digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Work on the most ambitious thing you can imagine, especially if it is something you would personally find most rewarding, and treat "hard tech" or "deep tech" as a problem to be solved by testing economics, physics, and market fit early. Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, says his path to building the XB-1, the first independently developed supersonic jet, came from asking whether the idea was viable and then finding the answer through spreadsheets, self-study, and networking. The video frames supersonic travel as a return of the speed Concorde once offered, but at business-class fares for Overture's first version.
Key Points
- Scholl's personal test for choosing work was to ask what would make him happiest if it worked, which led him to flight.
- He concluded Concorde failed for economic reasons, not technical ones: a $20,000 ticket, 100 uncomfortable seats, and flights that often flew half empty.
- Boom's core modeling idea is that airplane performance can be predicted from four inputs: lift-to-drag ratio, propulsive efficiency, structural efficiency, and Mach number, where lower numbers are better for the first three.
- Scholl argues people dismissed supersonic travel with "bad reasons," such as claims that people won't pay for speed or that sonic booms are too loud.
- Boom built a small test airplane (XB-1) first because iterating on a small aircraft is cheaper than on a large one.
- Scholl says small, high-caliber teams of about 50 people can outperform large teams, and that founder motivation is undervalued.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- To test whether a hard-tech idea is viable, build a simple spreadsheet model with one tab for the market (routes, seats, fares, and speed gains) and one for the technology (efficiency and performance inputs), then check whether the assumptions are reasonable with domain experts.
- To find expertise in an unfamiliar industry, identify people with a direct connection, write short intro requests offering to meet or buy lunch, and ask each contact: "If you could wave a magic wand and get anybody on the planet to work with you on this, who would your top five people be?" Ask that question recursively, ignoring availability, interest, and whether you know them.
- When staffing a hard-tech team, prioritize early-career people from places like SpaceX and Boeing, plus a few experienced veterans to advise, but listen to them only "the right amount."
- Before assuming an idea is impossible, look for the fundamental physics and economics yourself rather than relying on what the internet or experts say.
- Scholl studied with textbooks, an airplane design class, and remedial calculus and physics from Khan Academy before feeling ready to pursue the idea.
- He said that if Boom knew on day one what it knows now, it could have done the project in half the time for a third of the money.
- Overture, the planned supersonic airliner, is described as carrying about 65 passengers at Mach 1.7 on 100% sustainable fuel, with a goal to start carrying passengers by 2029.
- Scholl said a professor at Stanford told him the assumptions in his model were conservative, which encouraged him to pursue the project.
Bottom Line
Scholl's experience suggests that ambitious ideas dismissed as impossible may only need someone to test the basic economics and physics themselves before accepting the conventional view.
