Reinventing Flight: An Interview with Blake Scholl
By Jon Hersey
Blake Scholl is founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, a company devoted to “making the world smaller” by making air travel faster—a lot faster. The commercial airliner that Boom is developing, called Overture, will be capable of ferrying between fifty-five and seventy-five passengers from one continent to another two times faster than any airliner today. Instead of a six-and-a-half hour flight from New York to London, Overture will do it in three and a half. On October 7, 2020, Boom will unveil its prototype, XB-1, the first privately funded supersonic jet in history (watch the livestream here). Scholl estimates that flights on Overture will be available in 2030. We spoke recently about the state of the aviation industry, how Scholl got started, and the principles that have helped him take off.
Hersey: Fresh out of college, you went to Amazon and built advertising automation software, then went on to found a company that was bought by Groupon. You had no background in the aviation industry, yet you decided to tackle one of its biggest challenges: pioneering commercially viable supersonic flight. How and why did you make the decision to found Boom?
Scholl: I set a goal in my mid-twenties that I wanted to go Mach 2, and I put a Google Alert on “supersonic jet” so I could be first to know when I could buy a ticket. Fast-forward nearly a decade. By this point, I had founded and sold my first company, and I was thinking about what was next. What I realized is that all startups are hard, and no matter what you work on, as a founder, you’re going to be operating at your personal redline. But if you do something you’re passionate about, you’re going to be way more motivated. What I realized was that I wanted to optimize for my own selfish motivation.
So I put all my ideas in descending order of how happy I would be if they worked, disregarding everything else. I figured I’d create that list and then work on the most exciting thing that’s not impossible. And as luck has it, I’m still working on number one. I made this list in 2014, and I thought I would spend two weeks researching supersonic flight to understand why no one else was doing it and why it’s a bad idea. But instead, what I found was that the space was full of stale conventional wisdom. . . .
Hersey: I think a lot of people look at problems such as the one you and Boom are tackling and decide that they don’t have the proper credentials, that they’d need to go back to school or work for years or decades in the field before they could do it. What do you think about credentials and widespread beliefs about them?
Scholl: I think credibility is what matters—not credentials—and credentials are often a bad way to show credibility. Moreover, I think people underestimate what they can learn. If you are passionate and motivated and you have a good sense of what mental clarity is like, you can iterate on something until you really understand it.
For instance, my first year on Boom was just getting educated. I started reading textbooks, and if one textbook didn’t help me understand something, I’d throw it out and get another one and read that until things clicked. I took an airplane design class and built a spreadsheet model of an airplane, which showed how a few variables predict a plane’s capabilities. It was just me by myself in my basement, puttering through these things.
I got a big leg up from Objectivism, because you learn what it means to be clear on something. You can just chew on a topic until it clicks, and you can actually learn a lot quickly, including things that weren’t in your formal training.
Hersey: How else has Objectivism impacted your life and career?
Scholl: I’ve been an Objectivist and a huge fan of Ayn Rand since I was in college. I remember being very excited the first time I read Atlas Shrugged. What an inspiring set of heroes! (And by the way, many of the main characters fly planes.) I just loved this idea that you can go off and accomplish big things. The inspirational value was huge.
Another thing that has influenced me tremendously is Rand’s identification that there’s no divide between the moral and the practical. The opposite view is widely accepted and ingrained. But it’s very powerful to know that whenever you think there’s a conflict between the two, you need to fix your thinking. That puts you in a position where, no matter what you’re doing, you feel like you can take the moral high ground. And you can do it while building an awesome business. That mind-set permeates everything we do. We’re building this massive new industrial product, and we’re really proud of it.
Hersey: As you should be! What you guys are doing is incredible—and long overdue. As a kid, I recall seeing the Concorde supersonic jet on TV. Why haven’t we already had a supersonic travel industry for a few decades?
Scholl: Let’s look back at what happened in the 1960s. In 1962, Concorde was established by treaty as a joint venture between the French and British governments, and it was the height of the Cold War. It was not done to usher in a new era of supersonic passenger flight but to show that European technology was better than Soviet technology. There was a competing Soviet supersonic program, and there was an American supersonic program that was canceled by Congress before it ever came to fruition.
They never had the goal of building a sustainable economic model. They just wanted to show up the Russians. It’s the same story as Apollo. Why did we go to the moon? It wasn’t because someone thought that tourism on the moon would be great. It was, “Let’s show that we can do it and that our rockets are better than the Soviets’ rockets.” The space race was a race for national prestige.
When that’s your motivation, it turns out you actually can do technically impressive things. Concorde’s first flight and the first moon landing happened in 1969, fifty years ago last year. But half a century later, if you want a supersonic airliner or lunar lander, you go to a museum rather than the airports or the skies. That’s because national prestige is a bad motivation, and it results in things being done in unsustainable ways because there’s no durable economic model. You go plant a flag and have a celebration, and then you don’t know what to do next, because you had no vision beyond that.
