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