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The Luba Show

Aug 25, 2026 · 44 min

BlakeScholl

Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic

He's Bringing Supersonic Flight BACK - Blake Scholl

Blake Scholl on The Luba Show
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In this episode

Today I walk with Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake was roughly Amazon's 200th engineer, spent more than a decade building XB-1 into the first supersonic jet made outside a government or military, and got the US ban on supersonic flight repealed after breaking the sound barrier, and now he's scaling Boom toward carrying passengers in 2030. He gets into the six years Boom spent waiting on Rolls-Royce for an engine, and why that breakup turned out to be the best gift the company ever got.

  • Why he'd rather be a "dark matter entrepreneur" who tried and failed than spend his life asking what if
  • The six years Boom spent trying to get Rolls-Royce to build a custom engine, and why losing that deal is what made the business financially viable
  • Why "work on something you know about" is terrible advice, since what you know is far easier to change than what you love
  • How a parenting lesson turned into the practice that built candor inside Boom's staff meetings

Chapters

  1. Trailer
  2. Intro
  3. The day XB-1 broke the sound barrier
  4. 2,000 pounds overweight and called the Theranos of aviation
  5. How big a dent can we make in the universe
  6. Bill Gates and the dark matter entrepreneur
  7. Mom's advice: work on something you already know
  8. The flying lesson at 19 that decided everything
  9. Starting Boom with three kids under two
  10. The mistake dinner that became a staff meeting
  11. Why the Rolls-Royce breakup was the best gift Boom got
  12. Brian Chesky and permission to make the big swing
  13. Amazon at engineer 200 and automating ads at 22
  14. Congestion price the entire road network
  15. "I'd be proud of you for trying"
  16. The $750K prize to fly supersonic
  17. Outro

About the guest

Blake Scholl

Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic

Full transcript

LubaBlake, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for being here.

BlakeThank you.

LubaThis is amazing. It's just so impressive. But I'm gonna start in potentially an interesting spot. How long have you been into tango?

BlakeOh, boy. I took tango lessons in my early 20s.

LubaOkay.

BlakeAnd it has been a long time since I've done any tango dancing, so I think I'd get all tangled up if we tried.

LubaLike, why were you interested in tango when you were in your 20s?

BlakeFor me, dance has always been about music. And I love Argentine tango music. And I felt like I had to learn how to do the dance.

LubaHave you been to Argentina?

BlakeI have not.

LubaIs that on the map?

BlakeTo tango? Well, once there's a supersonic jet and it doesn't take so long to get there, then absolutely. There are many things in the world that are, like, on my travel wish list, but I'm too impatient. And without a faster airplane, I'm like, hey, it's not worth it.

LubaYeah, honestly, I totally get it. I just came here from San Francisco and my flight was canceled, and then I had to come back to the airport, and I was like, I just can't wait until supersonic planes are here. So when are they here?

BlakeOur target is about four years out.

LubaOkay.

BlakeSo we've built and flown a test airplane, which is the first supersonic jet made outside of a government or military. And the next job is really to scale up, and we're doing this as fast as we can without skipping any steps. Our goal is to be ready for passengers in 2030. Will that happen exactly? I don't know, these things have a way of taking longer than you want them to, but nothing's impossible. We've solved all the hardest problems already. It's a matter of just doing the scale-up and doing all the safety testing.

LubaSo we are actually here at the plane that flew supersonic and broke the sound barrier. It's XB-1.

BlakeYes.

LubaI'm curious, how did you feel when that happened?

BlakeIt was one of the best days of my life. Yeah. Two of the highest of high moments were the first flight and the first supersonic flight. But by the time we actually broke the sound barrier, that was the 12th time we'd flown the airplane, and every flight would be like another step closer. And I knew if we flew that day, we were going to go supersonic. And it was a question, really, of whether the weather would be good enough that we could fly at all.

And I got up that morning, it was like 3 or 4 a.m. because these test flights happen pretty early. So I'm up at three, and the first thing I do is look at the weather app and it's like worse weather than forecast. No. And I'm like, oh, are we gonna be able to do this? And I'm driving to the hangar and it's kind of cloudy and I'm like, are the clouds going to clear? I don't know.

And one of the principles of our safety culture is that the flight test team would make the go/no-go decision behind closed doors without senior leadership in the room. So they go in there, they're reviewing the data, reviewing the weather, trying to decide whether we can do it that day. And when they left and walked to the hangar, I could tell from the body language that it was a go because the team was excited. There was this, like, electric energy. The crew chief walked over to the front of the airplane and started hooking up the tow bar to pull it out of the hangar, and for me, that was the moment we broke the sound barrier. And so I'm like, it's going to happen. It's happening, it's happening, right?

And then we go actually do the flight and we actually break the sound barrier. And we've got this gigantic screen with an air-to-air live stream that is, like, taking place in the sky, streamed via Starlink at supersonic speeds.

