Building A Supersonic Plane Company From The Ground Up

**Jared Friedman** (0:05)
This is Boom Supersonics XB-1. It's the first independently developed supersonic plane in history. There we are.

**Blake Scholl** (0:12)
XB-1 is supersonic, faster than the speed of sound.

**Jared Friedman** (0:16)
But the XB-1 is essentially a prototype. The next step is to build a supersonic passenger airplane that you and I can fly in.

**Blake Scholl** (0:24)
We are here to bring back supersonic passenger travel and ultimately to make the planet dramatically more accessible.

**Jared Friedman** (0:31)
Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.

**Blake Scholl** (0:35)
The way I got to Boom is to ask myself, of everything I might work on, what would personally make me the happiest if it worked? And I knew I wanted to work on flight. If every founder just worked on the most ambitious thing they get their head around, everyone's going to be a lot happier and a lot more great things are going to get built.

**Jared Friedman** (0:59)
I've been following Blake and his team at Boom for nearly a decade. And recently, I was lucky enough to join them in the Mojave Desert for the XB1's historic flight. During our trip, I got the chance to sit down with Blake. In our discussion, we talked about the history of supersonic flight, how he went from being a product manager at Groupon to the founder of Boom, and how he took Boom from a crazy idea to a working airplane. What are we looking at behind us?

**Blake Scholl** (1:23)
Well, that's the XB1, history's first independently developed supersonic jet. And we built it because we wanted to learn 100% of the lessons required to build a supersonic jet safe for passengers out of technology we could deploy on an airliner. One analogy is XB1, that's kind of like our Falcon 1 That was the first time that anybody outside of a nation state had put something in orbit. And SpaceX did that to prove they could do it, and they moved on to the Falcon 9 Overture is like our Falcon 9

**Jared Friedman** (1:52)
All of this is leading to the Overture, a supersonic airliner that will carry around 65 passengers and travel at Mach 1.7 while running on 100% sustainable fuel. They've even figured out a way to prevent sonic booms from reaching the ground, which will allow them to fly over land, a major hurdle for past attempts at supersonic passenger travel. The goal for Overture is to start carrying passengers by 2029 How did you get the idea to work on this, and how did you get the company off the ground?

**Blake Scholl** (2:21)
Yeah, so I had set a lifetime goal in my 20s of flying, flying supersonic. After having seen a Concorde in a museum in Seattle, I just put a Google on a supersonic jet.

**Jared Friedman** (2:30)
In decades past, people regularly flew at Mach 2 on the Concorde. The Concorde was developed as a joint venture between the French and British governments in the 1960s. It carried passengers from New York to London at supersonic speeds from the mid 70s until 2003 when it was finally shuttered. The Concorde was too expensive to operate and never fully lived up to its potential. And when it shut down, technological progress reversed itself.

**Blake Scholl** (2:55)
The future I want to live in is one where flights that are at least twice as fast as what we have today are totally retained, taken for granted.

**Jared Friedman** (3:02)
Help us understand what this is going to mean for regular people as passengers.

**Blake Scholl** (3:07)
Supersonic is going to come to market much the way many other new technologies do, where they start at relatively higher price points and then come down, just electric cars, cell phones, computers. Concorde was kind of out in No Man's Land, a $20,000 ticket adjusted for inflation, and Overture version 1 is going to be like flying business class today. So imagine Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half hours, New York to London in about three hours and 45 minutes. But being able to do that at about the same fare you have in business class today.

**Jared Friedman** (3:37)
Blake has loved planes since he was a kid and has a private pilot's license. But he didn't pursue aviation professionally until he was in his 30s. Before that, he studied computer science in college and his first career was building websites at Amazon, Groupon and his own startup.

**Blake Scholl** (3:51)
My background was in the tech world. I started my career at Amazon as a software engineer.

**Jared Friedman** (3:56)
After Amazon, he worked at the mobile startup Pelago before co-founding his own startup.