sort of a series of
Speaker 1: missteps that all started with a company going public before
Speaker 1: it was ready, and all of that visionary stuff got
Speaker 1: shut down and the company got stuck as a internet
Speaker 1: coupon company with a very degraded brand and not a
Speaker 1: very inspiring future. So you left twenty fourteen, and that
Speaker 1: begins this journey in the Supersonic. Give us the story.
Speaker 1: What were the big hurdles to get this thing started? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the tail into my time at group On. There the
Speaker 1: process of shutting down the visionary stuff I was talking about.
Speaker 1: My VP asked me to come and run a big
Speaker 1: piece of the core business, and so I was running
Speaker 1: relevance and email and a lot of what was the
Speaker 1: core of Groupon, and it was so uninspiring. You know,
Speaker 1: I was paid very well. In my mind, I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: the money I'm saving from this gets sucked away and
Speaker 1: I called the fun fund, and beyond a certain dollar amount,
Speaker 1: I was allowed to spend that money on anything I wanted,
Speaker 1: and in my head that was to buy an airplane fund.
Speaker 1: I actually never bought the airplane, but the savings for
Speaker 1: the airplane became the seed capital for Boom. I left
Speaker 1: Group on. I think I decompressed for a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: but I knew I wanted to do another startup, and
Speaker 1: I thought back to everything I had learned doing the
Speaker 1: first one, and in particular the decision to sell the
Speaker 1: company when I had a chance to, and that the
Speaker 1: lesson I learned from that was that as an ambitious founder,
Speaker 1: that effort level feels the same regardless of what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: But what isn't the same is whether I'm really motivated
Speaker 1: by what I've set out to do. And you know,
Speaker 1: I sold the first company because it was really hard
Speaker 1: and I didn't love what we were building. For my
Speaker 1: next start off, I wanted to do one where I
Speaker 1: would never get up in the morning, no matter how
Speaker 1: hard it was, I would never ask the question why
Speaker 1: did I get myself into this? And I would always
Speaker 1: note was worth it. And so at this point I said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to organize all my ideas in descending order
Speaker 1: of how happy I will personally be if it works,
Speaker 1: and I'll forget everything else, whether I have the resume
Speaker 1: for it, whether it's a good idea, whether it's physically possible.
Speaker 1: And I thought I'd worked on that list, and I'll
Speaker 1: work on the most exciting thing that's not impossible. And
Speaker 1: so for me, anything with an airplane, and it just
Speaker 1: goes straight to the top of that list. I had
Speaker 1: had a Google alert on supersonic jet since my mid twenties,
Speaker 1: and I sort of set a personal lifetime goal of
Speaker 1: flying fashion the speed of sound because I was I
Speaker 1: never got to fly on Concord. It shut down when
Speaker 1: I was twenty two, and so I thought, Okay, take
Speaker 1: a deep breath. I'm sure there's a really good reason
Speaker 1: why no one's building supersonic jets, but I want to
Speaker 1: discover for myself what that is. I'll do two weeks
Speaker 1: of research, get it out of my system, and then
Speaker 1: I'll move on to the next idea. And as luck
Speaker 1: has it, I never never got off that top idea.
Speaker 1: I kept finding a whole bunch of stale, conventional wisdom
Speaker 1: that didn't stand up to a fresh, quantitative look at
Speaker 1: what was really possible. So what was the group think
Speaker 1: about why no supersonic airlines anymore? Well, I think it's
Speaker 1: an instance of something called the bystander effect. And if
Speaker 1: you don't know bystander effect, it's a term out of
Speaker 1: social science that sort of refers to this idea that
Speaker 1: if there's an emergency, someone's in trouble, and you know
Speaker 1: only one or two people are around, they'll tend to
Speaker 1: jump in and help. But if there are a large
Speaker 1: number of people observing some kind of a problem, everyone
Speaker 1: tends to assume everyone else has it and the right
Speaker 1: people are already on the problem. And the bizarre consequence
Speaker 1: of this is that really large, obvious things can go
Speaker 1: unaddressed for long periods of time because everybody assumes it's
Speaker 1: either impossible or the right people are already on it.
Speaker 1: I think supersonic flight was one of those I mean,
Speaker 1: who wouldn't want a faster airplane. Literally everybody would benefit
Speaker 1: from flights that are faster and more convenient. So there
Speaker 1: was this implicit assumption that there had to be something
Speaker 1: wrong with that idea or else somebody would be doing it.