LubaWow.

BlakeAnd there's, like, a little thing that pops up when we go through Mach 1, the sound barrier, and all my friends that were there with me were like high-fiving me and like, you did it, man, you did it.

LubaHow many friends did you...

BlakeOh, we had like 300 people there.

LubaWow.

BlakeYou know, media, friends, investors. But for me, that felt weird because I'm like, yeah, of course.

LubaOf course that's happening.

BlakeOf course it's happening. Like, what do you think was going to happen? But yeah, for the rest of the world, we broke the sound barrier when we broke the sound barrier. For me, it was like a couple hours earlier.

LubaThat's incredible. So there were 12 flights before you guys actually broke the sound barrier. Is it that you were waiting for a flight to be cleared for it? Like, why?

BlakeYeah. So it's something called envelope expansion.

LubaOkay.

BlakeSo basically every time we flew, we would push to a new flight condition that we hadn't done before, check everything and then move on. So basically, you're expanding what's called the altitude envelope: how high have you flown? And you're expanding the speed envelope, or the dynamic pressure envelope: how fast are you going? And so we sort of step up in speed, step up in altitude, step up in speed, step up in altitude. And at every point we check some stuff. And, you know, how easy is it to fly the airplane? How stable is it? And then you'd kind of, like, run out of fuel and come back and, like, everyone would study the data and say, okay, is it good to do the next flight? And so every flight was like a little bit more.

LubaAnd how many days between the flights, or months?

BlakeI mean, it would depend on what we learned between flights.

LubaOkay.

BlakeYou know, from first flight to second flight was several months because we actually made some significant changes to the airplane that took a while to do. But after that, it got much faster. So it was something like nine months from first flight to first supersonic flight, with a big gap between one and two. And then we started going bam, bam, bam, much faster. I think the last two flights were like two weeks apart.

LubaSo take me to the exact moment when you realized it's happening.

BlakeSo, I mean, I sort of described that earlier.

LubaYeah. But like, so you check the weather app, they cleared you. Like, what did you feel?

BlakeI was just...

LubaHow much did you think about it?

BlakeAbout that? I mean, I was super excited. Like, it was like, holy crap, I've spent more than a decade of my life, and there are many, many days where it wasn't obvious that it would happen at all. So we almost ran out of money repeatedly. We had technical problems that felt like, I don't know how we're ever going to solve this problem. Like, at one point we were 2,000 pounds overweight.

LubaOh, wow.

BlakeOn an airplane that was only supposed to weigh 12,000 pounds. It's hard to get 2,000 pounds out. And it was like, whoa, will this work at all? And we had a bunch of moments that were like the startup equivalent of a stage four cancer diagnosis. It's like, either we're going to beat this or we're going to die.

LubaYeah.

BlakeAnd so there had been a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to that day. And I had worried, you know, one of my personal anxieties as a founder is if this thing never actually goes supersonic, like, boy, we're going to be branded in history as failures. You know, I would go to a press conference and reporters would show up and say, like, have you seen the tweet that says Boom is the Theranos of aviation? How would you respond? It's like, I will literally be called a fraud if we're not successful.

And, you know, flying the test airplane supersonic was not why I started the company. That was to enable, you know, anybody to fly supersonic. So that's not success. But it's like base camp. It's like we've set out to climb Mount Everest. It's hard, but it's doable. And breaking the sound barrier is like, we got to base camp. And in a certain sense, like, I felt safer after that, just emotionally, because I'm like, okay, we've made a positive contribution to history at this point. And I want to go the whole way. But even just getting to here, we've done something good for the world.

LubaThat's incredible. How many times did you feel like there was this stage four cancer diagnosis? Like, if you were to count.

BlakeA dozen, maybe. It seemed like the first ten years of the company, we had a near-death experience, like, every year. It's been a while since we've had one, so maybe we're due again, I don't know.

LubaHow long has it been?

BlakeIt's been like 18 months.

LubaOh, that's not that long.

BlakeYeah.

LubaDo you think a part of you is hooked on that feeling of, almost, like, danger, and maybe...

BlakeI mean, I do believe in, you know, doing things that are really hard. And what I find is, if things get easier, I'm like, oh, great. I can take on more now.

LubaYeah.

BlakeAnd so I tend to be, you know, wherever my personal red line is, I kind of hang out there. And if it gets easier, I just, like, stack on the challenge. I take on a new goal, start a new project, you know, just make it harder again until I'm at my limit.

LubaAnd where does that come from? Like, your desire to stack on really, really hard problems and challenges.

BlakeWe only live once, right? And I think my mindset is, having seen what's possible... Like, literally, Boom started, we broke the sound barrier, we showed that sonic boom is a solvable problem. And based on that, we got the ban on supersonic flight in the US repealed. Like, that's a pretty freaking big accomplishment. And, you know, Steve Jobs used to talk about making a dent in the universe. I was like, well, we put a dent in the universe. And I'm like, well, how big of a dent can we make in the universe? And I wouldn't want to be, like, 90 and think, what if I'd swung a little harder, right? I'm like, let's see how much stuff we can change.