Contrast this with the first fifty years of innovation in aerospace, which was driven by entrepreneurs. Everyone knows that the first airplane was built by bicycle entrepreneurs. The first practical airliner, the DC-3, was built by Donald Douglas when he was still running Douglas Aircraft Company. The first jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, was built by Geoffrey de Havilland when he was still chairman of his company. That one wasn’t successful. But in all of these instances you had businessmen building business cases, and they had to create an airplane that they could see a market for, that airlines could operate profitably, that passengers could afford to fly on. You had to have a big enough market to make a return for yourself and your investors.
Enter Concorde and Apollo, and none of that applied. They didn’t have to create lasting value, so they didn’t. And that led to a scorched-earth period—literally half a century of no progress. The memory of Concorde is that it didn’t work. So the industry went back into this optimization loop on subsonic aircraft.
There was also political fallout from Concorde that really hamstrung innovation; the American competitor was canceled, and the question became, “How do we shut down our program and not get shown up by the Europeans?” And so Concorde was blocked from airports, and governments established a speed limit over land. In the United States, regulations say: Thou shalt not go faster than Mach 1. Supposedly, it’s about sonic boom and noise. But I think if it was really about that, they would have set a noise limit, not a speed limit.
The result was that what would have been the normal progression of technology was blocked by regulation. Think about everything from computers to electric cars, to cell phones. These things all started at a high price point for a small market; then the cost came down, and more and more people could get them. Today, the best phone a billionaire can buy is the same one a billion of us carry in our pockets. It would have been the same with airplanes; supersonic would have started with a private jet for people whose time is most valuable and who can pay for something really expensive and new.
But the problem is, for the most part, private jets are flown over land. No one wants to drop one hundred million dollars for a new airplane that, most of the time, travels no faster than the airplanes they already have. So what would have been that first market for supersonic was effectively prohibited. And if it hadn’t been, we’d all be going Mach 3 by now.
Today, we finally have the technology and the market to skip over what would have been the normal first step—the private jet—and do a small airliner instead, focusing on transoceanic routes where the speed limit doesn’t apply.
Hersey: Has the regulatory environment for supersonic travel changed much?
Scholl: The speed limit is still on the books. It will get reversed, but that will take a while. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is working on it. Our experience with the regulators has been positive. I have a lot of issues with the system they’re operating within, but the people are good human beings.
Hersey: What do they bring to the table?
Scholl: Well, they’re a group of people who can help us build a safe airplane that will be accepted by the flying public. I might design a very different system if I got to rewrite all the rules, but I don’t get to do that. The people there are generally smart and well-intentioned. We try to make the best of that. And I’ve been really pleasantly surprised so far.
For example, we briefed the entire FAA transport aircraft team in Seattle a couple years ago. We went through the whole airplane tip to tail and said, “Here’s all the technology. Here’s what we imagine will be the certification issues.” We brought our list, and they brought theirs, and ours was actually longer. We said, “OK guys, what are the showstoppers here? What’s going to cause you not to approve this airplane?” And they said, “Well, so long as you don’t have to fly supersonic over land, we don’t see any showstoppers.” It has even become sort of competitive at the FAA regarding who gets to work with us because most of what they get to do is, “Oh, let’s approve this new radio.” Boom is the kind of thing they’ll get to tell their grandkids about.
That’s how we operate with everyone who’s a stakeholder in this, be it our own employees, partners, suppliers, investors, or regulators. We just treat them all like they’re one of us, and say, “Let’s tell you why we think this is important. You’re there as a check or balance on us, but let’s talk about how we can do something great together that we can all be proud of.”
Hersey: You’ve had to deal with a fair amount of controversy. People have pressed you on issues such as the potential for increased danger while flying supersonic, environmental impacts, and increased “inequality.” I’ve been impressed with how you’ve dealt with these types of questions. What’s your general approach to communicating about such controversial issues?
Scholl: I have a fundamental belief that supersonic flight, done right, is good for people. When there’s a criticism, you first have to look in the mirror and ask, “Is there validity to it?” And if there is, shut up and go fix it—then go back and communicate. So, first and foremost, you have to make sure that truth is on your side.
Once you’ve checked that box, then you’ve got a communication challenge. But if you do it right, you can explain why this is really good for people and why a lot of the things that some might think are downsides are not really downsides.
Here, too, I think I owe a debt of gratitude to Objectivism. We’ve gotten really good at explaining why supersonic flight matters to humans. I look at how people were talking about this pre-Boom, and it was along the lines of, “Leaders and CEOs arrive at their destinations faster, and they’ll spend less time on airplanes.” That’s okay, but our take is that this is about human connection. This is about making your world bigger. When flights are shorter, where can you vacation? Where can you do business? Who can you fall in love with? It’s about how a donor heart that goes twice as fast can go twice as far to save someone’s life.