Speaker 1: And then you could go on YouTube and there were
Speaker 1: plausible sounding but not actually correct explanations, like you know,
Speaker 1: one thing that was said was you have to solve
Speaker 1: the sonic boom problem in order to find a market.
Speaker 1: Another was that when supersonic came back, you would have
Speaker 1: to be a private jet for the ultrawealthy, not an airliner.
Speaker 1: Another was that it would inherently cost more and that
Speaker 1: people wouldn't pay more. And it turns out none of
Speaker 1: that is true. None of it stands up to relatively
Speaker 1: simple first order analysis that you know, I could do
Speaker 1: with a spreadsheet and data that I found in Wikipedia.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the lessons I learned from
Speaker 1: that experience is never accept a qualitative answer to a
Speaker 1: quantitative question. And so there were all these qualitative explanations
Speaker 1: of why supersonic flight wasn't commercially viable, but really it's
Speaker 1: a question should have like, okay, well how fast is
Speaker 1: the airplane and what roots would it fly on. What
Speaker 1: would affares have to be for it to be profitable,
Speaker 1: and how many people could afford to fly on those roots?
Speaker 1: And how much demand is there? And then that and
Speaker 1: what's it going to cost to develop? And you know,
Speaker 1: it's numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers that really say, doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense. And so there were all this a
Speaker 1: qualitative dismissal that didn't stand up to running the math.
Speaker 1: The reality was that boom could have been founded probably
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen years before it actually was, but nobody looked,
Speaker 1: nobody ran the math. So why didn't Boeing do this? Oh,
Speaker 1: that's a fascinating question. Bowing certainly could do this. In fact,
Speaker 1: they invented the key technology for it. All of the
Speaker 1: key enabling technology for mainstream commercial SuperSonics really debuted on
Speaker 1: the seven eight seven Dreamliner that Bowing built. Technologically they're
Speaker 1: capable of this. But it's a classic innovator's dilemma situation,
Speaker 1: so that the pace of innovation on subsonic aircraft. It
Speaker 1: has become so well subsonic that when Boeing or same
Speaker 1: things trade Airbus, when they develop a new airplane, they
Speaker 1: invest billions of dollars to build a relative commodity that's
Speaker 1: a low margin product that they're going to have to
Speaker 1: keep in production for decades to come in order to
Speaker 1: earn back their investment. And so that the last thing
Speaker 1: that a big company wants to do is come out
Speaker 1: with a new product that's going to cannibalize sales of
Speaker 1: the existing product before they earn back their investment. And
Speaker 1: so if Bowing did what we're doing, it would suck
Speaker 1: the most profitable passengers out of the front of the
Speaker 1: seven eight sevens before they earn back their seven eight
Speaker 1: seven investment. And so if you look at what their
Speaker 1: productive filament really is, they're focused on building replacement cycle products,
Speaker 1: not cannibalization cycle products. And so technologically could they do it, Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you know, I think we can do it faster and
Speaker 1: better as a focused startup. But they could absolutely do it,
Speaker 1: but they don't have the business motivation to do it
Speaker 1: because it would cannibalize the cash cows. So you're building
Speaker 1: this fascinating startup, You've got a prototype in place, the
Speaker 1: XB one. I think you're going to fly the plane,
Speaker 1: your first plane in this twenty twenty six. What I'm
Speaker 1: interested in is you've been hiring these people to share
Speaker 1: this dream with you, to go on this journey. I
Speaker 1: read somewhere about your favorite interview question, could you tell
Speaker 1: us what it is? Yeah, So to put this in context,
Speaker 1: as we were saying before, I'm a software engineer by training,
Speaker 1: and on day zero at Boom, my only knowledge of
Speaker 1: airplanes was how to fly a very little one. I
Speaker 1: knew I would need to learn a lot, and I
Speaker 1: would need to learn to hire people who knew a
Speaker 1: lot more than I did about their domains. And so
Speaker 1: what I found was I could ask people to teach
Speaker 1: me something, and it was shockingly easy to discover whether
Speaker 1: people really knew what they were talking about, because I
Speaker 1: could just walk away from that interview it said do
Speaker 1: I understand it or not? And what I found was
Speaker 1: most people operate on rules of thumb, not real deep understanding.