And my sort of life challenge to myself is, how much better can I leave the world than I found it? And I have, like, way more ideas than I probably have years of my life or energy to actually execute. But it's sort of a challenge of how much... you know, the world is kind of messed up in a bunch of ways.

LubaYeah.

BlakeHow much of it can I fix? How much of it could this company fix? I don't want to leave, like, stuff on the table.

LubaAnd was this something that you were experiencing since you were a kid? That you were like, oh, one day I'm going to be someone who leaves a dent in the universe?

BlakeNo. For a long time, I thought I was somebody who admires people who leave dents in the universe, but not one who would leave one myself. Like, I could have dreamed of it, but I'm like, who am I? I'm some kid from the Midwest. Like, who am I to say that I have some ability to go dent the universe?

LubaAnd who were the people that you were inspired by at that point and you were admiring?

BlakeLike, you know, all the greatest greats of history. You know, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, looking back further in time, Edison. You know, people who left the world meaningfully better than how they found it, based on what they created. And I had so much respect for them. But, like, how arrogant would it be to say, well, I'm going to do that too?

And then, so when I was contemplating... like, I had this supersonic idea, should I go for it? And I talked to my friends about it. I said, I think I want to build a supersonic passenger jet. And even the people that really respected me would get very quiet. And you could watch the air leave the room. Their eyes would kind of roll back. One said to me, call me back when you've got something less pie in the sky. And so I struggled with, like, should I go for it or not?

LubaBut what gave you a permission to even dream that you could potentially take on projects like supersonic planes? Because, again, you were saying that you were the type of guy who admired the greats but didn't think that you were the greatest.

BlakeWell, I thought in particular about stories I'd heard about Bill Gates. In the 1970s when he started Microsoft, you know, he said his goal was to put a personal computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software. And that was at a time where personal computers were mostly not even a thing. And yet his goal is to put them everywhere and empower them with his software. By the way, there was no software industry. Like, Microsoft was the first real software company.

I thought, what was it like to be Bill back then? Like, did he know for sure he was going to be able to do it? Like, no. Nobody taps you on the shoulder and says, yeah, by the way, you're the guy that's actually gonna do it. Like, how could Bill know? I think he just had to take a guess.

I started to imagine that there are two kinds of entrepreneurs. There's the ones who take on big challenges and succeed. And we know who they are, right? They're part of history. And there are also the entrepreneurs that take on big challenges, give it everything and fail. And I thought of those as, like, the dark matter of entrepreneurship. Like, you don't know who tried and didn't succeed. And I was like, okay, how do you know which you are? I think the only way you can know is to pick a mission that is incredibly inspiring, that causes you to give it everything you've got, and that's the only way you actually find your limit. I don't think you find your limit by thinking about your limit. You find your limit by pushing and seeing how far you can go and how much you can learn and how much you can grow.

And so I sort of made the decision, I would rather be a dark matter entrepreneur than a what-if entrepreneur. Like, I did not want to be at the end of my life thinking, what if I'd gone for it? And at this point, like, I had done enough technical work that I believed it was doable, and it was a question of whether I had the courage to go for it myself. And I was like, great, I'd rather fail than not try.

And at that point it was like, whenever I see something in life in terms of courage, then it becomes easy. Because courage is just a choice. It's a choice to do it despite the fear. Courage is not being fearless. Courage is acting despite the fear. And so once I saw, oh, this is just a courage decision... and I think that's how courage works. It is a courage decision. Then that was easy.

LubaDo you remember the moment when you decided that way? Was there a lot leading up to it, or was it a conversation?

BlakeThere was a lot leading up to it, and I kind of remember where I was standing.

LubaTell me.

BlakeIt was in the bedroom of a house, this rental house in Denver. And I'm like, you know, can I go all in on this or not? And I think I was just, like, pacing around.

LubaYeah. And why were you in Denver at that point?

BlakeLike, I'd sort of taken steps towards starting, and I'd come out here because that was where the first couple of people that I was planning to hire would be.

LubaI heard the story where you were calling your mom, and you were like, well, I'm gonna work on the supersonic idea. And she was like, Blake, shouldn't you be working on something that you know something about?

BlakeYeah. Thanks, Mom.

LubaWhat was that like to hear that from... of course, I don't know how close you are with your mom. Maybe...

BlakeWell, yeah. Mom and I are not close at all anymore, but I think it was very well-meaning but misplaced advice. I was like, you know, "shouldn't you do things you know about?" Sounds plausible, but is actually terrible advice, because what you know is changeable. Like, people can learn. I think people generally underestimate their ability to learn. And yet what you're passionate about is much harder to change. And I think a lot of people get stuck in some corner of the universe where they're doing what they know, but not really what they love. And I think it's a very sad place to spend your life. It is much easier to change what you know than it is to change what you love.

