Building A Supersonic Plane Company From The Ground Up

We're here to bring back supersonic passenger travel and ultimately to make the planet dramatically more accessible. Blake Schull is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. The way I got to Boom was to ask myself, of everything I might work on, what would personally make me the happiest if it worked? And I knew I wanted to work on flight.

If every founder just worked on the most ambitious thing they'd get their head around, everyone's gonna be a lot happier and a lot more great things are gonna get built.

I've been following Blake and his team at Boom for nearly a decade. And recently, I was lucky enough to join them in the Mojave Desert for the XB One's historic flight. During our trip, I got the chance to sit down with Blake.

In our discussion, we talked about the history of supersonic flight, how he went from being a product manager at Groupon to the founder of Boom, and how he took Boom from a crazy idea to a working airplane.

What are we looking at behind us? Well, that's the XP one, history's first independently developed supersonic jet, and we built it because we wanted to learn 100% of the lessons required to build a supersonic jet safe for passengers out of technology we could deploy on an airliner. One analogy is XP one. That's kinda like, our Falcon one.

That was the first time that anybody outside of a nation state had put something in orbit, and SpaceX did that to prove they could do it, and they moved on to the the Falcon nine. Overture is like our Falcon nine. All of this is leading to the Overture, a supersonic airliner that will carry around 65 passengers and travel at Mach 1. 7.

while running on a % sustainable fuel. They've even figured out a way to prevent sonic booms from reaching the ground, which will allow them to fly over land, a major hurdle for past attempts at supersonic passenger travel. The goal for Overtur is to start carrying passengers by 2029. How did you get the idea to work on this, and how did you get the company off the ground? Yeah.

So I had set a lifetime goal in my twenties of flying supersonic.

After having seen a Concorde in a museum in Seattle, I just put a Google word on supersonic jet.

In decades past, people regularly flew at Mach two on the Concorde. The Concorde was developed as a joint venture between the French and British governments in the nineteen sixties. It carried passengers from New York to London at supersonic speeds from the mid seventies until 02/2003 when it was finally shuttered. The Concorde was too expensive to operate and never fully lived up to its potential.

And when it shut down, technological progress reversed itself.

The future I wanna live in is one where flights that are at least twice as fast as what we have today are totally retained, taken for granted. Help us understand what this is gonna mean for regular people as passengers. Supersonic is gonna come to market much the way many other new technologies do, where they start at relatively higher price points and then come down.

Just electric cars, cell phones, computers. Concorde was kind of out in no man's land, a $20,000 ticket adjusted for inflation. And, Overture version one is gonna be like flying business class today. So imagine.

Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half hours, New York to London in about three hours and forty five minutes, but being able to do that at about the same fare you have in business class today. Blake has loved planes since he was a kid and has a private pilot's license, but he didn't pursue aviation professionally until he was in his thirties.

Before that, he studied computer science in college, and his first career was building websites at Amazon,.

Groupon, and his own startup. My background was in the tech world. I I started my career at Amazon as a software engineer. After Amazon, he worked at the mobile startup, Palago, before cofounding his own startup. My first company was a barcode scanning game. I knew ecommerce, and I'd worked at, one of the first, you know, iPhone app companies. So I figured I knew mobile.

So I thought I should put those together and work on what I knew. I should work on mobile e commerce. And what I found was chasing what I thought I knew, gave me a sense of competence, but it gave me no sense of purpose or drive. I I think that I I've come to believe is that knowledge and skills are variable. I think smart people underestimate what they can learn, particularly if they're motivated.

But what what you can't change is is your passions. If you go after something that inspires you, you can go find that you can create skills and knowledge that you didn't have before. After having sold my first company to Groupon, I wanted to work on something that that would be inspiring that I would never wanna, give up on, no matter how hard it was.

And so I figured, obviously, someone will go do this. Someone will pick up where Concord had left off, and I was just waiting for, you know, waiting to find out when I could buy a ticket. But it was it was crickets, and I didn't know why. And so when I got to that point of being ready to do my next company, I thought, okay.

I never I never want to be 80 years old looking backwards and wondering what if I tried. So I thought, okay. I gotta get this out of my system. I gotta look at it, understand for myself why it's a bad idea, and then move on. And so my my first question was why did Concorde fail? The answer was not technology. The answer was economics. At that point, I figured I had to get a lot smarter.

So I I bought every textbook I could find. I took an airplane design class. I took remedial calculus and physics from Khan Academy because I hadn't had either since high school. Another thing I've come to believe is particularly for, you know, what people call, you know, hard tech or deep tech, where the technology development timelines and costs are longer.

One of the biggest ways you can you can fail is to build something that nobody wants. So you gotta mature the concept of the market along with the concept of the product and keep and be really honest that there will be product market fit for the eventual thing. And so my my first question was why did Concorde fail? The answer was economics.

It was, you know, you know, $20,000 ticket, 100 uncomfortable seats. The thing flew half empty. And then the question became, how much would you to do better than Concorde on just just fundamental efficiency of the airplane in order to make those economics work? A business class fare, a seat instead of a bed. And it literally took two weeks to have that question.

And then I got to the point in the middle of twenty fourteen where I had a spreadsheet model of the airplane and a spreadsheet model of the market. One tab was like global air travel. You know, every route in the planet, how many seats, at what fares, and how much the speed up would be with a certain cruise speed of the airplane. And then there's the other tab, is about the technical stuff.

What would be the lift to drag ratio? What would be the engine fuel economy? What would be the structural efficiency of the airplane? And it it turns out, you can predict the performance of an airplane with really just four inputs. Aerodynamic efficiency, lift to drag ratio, propulsive efficiency, structural efficiency, and lower numbers are better.