Speaker 1: And if you're doing something that's been done over and
Speaker 1: over again, rules of thumb work. But if you're going
Speaker 1: to break from tradition, you have to operate from first principles,
Speaker 1: what's physically possible, what's financially viable. Knowing a rule of
Speaker 1: thumb doesn't cut it. And so in asking people teach
Speaker 1: me something and then kind of iterating with them in
Speaker 1: the conversation to see where I could really get my
Speaker 1: head around it. I could separate out the people who
Speaker 1: are first principles thinkers from the people who only had
Speaker 1: rules of thumb, And the result was we were able
Speaker 1: to build a culture of people who are first principles
Speaker 1: thinkers and great communicators. So you have done for a
Speaker 1: startup sort of amazing work. You got a two billion
Speaker 1: dollar pre order from virgin for ten aircraft by two sixteen.
Speaker 1: Following two fifteen, you'd only raise seven hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: and you went on to get an order from the
Speaker 1: US Air Force, American Airlines, United Airlines. Tell me how
Speaker 1: on earth you did that one step at a time,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, to recap where we are today, there's
Speaker 1: an order from American and United and a pre order
Speaker 1: from japan Airlines. We say order when we mean there's
Speaker 1: a nonrefundable deposit that's unplaced, and a pre order is
Speaker 1: kind of more like an option. Maybe the story of
Speaker 1: the United deal is kind of the best one to
Speaker 1: tell here. So this was this came together starting late
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, kind of going into twenty twenty one. We
Speaker 1: announced the United Order in the summer of twenty one,
Speaker 1: and the way it got started was we were actually
Speaker 1: out raising a round of capital and I was talking
Speaker 1: with an investor and he had been doing kind of
Speaker 1: due diligence checks on boom claim people he knew in
Speaker 1: the industry, asking what they thought, and he calls me up.
Speaker 1: He says, Blake, I'm going to invest, but I'm also
Speaker 1: going to introduce you to this guy at United who
Speaker 1: does not think what you're doing makes a whole lot
Speaker 1: of sense. See if you can convince them to just
Speaker 1: not be a detractor. And so I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: and I took the intro and it was sort of
Speaker 1: the mission of neutralize the detractor. And the conversation started
Speaker 1: with a focus on sustainability, something like, you know, look,
Speaker 1: I love what you're doing here, but at United we
Speaker 1: really value sustainability and so obviously we would never do this,
Speaker 1: And you know, I explained that sustainability was actually one
Speaker 1: of the best reasons to do supersonic because we were
Speaker 1: designing overture, you know, from the ground up, to be
Speaker 1: compatible with a one hundred percent sustainable aviation fuel and
Speaker 1: it could actually be the first airplane in their fleet
Speaker 1: that would operate on net zero carbon. So from that conversation,
Speaker 1: everything's sort of leapt forward. And it was just a
Speaker 1: little bit more than six months from the very first
Speaker 1: conversation with United to being able to announce their order
Speaker 1: of jets. It started with trying to neutralize a detractor
Speaker 1: and then ultimately turned into our anchor customer for overture. Well,
Speaker 1: let's unpack some of your career in life lessons. You
Speaker 1: were an Amazon before Amazon truthly was really Amazon. You
Speaker 1: were at a few tech startups after that, as we
Speaker 1: talked about, and then groupon you even had your own
Speaker 1: startup in high school. What kind of mindset is necessary
Speaker 1: to lead a successful startup? Working on something I care
Speaker 1: about that I want to create in the world has
Speaker 1: been I think the most important things. If I look
Speaker 1: back at the biggest successes I've had, it was when
Speaker 1: I took on things that I really wanted to work,
Speaker 1: that I wanted to create, and where I was willing
Speaker 1: to put aside my fears of whether I would succeed
Speaker 1: or not and just run at the problem. Boom is
Speaker 1: a good case study in that, and that on day zero,
Speaker 1: I didn't have the resume to build an aviation company,
Speaker 1: let alone a super not a jet company. And it
Speaker 1: was kind of a heady thing to go do because
Speaker 1: I knew either we'd fail or we would do something
Speaker 1: that really would change the world. There wasn't a whole
Speaker 1: lot of in between. And I struggled with that for
Speaker 1: a while and ultimately decided that the people who take
Speaker 1: on big missions and succeed, we know their names. That's
Speaker 1: the right Brothers, that's Bill Gates, that's Steve Jobs, etc.