And so, you know, my resume said, when I did my first company, that I should work on mobile e-commerce, because I knew e-commerce from Amazon, I knew mobile from this other startup I'd been part of, so I should work on mobile e-commerce. Turns out I had no vision, no passion. I shipped a bunch of software. None of it mattered, and I was miserable.

LubaOkay.

BlakeI'd much rather focus on what I want to create in the world and learn how to do it, versus follow my resume and do more of the same stuff that I maybe enjoyed the craft of, but not what I was building.

LubaTell me about how you got the aviation bug, because you keep saying do what you love. You clearly love aviation, right?

BlakeI think for some of us who are into flight, it is a thing we get infected with at the moment of first exposure. And I don't really understand how somebody could not have it. But it's clearly not everybody's thing. The story my parents told me was that when I was very young, like six months, they took me to an airport in Cincinnati, and I was watching airplanes take off and land. I had a little toy airplane, and it was the first time I made the connection between a toy thing and a full-scale thing.

LubaWow.

BlakeAnd so maybe it imprinted, I don't know. But, you know, my next memory after that was I tried to get my parents to get me a radio-controlled airplane as a kid. I don't think I ever got anything flying. I remember being jealous in high school of my friend who got flying lessons. I was like, man, I gotta get flying lessons. Mom wouldn't get me flying lessons.

And then it was the summer of 2000. I was 19 years old, and I was working at a tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area as an intern, and I was like two exits down Highway 101 from San Carlos Airport. And I'm like, I'm an overpaid tech intern. I could get flying lessons. Why would I not do this?

And I vividly remember my very first flying lesson, and my instructor talked me through the takeoff. And this was in San Carlos. This is, like, one click south down the 101 from Oracle headquarters. And I remember that moment of pulling back on the stick, watching the airplane climb in the air and thinking, holy crap, I've got my life in my own hands. And then also, this is really awesome. I've got my life in my own hands. I want to learn to do this. And I knew at that moment it was something for me, even though it took me another eight years to actually finish my pilot's license.

LubaMaybe I'm over-assuming here, but the statement "I've got my life in my own hands" makes me think of choice. Like, you have the choice that you're making about your life. Is that at all how you were thinking about it?

BlakeI think there's like a visceral feeling of that in terms of, like, literally, I'm controlling this airplane.

LubaYeah.

BlakeAnd if I don't land it safely, I'm going to die. I don't walk away. But then there's also, I guess, a metaphorical version of that. Like, I'm in control of where I'm going. That speaks to me as well.

One of the things that I think is great about flying as a hobby, it's the most relaxing thing I do. And the reason is because of the safety criticality. It requires mental focus. So, you know, if I go around my life, there's always something in the back of my head. Am I completely present in a conversation? Am I completely focused on a problem, or am I thinking of the meeting I just had? Am I thinking about my next meeting? Am I thinking about some other problem? It's hard to be mentally 100% present, but flying forces 100% mental presence. And as a result, maybe I'm only in the air for an hour, but for an hour I'm not thinking about anything but flying the airplane. And I find that one hour in the air is more relaxing than, like, an entire week of vacation, because I'm actually, for once, not thinking about anything else.

LubaSo how often do you fly now?

BlakeNot as much as I want to. You know, maybe once a month or so.

LubaOh, that's pretty good. That's still pretty good.

BlakeI think it's about the minimum that is safe.

LubaTo keep up your license.

BlakeRight. Well, the bar for keeping your license is actually relatively low. The bar to feel safe doing it is much higher. The best analogy I would make for someone who's not a pilot is, imagine you use Microsoft Excel, but knowing the keyboard shortcuts is a life-and-death matter.

LubaYeah.

BlakeHow often would you feel safe using the spreadsheet if you only opened Microsoft Excel every six months, but your life depended on knowing the keyboard shortcuts? Are you really safe? No. You need to do it more frequently to maintain that muscle memory, to maintain that currency. And so, like, once a month for me is minimum. And, you know, there are periods of time where I was flying several times a week, and when I'm flying several times a week, then I'm like, okay, now I really know what I'm doing.

LubaDo you have IFR and private pilot?

BlakeI do. I have my private ticket and I have my instrument rating as well, which, for anybody who's thinking about flying, I highly recommend getting.

LubaBecause for anyone listening, it's to fly in cloudy conditions.

BlakeYeah. So when you first get your pilot's license, you're certified to fly under visual rules, which basically means you've got to be able to see where you're going and see other airplanes and avoid them. So you can't be in the weather. You can't be in the clouds.

LubaYeah.

BlakeAnd then there's additional training you can do to learn how to fly by reference to instruments, meaning you can fly safely even if you have no visibility outside the airplane. So I like to say I'm certified to have my head in the clouds.