Think about the cultural impacts. We haven’t had a world war since the dawn of the jet age. I don’t think that flight is the whole story, but I also don’t think it’s irrelevant. Also, in-person experiences are so much better. Think about how much better this conversation would be if we were in the same room rather than just being on Zoom. Zoom is great, but it’s not anything like me walking you through the hangar and showing you the airplane. Imagine a world in which every kid not only reads about Johannesburg and Mumbai and Tokyo and Shanghai—they don’t just watch YouTube videos—they’ve actually been there. And they’ve met the people there.
That’s a future I really want to live in. It’s not about Mach numbers or fancy turbo jets and technology; it’s about values. And if you learn to talk about values, you can talk about them in a way that appeals to people from a large variety of political orientations and positions. And you can do it without compromising what you stand for. You just have to explain the value really well. And you have to put it in terms that people understand.
Take, for example, the last FAA reauthorization bill, which I think was in late 2018. We hired a policy team in early 2018, and said, “You probably can’t change the laws around supersonics, but try anyway.” We sent them to D.C., and we worked on getting some stuff into the FAA reauthorization bill.1 Well, stuff that we wrote basically got into the bill and got signed into law. Moreover, it passed the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously. Nothing happens in D.C. unanimously. But we went there, we met with congressmen on both sides of the aisle, and they asked, “What about jobs? What about noise? What about emissions?” And after hearing our answers, they were asking, “OK, why would anybody say no to this?”
Hersey: So focusing on life-serving values and human flourishing has enabled you to build bridges between people.
Scholl: Right. For whatever reason, when people get focused on their own views, it’s really easy to get confrontational. And it has resulted in less agreement than you can get if you just focus on values. Focus on values and do the work to make sure you have good answers to the common objections that you might get from people of different persuasions. For example, Overture is designed from the ground up to run on 100 percent alternative fuels. It doesn’t have to use fossil fuels, and it will be the first airliner with that capability. You can have different views about whether that’s important or not, but we just decided to build it in because it makes it obvious to more people that it’s good. And that keeps us out of a controversy that we don’t need to be in.
Hersey: To be successful, you need to attract a lot of enthusiastic people to your project. What have you learned about doing that effectively?
Scholl: This is a great question, because it’s the key to why the whole thing can work. I think about the team we have today. We’ve got basically the entire leadership team from the Gulfstream G 650, which is the fastest airplane money can buy today. We’ve got the guy from SpaceX who made a couple of key inventions that enabled them to land the rocket. We’ve got Rolls Royce and Japan Airlines as partners. I could keep going. Incredible people have joined our team and invested in Boom.
I tell you, though, if we were building a better turboprop or a better seat, no one would care. We wouldn’t have any of those people or any of those partners. But if you pick something inspiring and, most important, if you pick something that inspires you, then that becomes contagious. When you pick something that people really want to exist, the world almost conspires to pull success out of you.
I’m not the leader today that I was six years ago. When I started Boom, I couldn’t recruit worth a damn. I probably couldn’t sell you a $1 bill for fifty cents. And let’s not talk about public speaking or interviewing, or what I was like the one time I did TV, which was really, really bad. But what I learned to ask was, “What matters more to me, the mission of what we’re building or my own insecurities?”
I imagined what history might be like from right to left. Imagine you’re in the year 2050 and you’re reading the history books on how the world made the leap to supersonic. How do you think that story goes? If you just forget for a second that you’re working on it, you can try to imagine a lot of what must be part of that story. It’s not going to be the case that after 150 years of not doing it, Boeing suddenly did it. It’s going to be someone from outside the industry. They’re going to have to defy a lot of conventional wisdom. They’re going to have to be incredibly perseverant because there will be a lot of challenges and setbacks along the way. They’re going to need to be able to recruit a dream team. They’ll need to be incredibly persuasive because they’ll need buy-in from the lead airlines, suppliers, and investors. You’ve got to have a long-term mindset. You’ve got to really care about the culture that you’re building in your company. Those are all things that you can just imagine as part of the success story.
So, if that’s how it’ll have to go, you can imagine the person who is going to go do this, and go become that person. And it turns out that things I was terrified to do six years ago I now really enjoy. I really enjoy public speaking, recruiting, forming partnerships. You wouldn’t recognize the me of six years ago.
So, if I could make one point that envelops this and a bunch of other things, it’s that your own motivation really matters. And if you can lock onto something that you care about accomplishing, it unlocks these superpowers that you didn’t know you had. There’s a guy who was my boss at Groupon for a while, and when I started Boom and got it to a point where it looked credible, he was like, “I don’t think I understood what you could do.” And I think that’s probably true of a lot of people; if you haven’t locked onto the right target, you haven’t unlocked yourself. So pick something really motivating—more motivating than all of your insecurities. And then you can create new capabilities. You can be magnetic and attract other people to your cause, and you can do some things that will make you pretty darn happy. So focus on your own selfish motivation. It really, really matters. I think it’s underrated, even among Objectivists. Your own motivation is an incredibly powerful force.