Umarbek

We shipped a large amount of quality software that didn't matter.

I think the difficulty of startups is actually set by the founder, not by the startup. Because there is a certain level of effort we're willing to put in. There's a certain level of pain we're willing to endure. And no matter what I do, I'm going to put myself at that same red line and the effort's going to feel the same, but the motivation is absolutely not going to be the same.

I'm going to put all my startup ideas in order of how happy I would personally be if it worked and neglect everything else. It doesn't matter whether I'm qualified for it. It doesn't matter whether it's a good idea. Initially, I'm not even going to say is it physically possible.

This is insane. How is it that the most amazing things in aviation are in museums when there's nothing better in the skies?

If you are NASA, you have to make every problem you want to work on really hard. Otherwise, it doesn't justify your existence.

The amount of space you want is inversely proportional to flight time.

All the data you need to answer that question is in Wikipedia. And it's literally a three-line spreadsheet. You don't need to know anything about aerospace engineering to ask and answer this question.

How is it that I'm the human having these insights? I have nowhere close to the resume for this. I think I'm approximately the only person who asked the questions. I had to totally be willing to be a beginner again.

If you're not being so persistent that you're worried about being annoying, you're not being persistent enough.

Imagine it's 2050 and I'm on the beach sipping mai tais. How do I think aviation history goes? Do I think we're still flying subsonic in 2050? No. Do I think that after 150 years of not doing it, Boeing suddenly did it? No. That never happens. Big companies don't suddenly get enlightened.

I look in the mirror and I'm like, am I that person? And the answer was obviously no. And then the question was, can I become that person?

If you're going to do this, you should really push the team harder because all of these assumptions are conservative.

One of the core jobs of founders is to solve chicken and egg problems. One of the ways you solve chicken and egg problems is to basically recruit the chickens and the eggs in parallel.

If you could get anybody on the planet to come work with you on this and you wave a magic wand, forget whether they're available, forget where they live, forget whether they want to do this. Think only about is this the person you want in the trenches with you on this problem. Who would you get? Can you give me five names? I searched my network recursively. I would get the five names and then I would talk to those five people and I'd ask them the same question. Pretty soon I was actually talking to the best people on the planet.

One of the key enabling technologies for supersonic flight is LinkedIn.

"Blake, do you have anything that's real? Because you sound like you're completely full of shit."

The highs and lows are so high and so low and they're like milliseconds apart.

The world generalized from Concord to all of supersonic and drew all the wrong conclusions. It's almost as if we stopped building computers after the UNIVAC and then everyone would tell Steve Jobs you couldn't possibly make a pocket computer because computers are affordable to banks and the size of a room.

We went from a commercially, privately funded model of innovation to a national prestige cold war era. In 1969 we landed on the moon and we flew Concord supersonic. I have a fairly controversial view which I think is both were terrible ideas. I think Apollo destroyed space exploration. I think Concord destroyed supersonic. Remember we can't go to the moon anymore and we can't fly supersonic anymore. So these things that supposedly were about progress, something went wrong.

We had these government spec projects with effectively unlimited budgets that had no incentive to create product market fit and caused the entire supply base behind them to get used to unlimited money. All the economics dropped out.

In 1973, we put in place a regulation that ostensibly was about protecting the public from sonic boom, but it wasn't a noise limit. It was a speed limit. It was a ban on supersonic. It could suck noise out of the atmosphere. You could design a supersonic jet that cancels out Harley's and it still wouldn't be allowed. It's literally a ban on innovation. Had that not been banned, we'd all be going Mach 5 by now.

The usual reaction was, well, this kind of makes sense. There was this lore that there's always these internet guys with airplane ideas. All the airplane guys that have done anything are used to getting pitched by internet people who don't know what they're talking about. There's a term for it. They call it fruitcake. I remember the first meeting I was in where someone said, "That's not fruitcake."

Some of the worst decisions I ever made along the way were these fighting for credibility through traditional eyes approaches. That was basically always wrong.

In a crisis what you need to do is become more deeply who you've always been. I'd known in my heart of hearts that it did not make sense to outsource the most important thing.

You want designers to think like engineers, engineers to think like designers.

One of the things being a startup founder I've struggled with is by the time something happens I've sort of priced in the success in my own emotions and then I'm on to the next big problem emotionally. I find it really difficult to actually enjoy the successes.

52 years of bad regulation was reversed in 115 days.

I never wanted to ask myself, is it worth it personally? I never want to be 80 and look backwards and think what if I'd had the courage to look at it. I want to understand for myself why it's a bad idea.

I bought every textbook I could find for college aerospace engineering courses. I couldn't understand them because I hadn't had any physics or calculus since high school. So I went back and I did calculus and physics on Khan Academy so I could understand the books. I was too embarrassed to talk to people in the industry because I don't know what I'm doing and I think I would sound stupid very quickly.

I called a friend up at Sequoia and I was like, can we borrow a conference room for a couple days? We had these actually fairly impressive people in aviation that were going to be bopping around the Sequoia offices. So that would be impressive to the investors. And the fact that I was able to get Sequoia to give me a conference room might make me plausibly sound like maybe I could raise money for this thing.

The most supportive thing my wife ever did was be willing to move to Denver. When I told her I was doing this, she rolled her eyes and said, "Okay, you've got a year to screw around with this thing and then I expect you to get a job."

I would tell people I'm going to go work on supersonic jets and I could just watch their eyes roll back. One guy told me to go for it. Years later, he said, "Yeah, I didn't think you were right. I thought you were crazy, but I could tell you were really passionate, so I couldn't tell you not to do it." So actually zero people believed.

The lesson: don't ever let anybody take a picture that you're not okay being the headline picture.

Ashley wrote a very nice story. But then the editor picked the picture and wrote the headline. The headline was something like, "This Colorado company thinks it can build a supersonic jet." And the picture, all we had was this cardboard mockup. Me awkwardly standing on this orange plastic chair stepping into this cardboard mockup. Our internal Slack has an orange chair emoji. This joke has gone a decade. The comments were brutal. "Haha, what a stupid company. Don't they know that airplanes aren't made of cardboard? What idiot runs marketing and would name a supersonic jet company Boom?" My favorite thing was the hacker news comments that day. One was "this is how you launch a company. The one-two punch. Whoever runs marketing at Boom is a genius." And there was another one that was "Monday: haha. Wednesday: oh."

You couldn't go hire a supersonic airplane design team off the street. They didn't exist. The Concord team, if they were even alive, was retired. The military supersonic guys were used to unlimited budgets. We had to create the team and the only way to create the team was to find the best people we could and just put them through supersonic airplane 101 by just doing it.

The supersonic flight was live streamed from an iPhone camera over Starlink.

Supersonic flight with no boom, forward compatibility, sustainable fuel, no net new noise. Everybody wants this.