LubaYeah. That's amazing. You mentioned that you got the bug for flying, as your parents say, by them giving you a little plane, and then you connected the dots between the toy plane and the plane in the sky. You've been taking your kids pretty often to the factory, right?

BlakeYeah. I love to bring the kids here. I mean, there's a lot of downsides to having a CEO as a parent. You don't get the most time. But one of the upsides is you can get a front-row seat to making history. And if my kids are going to have the downsides of having a busy father, I want them to also have the upsides. So whenever they want to come here, I bring them and, you know, they can fly the flight sim, or they can see things getting built. And, you know, I brought my four-and-a-half-year-old to Boom and, like, we drove the forklift together. And my older kids, one of them is very clearly going to be either a mechanical or manufacturing engineer.

LubaHow is that clear?

BlakeWell, when he was four, we were building Legos together. And I was like, that brick goes over there, honey. And he's like, no, it doesn't, Dad. It goes over there. And I'm like, he's right.

LubaWow.

BlakeSo from age four, he was better at Legos than I've ever been. And he's got three 3D printers, he's got a CNC machine.

LubaHow old is he now?

BlakeHe's 12.

LubaOkay. Wow.

BlakeAnd, like, I bring home a part, and I'm like, let's talk about how this part was made. And he just lights up, and he's very interested in it and pretty smart about it. So I don't think it's for parents to decide what the kids are going to be. I think my job is to help them develop basic skills, help them develop character, and encourage them to, like, find the work that's meaningful, that they're going to love. It's just very obvious with him.

LubaWhat was it like starting a company with kids at home?

BlakeWell, I started Boom when I had three kids under two years old.

LubaWow.

BlakeSo if you're wondering how the math works, there were twins involved. And it wasn't the easiest thing. You know, I had had enough savings that I could afford some help, and it's hard for me to imagine not having a support network and being able to still do it, but it was doable.

So my thought to founders would be, I think it's a built-up assumption a lot of people have that there's some trade-off between, quote unquote, life and work, and I just reject that. Meaningful work is part of life. And I've never found that if something really mattered to me, I couldn't find a way to fit it in somehow. And all the time, I find that there's a lesson I learned as a father that, if I bring it to the office, makes me a better CEO, or a thing I learned about inspiring people at the office that, if I bring it home, makes me a better dad. So I think there's a lot of synergy. And it also makes me more efficient with time. I've got to figure out how to do more with less, and that is a core life skill.

LubaAnd also be more focused while you are doing the work, because you have a lot more responsibilities. What are some recent lessons that you learned as a father that made you a better leader?

BlakeSo one is about honesty. One of my boys went through a phase where he was lying a lot. And at first, I was very judgmental about it. I was like, that's just wrong. You need to tell the truth, dude. And, very frankly, he would get very ashamed, and it wasn't getting better. And I had a parenting coach who would...

LubaA parenting coach? I've never heard anyone say that.

BlakeYeah. One of my kids had seen a therapist who was a child psychologist.

LubaOh, yeah.

BlakeAnd I would, like, check in with him from time to time. Like, wait a minute, you know a lot about kids. Can I just get a Zoom call with you, like, every couple of weeks? And we'll just talk about what's going on. Like, I was parenting by trial and error. And I'm like, if I had someone who knew a lot, I could make fewer mistakes and get it more right the first time and not have my kids in therapy 30 years later because of my mistakes. So I recommend this. Like, it's good to have great executive coaches. It's good to have great parenting coaches. If we can find people who can help us learn faster, it's very much worth the expense.

But anyway, this guy encouraged me to get curious about what was the motivation for the lying. He was like, yeah, kids really only lie for 3 or 4 different reasons. Figure out which one it is and you can deal with that. And it turned out he was embarrassed by making mistakes, and he felt a need to hide his mistakes. And so once I saw that, I'm like, oh, I just need to normalize mistake-making and actually make it cool to learn from mistakes.

And so, like, a lot of families do these gratitude practices where you sit down for dinner and everyone says what they're thankful for. And I'm like, we're going to sit down and we're going to talk about the mistakes we made and what lesson we learned from it. I remember walking up the first time I did this, and I thought, I'm probably gonna have to lead by example, because no one's going to want to share a mistake. But, who wants to go first? Everyone's like, me! I'm like, oh, I didn't see that coming.

LubaWow.

BlakeAnd they started to share mistakes and started to share what they learned. And sometimes they were the right conclusions. Sometimes I'm like, no, no, no, that's not the right conclusion. Let me help you draw the right conclusion.

And then what I realized is, like, everyone's just a big kid. And it's difficult to build a corporate culture of candor, because people are afraid of being punished or being embarrassed by mistakes. And so I ended up doing the same thing at my staff meeting. I made it cool to share a mistake and what you learned. And then what it did is increase the level of transparency and candor within the company.