Speaker 1: And the ones who try and they don't succeed, we
Speaker 1: don't know their names. They're lost to history, but they
Speaker 1: know they gave it. They're all And the thing I
Speaker 1: told myself in twenty fourteen was the only way to
Speaker 1: know what I could do would be to give it
Speaker 1: a try, and I wanted to pick a mission where
Speaker 1: I would rather try and fail than not try period.
Speaker 1: So most companies starting out, culture becomes really important. It's
Speaker 1: really the glue. Some people call it the operating system
Speaker 1: that binds everything together. Core values I've observed that really
Speaker 1: seem to be essential or urgency, focus, and curiosity. How
Speaker 1: do those three work together for you? Urgency, focus, and curiosity,
Speaker 1: those are three really important values thinking about how this
Speaker 1: play out At Boom, We've challenged ourselves to do quickly
Speaker 1: something that a lot of people say you can't do
Speaker 1: at all. And you know, how quickly can we get
Speaker 1: to hardware? How quickly can we learn something? Can we
Speaker 1: go sell an airplane before we've ever even built one yet?
Speaker 1: Focus is like the secret weapon of a startup, like
Speaker 1: what we're talking about earlier with Bowing and why Bowing's
Speaker 1: not doing supersonic They have the problem of an established
Speaker 1: business that they don't want to disrupt. And one of
Speaker 1: the biggest luxuries and benefits of a startup is you
Speaker 1: exist in the world for one purpose. We're here to
Speaker 1: make supersonic flight a reality and make it mainstream. And
Speaker 1: that luxury of focus enables us to put our brains
Speaker 1: and our best people on the things that matter most
Speaker 1: and then last, but not least, necessity of learning. And
Speaker 1: I think curiosity and first principles thinking really go together.
Speaker 1: Why do things work the way they do today? What
Speaker 1: would be possible if things were different? What could we change?
Speaker 1: But also that a mindset of being willing to be
Speaker 1: wrong and to change our minds quickly really matters. One
Speaker 1: of my sayings is that if you want to be
Speaker 1: right a lot. One of the best things to do
Speaker 1: is to stop being wrong quickly, and so that requires
Speaker 1: listening to reality, listening to evidence, listening to people around us.
Speaker 1: And when we discover that our previous view or previous
Speaker 1: strategy was wrong, that's not something to be ashamed of.
Speaker 1: That's something to be excited about. That's called learning. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I'm working really hard to make
Speaker 1: part of the Boom culture is that it's okay to
Speaker 1: change your mind, because changing your mind is called learning.
Speaker 1: What do you say when people say it won't work.
Speaker 1: You just gave us an example of unite it. Tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit more about how you use that
Speaker 1: culturally in your company. But there are plenty of skeptics,
Speaker 1: and they have good reason. It's been more than a
Speaker 1: century since the last entrepreneurially founded commercial aircraft company, which
Speaker 1: was Douglass Aircraft in nineteen twenty one, and you know,
Speaker 1: they got to start with a single engine propeller plane.
Speaker 1: And we're saying we're going to build a transoceanic, supersonic
Speaker 1: passenger airplane as a new company. So there's plenty of challenge.
Speaker 1: But the thing that gives me heart is On one hand,
Speaker 1: this absolutely should exist. You know, it's hard to imagine,
Speaker 1: say in twenty fifty, twenty sixty, that we're still flying subsonic.
Speaker 1: It needs to come, it's inevitable, and it really needs
Speaker 1: to come from a new entrant. And so we say, great,
Speaker 1: what would a successful attempt at this have to look like?
Speaker 1: You know, it's going to require an ambitious team. It's
Speaker 1: going to require really talented individuals. It's going to require
Speaker 1: an ability to be persuasive of customers, of investors, of
Speaker 1: supply liars. It's going to require deep passion for mission
Speaker 1: and deep belief because the journey will be long and hard,
Speaker 1: and persevering through it is going to be necessary for success.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of big challenges ahead of us, but
Speaker 1: also some that are in the rearview mirror. We've built
Speaker 1: and tested histories first independently developed supersonic jet. We've pre
Speaker 1: sold twenty six billion in Overture airplanes and order in
Speaker 1: orders and pre orders. North Carolina has contributed two hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars with the project and is funding build out
Speaker 1: of the Overture superfactory in Greensboro. And so there are
Speaker 1: plenty of quote unquote impossible things left to do. But
Speaker 1: I look backwards and we've already done some things that
Speaker 1: everybody said we couldn't do. You're the founder and CEO
Speaker 1: of Boom Supersonic, which you're also a human with a family.
