#225 Blake Scholl - Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Shawn Ryan** (0:15)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:36)
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**Blake Scholl** (0:39)
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**Shawn Ryan** (0:43)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:43)
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**SPEAKER_4** (0:50)
Blake Scholl, welcome to the show.

**Blake Scholl** (0:52)
It's good to be here, Shawn. Thank you for having me.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:54)
It's good to have you. Another innovator. I love being around you guys. I mean, it's just been interviewing a lot of innovators here in recent history, and man, you guys are just incredible and fascinating and motivating to be around. So thank you for coming. I love what you're doing. So.

**Blake Scholl** (1:17)
Well, thank you. It's an honor to be here.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:19)
I got a question. How long did it take you to get here from Denver?

**Blake Scholl** (1:23)
It's about two hours and 10 minutes.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:25)
Two hours and 10 minutes?

**Blake Scholl** (1:27)
If all the flights are about that long, we'd be doing okay.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:31)
You're not flying on the new jet, huh?

**Blake Scholl** (1:34)
Not yet.
I have committed I will be in the first test flight myself. So that I'm very much looking forward to. And I joke. So we just finished with our XB-1. Our sort of our one third scale demonstrator airplane. And I'd love to go, you know, hot wire that thing and make it my own personal airplane.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:53)
I'll bet you and just about everybody else will love that. But well, hey, I want to get in to how you got into this and all about what you're doing right now. But first, every guest starts off with an introduction here. So Blake Scholl, the founder of Boom Supersonic, a company who started in 2014 to bring supersonic air travel back to the mainstream. Challenged a 52-year-old ban on supersonic flight over land, helping to reverse it in just 115 days. A self-taught leader behind the world's first independently developed supersonic jet, the XB-1, which broke the sound barrier six times this year without an audible sonic boom. The architect of Overture, the fastest airliner in development, set to fly at Mach 1.7 with 130 orders for major airlines. Earned your private pilot's license in 2008 and an instrument rating in 2011 A former Amazon software engineer who had just 24 managed 300 million P&L. Like I said, I love what you're doing. You are reinventing commercial air travel. It sounds like the XB-1 can make... Is it from New York to Paris in under four hours?

**Blake Scholl** (3:10)
Under four hours.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:13)
That's incredible. I'm just... Before we get too far... Would this be used for CONUS travel or is it only overseas flights?

**Blake Scholl** (3:22)
Well, now that we've cracked Sonic Boom and the president has now signed an executive order to legalize supersonic flight in the US., it can be used for CONUS too. So, you can leave New York at 9 a.m. and land in San Francisco at 9:30 a.m. San Francisco time.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:41)
That's crazy.

**Blake Scholl** (3:42)
It's going to be so great.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:43)
That is... And you know what I love when I was going over the outline downstairs? I mean, I love that you started this in your basement with cardboard cutouts of what you thought it would look like. And now here we are today with the model and the test flights and 130 orders and it's just... I love these stories that somebody that just started something from scratch, you had no... I mean, you didn't have any education or... You weren't in aerospace.

**Blake Scholl** (4:15)
No, I had no formal training in this.
And yeah, it seems a little surreal. So on Father's Day, I took my dad and my twin boys to the new R&D facility we're building in Denver. And we've got our test airplane there. And so we opened up the cockpit, and I let them all get in it. And I was flipping through my phone. And you know how it shows you photos from way back. And there was one of them from nine years earlier in the plywood and cardboard mock-up of that airplane.