LubaThat's incredible. How often do you do this meeting?

BlakeIt's not, like, formally programmed. It used to be.

LubaSometimes.

BlakeBut it's more like, these are things you kind of drop into the culture and you make them a little bit of a practice. And once it's part of the culture, you don't have to make a song and dance out of it every week.

LubaWhat are some other big cultural things at Boom that you found really helpful?

BlakeYeah, the single biggest thing is making sure that the vast majority of our employees are passionate about the mission. What we set out to do is really hard. And we knew there would be days where we got the equivalent of a stage four cancer diagnosis. And, you know, when you get that diagnosis, there's a choice that patients face, which is, am I going to fight it or am I going to give in? And I think a lot of that comes down to, like, pain tolerance relative to how valuable life or the goal is, right?

And so I needed a team that deeply believed that we needed to bring back supersonic passenger flight and make it mainstream, and that it was worth an enormous amount of pain to accomplish that goal. And if you don't believe in that goal, it's irrational to put up with it, because this shit's really hard. And if you don't love it, you're going to quit. And so I sort of engineered a team that would not give up despite setbacks. And so mission focus is a big thing we look for. And that resilience is a thing we build with the culture.

There have been a number of times... like, one example, we put a lot of energy into getting a legacy big engine company to build a custom jet engine.

LubaRolls-Royce.

BlakeYeah. Rolls-Royce. And the most amazing thing is we almost succeeded. But then we didn't. And it's like, okay, great. We're building an airplane and we've got no engine. And that was one of these, like, well, are we going to hang it up right here, or are we going to go solve that problem? And it turned out that the breakup with Rolls-Royce was the best gift we ever got.

We ultimately decided to just bring it in-house and do it ourselves, and that led to a bunch of other things, including the discovery that we could use our engine for ground power generation, thereby pulling scaled revenue in by many years, and many billions less capital to go raise. And it made the whole thing financially viable in a way it might not have been otherwise. So the breakup with Rolls-Royce, and our willingness to, like, stick with it despite a big setback, actually got us the thing that probably saved the company in a different way.

LubaTell me more about that decision to build your own engine. So you had this situation where Rolls-Royce fell through. I mean, you could have gone and, like, tried to build a relationship with another legacy engine company.

BlakeYeah. And we flirted with that. But to take the story back, I mean, first off, there was no engine that would just work, right? We knew we would need at least a somewhat customized engine from day one. And from day one, my assumption was we'd have to build it ourselves. And so one of my first employees was an engine designer. And then a couple of weeks into his tenure at the company, he's like, hey, the Rolls-Royce engines are going to be more easily modifiable than anything else, we should really work with Rolls. And it sounded like a big breakthrough. It was actually a big mistake.

LubaDid you feel like it was the right decision?

BlakeI thought it was okay. But at least, I half thought it was, is the reality. It was a seductive decision. Did I 100% really buy into it? Not necessarily. But I went along with it. There were reasons why it made sense. And we spent the next six years trying to get Rolls-Royce to build us an engine. And then the breakup happened, and I was like, crap, what are we going to do? And I kind of knew in my heart of hearts outsourcing it was not the right decision.

It had gotten all the way to a board meeting at Rolls-Royce, where the team was going to ask for board approval to actually do the program. The actual outcome of that board meeting was the CEO got fired.

LubaOh, wow.

BlakeRight. And you could say, ah, bad luck. And I think bad luck is a way of reality telling us that our plans were fragile. And in this case, I was betting the entire company on the willingness of a 100-year-old British company to play ball with us. Boy, that is risky. And it's much better to take things under your own control.

And so we talked about, should we try to get another engine company in? You know, we looked at a lot of different ideas. In my heart of hearts I knew that we should do it ourselves. And I remember going to a talk that Brian Chesky gave. Brian was the founder CEO of Airbnb.

LubaI used to work at Airbnb.

BlakeOh, great. So, you know, Brian's a great guy. And so Brian gave a talk about having led Airbnb through Covid. And he said, when you're in a crisis, the temptation is to compromise. But what you really need to do is look within yourself and become your truest and best self, what you always knew you should have been. And it was as if Brian had stood on stage and said Boom should build their own engine, because that's what I heard.

And I remember leaving that talk and thinking, I don't know if we can do it. My team isn't going to believe that they can do it. We don't have any of the people at the company to go do this today, but we're just going to have to go figure it out. And it was scary as fuck to go lead through that, in part because I thought nobody would believe, not even inside the company. But I knew we had to do it.

LubaSo it was almost like he gave you a permission to...

BlakeI think so. Brian gave me permission to make the big swing.

LubaAnd obviously, you've dealt with so much pain building Boom to what it is. I'm sure now there's been a lot of exposure therapy, you can say. But what about in the early days?