Speaker 1: How do you integrate those two? It's challenging and sort
Speaker 1: of some of the worst moments personally or what I
Speaker 1: feel like, I really need to be in two places
Speaker 1: at the same time, and I just have to choose.
Speaker 1: I try to make it win win as much as
Speaker 1: I can. And just to give one story, earlier this year,
Speaker 1: I got to personally fly Supersonic for the first time
Speaker 1: on a T thirty eight along with our chief test
Speaker 1: pilot down in the Mojave Desert, And so I flew
Speaker 1: myself down to Mahave in the Sirius and brought my
Speaker 1: kids along for it. We made it into a little
Speaker 1: bit of a family vacation. They got to have an
Speaker 1: experience flying with me, and we got to have a
Speaker 1: lot of conversations, you know, afterwards, about how I've chosen
Speaker 1: what I work on, and you know, I hope it
Speaker 1: will inspire them to go off and do things that
Speaker 1: they love that will be meaningful to them. So that's
Speaker 1: one of the better stories. So let's move to some advice.
Speaker 1: What's the best advice you've ever received? I've been Look,
Speaker 1: you have a lot of good pieces of advice if
Speaker 1: I think about the ones that had been most pivotal,
Speaker 1: you know, for the success I've had, a lot of
Speaker 1: it comes down to people encouraging me to believe in
Speaker 1: myself when I wasn't sure. It's so easy for me
Speaker 1: to have self doubt and to say, Okay, what can
Speaker 1: I do? Am I going to succeed at this? Should
Speaker 1: I try something easier? Should I expect that someone better
Speaker 1: than I am you can go off and do these things.
Speaker 1: And I've been lucky to have some friends and mentors
Speaker 1: at critical junctures when I wasn't sure who said, no,
Speaker 1: I think you can do this. You should definitely give
Speaker 1: it a try. That helped give me the courage to
Speaker 1: be more bold. So, if you could, what advice would
Speaker 1: you give your twenty one year old self? Aim high,
Speaker 1: stay curious. Whenever you face a choice between doing something
Speaker 1: easier and doing something harder, do the harder things so
Speaker 1: long as it's something that you're passionate about and don't
Speaker 1: spend your time on missions you don't love. So we
Speaker 1: end each episode of Math and Magic with a shout
Speaker 1: out to heroes, influencers, and mentors in business. I think
Speaker 1: it is the combination of the math and the magic
Speaker 1: that leads to success. Analytical understanding the math part, and
Speaker 1: the sheer creativity built on that understanding that excites consumers
Speaker 1: builds fantastic products. You get two shout outs, one for
Speaker 1: the math person and one for the creative Who are they?
Speaker 1: On the math side, it's Jeff Bezos and on the
Speaker 1: creative side it is Steve Jobs who showed that we
Speaker 1: could build products that people would fall in love with. Blake,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for letting me go deep in the
Speaker 1: airplanes and indulging my inner plane geek, and thanks for
Speaker 1: bringing supersonic travel back for us non military types. We
Speaker 1: wish you the best and I hope you'll let me
Speaker 1: come fly your SIMS sometime. And congrats on all your success.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Bob. Yeah, looking forward to doing some hang
Speaker 1: or flying together. Here are a few things I've picked
Speaker 1: up in my conversation with Blake. One, do what you
Speaker 1: love at Boom. Blake is creating what many thought was
Speaker 1: impossible because of his lifelong interest in aviation. He's proof
Speaker 1: that if you follow your passion and you're willing to
Speaker 1: reinvent yourself, you'll succeed. As Blake said, skills are variable.
Speaker 1: Passion is not two know what you don't know. Learning
Speaker 1: new skills are essential parts of building a business. Don't
Speaker 1: worry if your ideas keep changing, as Blake says, that's
Speaker 1: not a sign of chaos. It's a sign that you're
Speaker 1: getting closer to the right answer. Three. Never accept a
Speaker 1: qualitative answer to a quantitative question. As Blake explains, if
Speaker 1: he listened to all the qualitative explanations about why supersonic
Speaker 1: flight wasn't commercially viable, boom wouldn't exist. I'm Bob Pittman.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Sydney Rosenbloom for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which
Speaker 1: is no small feat. Our editor Emily Marinoff, our engineer
Speaker 1: Jessica Cranchich, our executive producers Nikki Eatore and Ali Perry,
Speaker 1: and of course Gail Raoul Eric Angel, Noel, and everyone
Speaker 1: who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,