I dropped out of high school…Now I’m building a $1T dollar company

**Blake Scholl** (0:00)
I look at the mirror and I'm like fat and dumb. And I'm like, if I want to have any chance of doing this, I have to go to the startup CEO equivalent of the gym. At that point, I don't think I could have sold a dollar bill for 50 cents, and I didn't know Jack about airplanes. And so I'm like, okay, like I need to become that person.

**Sam Parr** (0:26)
So how does a guy who's slaying coupons on the Internet become the founder of a supersonic jet company?

**Shaan Puri** (0:31)
Which by the way, the one liner of what you're making is a commercial jet that flies 1300 miles an hour versus 500 miles an hour. Right?

**Sam Parr** (0:39)
Well, it takes you from it would take you from where to where and how much time like just take it.

**Blake Scholl** (0:43)
Yeah, that's what actually matters. Right. It take you from New York to London and just over three and a half hours, Tokyo to Seattle and four and a half LA, Sydney, about eight and a half. That's version one. We want to go faster after that. Amazing. So my back story was I've loved airplanes since I was a kid. But because there was basically no innovation happening in aerospace, it never occurred to me to have a career there. So I sort of fell in love with computers, with the internet. My first job out of school was Amazon in 2001 My parents didn't understand it because they were like, hey, we got you a computer science degree. Why do you want to work at a bookstore? But it was an amazing time to be there. After that, I was part of one of the very early mobile app companies, and then I wanted to do my own startup. And so I looked at my resume and said, I know e-commerce and I know mobile, so I should work on mobile e-commerce. And surely there'll be something there. And we built this barcode scanning game, which if you make a list of the most important thing in the universe, the least important, you have to dig a deeper hole to find where barcode scanning game goes.
And I would get up in the morning working on that thing, and I was just like, I was super depressed. And I would think, I'm going to screw this thing up. All the investors are going to lose their money. No one's ever going to hire me again. I was like really afraid of failure. And I'm looking at what we're building. And it's like, wait a minute, I'm building an app for people who shop in stores. I'm an e-commerce nerd. I don't even like stores. What am I doing? And so when we had a chance to kind of go aqua hire the company to Groupon, and investors got a return, and I got a little money, and I got to like get out of... I basically got my escape fantasy out of this business that I didn't love. It was a huge win. And I kind of spent my couple of years at Groupon, reflecting on that and thinking about what I learned. And one thing I knew was I definitely wanted to found again. I'd started my first company in my parents' basement in high school, and the founder bug had bit me. But I hated that waking up in the morning thinking about, you know, what am I doing and wishing I'd never started. And I never wanted to do that again. And a thing I knew about myself is no matter what I was doing as a founder, I was going to push myself to my personal red line. And that red line is the max I'm capable of, and it's going to feel the same no matter what I'm doing. But what won't feel the same is what I'm doing and how motivated I am by it.
And I wanted to pick a startup idea where I would never regret starting no matter how hard the day was. And so it led me to sort of organize all my ideas by how happy I would be if they worked. And I had had such a passion for flight. At this point, I'd gotten my pilot's license. You know, that's kind of all I knew about airplanes as to how to fly a single engine one for fun. And I never understood why no one had picked up or concord and left off. And I felt like, okay, I got to look at that and get it out of my system. And then move on to the next thing.

**Sam Parr** (3:44)