BlakeI think that's right. Like, you know, I think about an experience I had 15 years ago where I went to an amusement park on a rainy day, and there was almost nobody there. And so there were no lines. So I went to, like, the scariest roller coaster, and I went and got on it. I go around, like, oh my gosh, that was thrilling. But there's nobody in line. And the operator guy was like, do you want to just go again? I'm like, sure. Like, how cool is this? I just get to go on the same roller coaster over and over and over again. And after about 3 or 4 times around the roller coaster, it wasn't that scary anymore, right?

And so I think one of the gifts of doing Boom has been that it has handed me significant challenges over and over and over again. And, you know, the worst parts have been when something was going badly wrong at Boom and something was going badly wrong in my personal life. And those were the hardest. It's like, wow, my work is on fire and my marriage is on fire. Like, how do I get through this? But I just found a way. And as I get to today, it's like, okay, bad news does not faze me the way it used to. And you're right. I think the exposure therapy, in a certain sense, is a big deal, for sure.

LubaTake me to that period when both your work and personal life were on fire. How did you deal with it?

BlakeYeah, I mean, just by dealing with it, right? I'd do my best to solve one problem at a time, try to sleep. And, you know, at times I had good friends who helped me. There were times where I had a crisis of confidence and I needed to call a mentor. And it was helpful to have friends that believed in me, even when times were pretty dark, and even when they were dark in part because of mistakes I had made. And, you know, having people who said, no, you should get through this. That was helpful.

LubaWho do you consider your biggest mentors?

BlakeI mean, I've been lucky to have a handful of really good ones. And some of them go back many years. You know, the guy I went to high school with was the first person who told me, oh, no, you should actually go do this thing. Avichal.

LubaAvichal. Yeah. He introduced us.

BlakeThat's right, that's right. Yeah. Avichal was the first person who said he believed in me. He told me years later he didn't actually, but he didn't want to tell me.

LubaThe lift of confidence was huge.

BlakeIt was helpful. Yeah. You know, there's the guy that hired me at Amazon. Fast forward 25 years, he is on my board, I'm on his board.

LubaWow.

BlakeAnd I've had a handful of other people like that.

LubaI heard you speak about your time at Amazon, and that it was an incredible experience to work there and learn. What are some things that come to mind that you've taken away from it?

BlakeI mean, so to put it in context, I signed my Amazon offer letter late 2000. I got in two weeks before they had a hiring freeze because of the dot-com implosion. I was approximately engineer number 200. So it wasn't early early, but compared to today, it was early. And I was very lucky. I got to do stuff that I was excited about that Jeff Bezos cared about. And there's nothing like being early in your career and working on something that one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs cares about and therefore won't let you fail at. And so everybody between me and Jeff Bezos in that organization was breathing down my neck and telling me when I was screwing up and holding my feet to the fire. And that was an incredible learning experience.

So one of my pieces of advice for young people is, you know, if you've got a startup that you just can't get out of your head, go start it and figure it out. But if you don't have a startup you really want to start, go work somewhere else and work with the best people you can find on a problem that you personally are passionate about solving, that is the most important thing you can find to the company. Because if you work on a thing that matters to the company, all the best people are going to swarm, because you can't fail. And that's how you get the best mentors and exposure, by working on the thing that is actually the must-succeed for the company you're working for.

LubaSo at that time when you were working at Amazon, you cared about that problem, because it sounded like through that stretch of time you weren't really doing...

BlakeYeah, I mean, I built the first automated customer acquisition system on the internet at scale. So what that means in practice is we built an automated system that bought search ads without any people involved, before Google even had an API to do this programmatically. And so we were doing automated optimization of customer acquisition at scale. I was like 22. Somehow I'm leading this. And I just thought it was the neatest... I mean, I was a nerd, and that was, like, the neatest technical problem. Like, I'm going to build an automated system, and it's going to go, like, write ads automatically and figure out which ones are profitable, which ones aren't, and close the loop. And there's all this data. It was like, for 22-year-old me, it was the coolest thing I could imagine doing at that point in my life.

LubaYou mentioned that there is less life than what you have ideas for. What are some ideas that you're nerding out on and wish that you could accomplish in this way?

BlakeYeah, I mean, so I think the world is full of big problems hiding in plain sight with nobody working on them. And the most obvious...

LubaWhat's a problem that's very obvious?

BlakeTraffic. We sit in it every day, and we burn up about the equivalent of one working month per year sitting in traffic as an average American. Like, one month a year. How much life are we losing in traffic? And by the way, with autonomous vehicles, it's going to be worse, not better, because people will be even more willing to sit in traffic if they don't have to drive themselves. So traffic is about to be much, much worse. And I think there's a very obvious, easy solution, but nobody's doing it.

LubaWhat's the solution?

BlakeThe solution is to congestion-price the entire road network. So imagine we ran grocery stores the way we run our roads. Meaning you pay for them in your taxes, and then you can go anytime you want and have whatever you want. If we did that, the shelves would be bare. There would always be a line out the door. You couldn't possibly have enough food to feed everybody, because you're giving it all away for free, right?