If you got those three numbers plus the Mach number, you can really predict the whole airplane. And then and then the output is as good as the assumptions. So I I had that model. I I had taken it to a professor at Stanford, and I said, you know, look, dude. I've been at this for, two seconds. I don't know what I'm doing. But are the are the assumptions reasonable?

And he he said, Blake, if you're gonna do this, you should try harder because all these assumptions are conservative. And I remember leaving his office and thinking, if if that's true, either I have no courage or I'm gonna go find some engineers and we're gonna make a run at this.

And I I think that's one of the advantages that I had coming to aerospace from the outside is, you know, I didn't have time to go get a four year degree, let alone a PhD, let alone spend ten years at Boeing. I had to go look for the the fundamental truths, and and they are surprisingly accessible. So I spent the next six months networking. At day zero, I didn't know a single person in the industry.

I remember going to, go to LinkedIn, filter industry equals aerospace, connection equal first degree, and literally, there's no results. Wow. My first intro was a guy who had worked for me at Groupon and played hockey in college as somebody who now worked at SpaceX. That was how you broke into the industry? That was how you broke into the industry.

So I'd write these, you know, intro request blurbs that were like, hey. I've got an airplane, a design idea, I'd love to get your advice. And I'm happy to fly to you and and buy you lunch. And you'd, like, fly around the country. Yeah. Well, I I did you know, so I that was my only cred back then. I could show up in an airplane that I flew myself. That helped more than more than I thought it would.

I would go meet basically as many people as I could. Every time I met somebody, I I would describe what I was doing, try to convince them I wasn't insane, and and then say, you can wave a magic wand and get anybody in the planet to come work with you on this, who would your top five people be? Don't forget whether they're available. Forget whether they're interested.

Forget whether you know, forget everything other than would this be one of the top five humans on the planet to do this? I would ask that question recursively, and it turns out it turns out, you don't need many levels of recursion before I was actually talking to the best people on the planet. So that was how I found the initial team.

But for the first eighteen months, I thought there there is like no way I could possible be the human that had found the the formula for a supersonic passenger flight. And it was actually very liberating. Was like, like, today will be the day that I find the bug in the spreadsheet.

But after a while, was like, if the math was wrong, I would know by now. What did everybody else get wrong? All these supposed experts in aerospace who thought that this idea was crazy, why did everybody else miss this simple insight that you can get with a three line spreadsheet? I think it's a form of the bystander effect. Supersonic flight would so obviously.

be a good thing. Nobody's doing it. There must be something wrong. There must be a good reason why. Yeah. Right. And there and then the Internet was full of bad reasons why. One form of which is giving a qualitative answer to a quantitative question.

People won't pay more for speed. It's all about cost. The market's too small unless you can fly supersonic over land. Sonic booms are too loud. These are all qualitative claims about quantitative topics. I was fortunate that, you know, having you know, I left Groupon. I put aside a year of my life to just figure out what I wanted to do next.

And so I could kinda go down this rabbit hole without worrying too much that it could be a blind alley. And I I think nobody else went down it. This is not some,.

you know, amazing deep fundamental physical insight that you need 20 PhDs to go accomplish. It definitely makes me wonder how many other ideas like that are lying in plain sight, waiting for someone who's ambitious enough to just, like, defy the bystander effect and, like, stand up and say, well, I'm gonna do it. I I think they're actually a lot. How how big is the team? How old are they? How Yeah.

How do they know how to do this? They're about 50 people. 50?

50. This whole airplane was built by essentially 50 people. By 50 people. Yeah. Small, high caliber teams can do things that big teams can't do. Those constraints breed a lot of innovation. We looked for evidence of of having done meaningful things. A lot of the team was young.

They came from places like SpaceX. We'd find people earlier in their career at Boeing before they were corrupted and and and steal them. Generally, early career. The hardest ones to get were the the ones that had been around the loop a couple times but had had not gotten destroyed by big aerospace. You don't get a bunch of experts that have been there, done that, and know it's impossible.

You want a handful of them on speed dial to to prevent you from making foolish mistakes, to help you see around corners. You gotta listen to them only the right amount. That's my belief. And beyond that, smart, ambitious, hardworking, and incredibly passionate. That's the formula. How have you managed to do this so quickly with so few people?

Basically, just a core team of 50, like a relatively modest amount of money by aerospace standards. I mean, if we knew on day one what we knew today, we could have done it half the time for a third of the money. We made a lot of mistakes along the way. We we knew we would.

That's why we did a test airplane because we wanted to learn those mistakes because it's cheaper to iterate in a small airplane than it is on a big one. Building a supersonic jet is ridiculously hard.

It's not impossible. It's not impossible. You're in this, like, pretty unique position because you built both a, like, traditional software startup. And you went through YC with a with a hard tech company, which a lot of people don't don't even realize is is a thing. What advice would you have for founders who are, like, just starting out? They wanna start a company.

They don't really know what their path is.

What have you learned? Founder motivation, I think, is really, really important, and it's undervalued. The thing that has enabled me to go through a zillion things and never give up is just belief in how important the cause is. The world needs supersonic flight. Passengers deserve it. So there are there are days that I get up and there's a problem that I don't know how we're gonna solve.

And there are days where, you know, where I question whether I'm the person who can pull this off. But there is never a day where I don't think it's worth giving it everything I've got. The story of Boom shows that founders don't need to be constrained by their on paper credentials, and that the most ambitious startup ideas are surprisingly achievable.

and sometimes hiding in plain sight. Startups are hard.

My first company had like high highs and low lows, and boom is high highs and low lows. I think ambitious founders, we're gonna run at our personal red line. And being at that personal red line, being at that I don't know if I've got what it takes, that's gonna feel the same way at any company. So you may as well work on something. You might as well work on something really big.