The roads during rush hour are the equivalent of filet mignon or lobster. This is the best stuff. And you can get on the road whenever you want. That is primo, primo food. And there is no variable pricing. Anybody can just go take it whenever they want it. So guess what? There's always a line. Traffic is a line for the roads. The only way you solve the shortage is to price it.

So what we should do is get rid of gas taxes and get rid of, you know, vehicle taxes, and it's all variable pricing. Meaning you want to go get on the most important highway at 5:00, it's going to cost. And now we have enough technology through smartphones that we can track who's driving where, when. And I think there are ways to make this work politically where, you know, basically you can pay for priority access. And if you're not using it, that's basically a rebate. Effectively, you could rebate the taxpayers for having funded the road network. So everyone gets a check, and it's funded by the people who are willing to pay the most for the best access.

So I think there's a political aspect of selling this, and you have to overcome this, like, societal thing where everyone believes that we're just entitled to get on the roads. But that's baloney. It's actually a huge problem and it's hurting everyone's lives. And we could, like, rebate everybody a bunch of money and just charge the users. And I think that is actually the only way to solve traffic.

LubaWhy is no one working on it?

BlakeI don't know. I've tried to convince people to work on it, and I hear, like, that sounds really hard politically. I'm like, right, okay, go do it.

LubaHow can you coach someone to be courageous?

BlakeI don't know if you can. I mean, the best advice I would have is... actually, I'll tell a story. There was a moment where my oldest daughter was about ten, and I think it was actually her birthday, and Boom was in one of these moments where it's, like, not clear that we're ever going to succeed. We didn't have the money to fly the airplane. I was afraid we'd go bankrupt without ever flying anything. And in her life experience, the entire time she can remember, Dad's been saying he's going to build a supersonic jet, and now it might not even fly. And Dad could be a big failure. And so I'm driving her home from the ice cream shop and I'm like, honey, how would you feel if, like, the thing I've been doing your entire life went bust? And she didn't miss a beat. She said, I'd be proud of you for trying.

LubaOh.

BlakeAnd I think that is my wish for every entrepreneur. Do the thing you'd be proud to fail at. And I think one of the best things about tech, about America, is we are forgiving of honest failure. I think we are appropriately unforgiving of dishonest failure, but we're very forgiving of honest failure. And so if you really believe that it's okay to fail, it's actually psychologically easier. It was my experience: psychologically easier to take on something bigger, because there's less of an expectation of success. If I was like, I'm going to build another mobile app, like, okay, I should probably be able to do that. But I'm going to go build a supersonic passenger jet? Of course you're going to fail, right? It's psychologically a little bit freeing.

So I think working on something you'd be proud to fail at, taking on something ambitious, knowing that in some ways that makes failure even a little bit easier, and then just give it everything you've got. I think I've said this before, but courage is not fearlessness. Courage is acting despite the fear.

LubaIs this why you wanted to launch the prize? Because now there is a Boom prize for teams that attempt it.

BlakeWell, I think what young people get inspired by is very important. And there's an entire missing generation in aerospace. People roughly my age, I'm 45, and between, let's call it, 30 and, I don't know, 50, it is very hard to find great people in this industry. And it's because if you were growing up in, let's call it, the 80s or 90s, not much was happening. After the end of the Cold War, nothing interesting is happening militarily. And really, since the banning of supersonic flight in the early 70s, nothing interesting is happening commercially. So there's a whole bunch of kids that didn't go into aviation. They went into, like, social media, right? Or, like, e-commerce. That was me. But there's an alternate universe where aviation things were happening. I never would have had my tech detour. I'd just go straight for flight.

So I think what you inspire kids by and what opportunities are out in front of them is very important. And there's a long history in aviation of breakthroughs being inspired by prizes. You know, the big prize that Lindbergh went for. The X Prize, that had a big thing to do with the creation of commercial space as an industry. And I remember reading on Twitter, there's some kid who built a 500-mile-per-hour RC airplane. I was like, oh, damn, that's close to Mach 1. Someone's going to go supersonic. Let's make it a big thing. And so I tweeted about it, and then we put up $50,000 in prize money.

LubaAnd it went up.

BlakeRight. Yeah, we put up $50,000 of cash. And then a bunch of people started emailing me, like, hey, I want to contribute to the prize kitty. So we're at three quarters of $1 million of prize money.

LubaAmazing.

BlakeAnd there are over 100 teams registered. Someone's gonna do this for sure.

LubaAnd Blake, what are you afraid of right now?

BlakeWhat am I afraid of? I'm afraid of not giving everything my all. Like, I still don't want to be at the end of my life thinking I left something on the table.

LubaDo you think you're giving it your all?

BlakeMost days.

LubaAwesome. Thank you so much for your time.

BlakeThank you.

LubaThank you. This was awesome.