The sound epistemics behind Boom's breaking of the sound barrier

Welcome to today’s installment of “Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them.” 

Builder’s Spotlight: Blake Scholl

Principles on display: Be intellectually ambitious, practice cognitive integrity, build yourself by building

My friend Blake Scholl has been in the news because of his company’s successful supersonic test flight—the first-ever supersonic flight of a privately developed jet.

Blake himself has also raised some eyebrows. “This guy pivoted into aerospace from Groupon?” Yes. But his builder’s story is richer than that.

Blake is a paragon of cognitive agency, of a builder breaking standard molds regarding his own thinking and knowledge. His vast ambition is grounded in rigorous epistemics.

Blake made an earnest inquiry into the reasons why supersonic couldn’t work; and when he found no good reasons, he started Boom. He trusted himself to start from scratch, in terms of both his network, his knowledge, and his expertise—he knew no one in the industry, had never worked in aerospace, and taught himself high school physics and calculus with YouTube videos in his first year at Boom.

He knew he would have to grow along with his company as he built it, rather than as a precursor to building it—and that this would further increase the already insanely high risk that it would fail. He chose to work on it anyway; not in naive denial of how excruciatingly hard and uncertain it would be, but in honest recognition that it was the thing he was most personally motivated to work on, risk and hardship notwithstanding. 

Here are the most relevant highlights from my conversation with him a little over a year ago. All quotes are from Blake.

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A dream of supersonic, a life in e-commerce

Blake was always interested in supersonic. But he had never worked in the space. He worked in ecommerce.

In my mid-20s, I set a lifetime goal of breaking the sound barrier and I put a Google alert on supersonic jet, so I could be first to know when I could buy a ticket, but it was crickets. Meanwhile, I was having my first career in tech, worked at Amazon when my family thought it was a bookstore…

I thought, “Okay, I know mobile, so what should I work on? I should work on mobile e-commerce.” I started this mobile e-commerce company that built basically a barcode scanning game that was intended for people who would shop in stores.

Blake was working insanely hard, but he wasn’t actually that interested in the project. So he took the first reasonable out.

What I found was that it was like any startup that was really hard, except I would get up in the morning and think, “Why in the world did I get into this? I’m working really hard. I’m really worried about failing. I’m worried I’m going to lose all the investors’ money and let my friends and employees down, and let myself down and I'm thinking it’s not even worth it.”

When we had an opportunity to sell the company in a way that everyone would make a bit of money in a small exit, it was a massive relief to me. I thought, “Great, take the exit. Stop having to worry about failure, live to found another day.”

He ended up at Groupon.

I got to spend two years at Groupon retaining the bank account and reflecting on what I had learned. A joke I often make is there's nothing like working on internet coupons to make you yearn to work on something you really love.

Forging the steelman against supersonic, defeating it

He wanted to do another startup, and decided to make a list of everything that he would be personally motivated to work on, “forgetting everything else”—including “is it physically possible”, “do I have the resume for it”, and even “is it a good idea”.

He started looking into supersonic flight, at the top of his list, figuring it was a no-go. The opposite occurred: it turned out none of the reasons to not do it were good.

I figured, “I will probably get two weeks into the research and then I will understand why it's a bad idea, and no one's doing it and I will move on. I'll move to the next far more plausible idea.”

But instead, what I found was that there was a whole bunch of stale conventional wisdom about why this wasn't possible that didn't stand up to careful analysis, that anybody with a spreadsheet and half a brain could do with data that could be found in Wikipedia. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to look at it, you just have to look.

And so I continued to turn over more cards, and every time I turned over a card it was like, “No, this is plausible. This is plausible.” I spent basically a year from when I left Groupon to when I hired my first employee at Boom, really just getting educated, actually reading those books I bought. Took an airplane design class, built a spreadsheet model of the airplane, started to meet people in the industry.

Starting from scratch

Blake was starting from scratch. Truly.

On day one, I didn't know a single person in aerospace. I had no network, I had to build all that from scratch.

He also built his knowledge from scratch.

In that first year on Boom, I took Khan Academy remedial physics because I didn’t think I actually understood it. Same thing, calculus. I hadn’t had a calculus class since high school, and I wasn’t sure I actually had ever understood it. It felt wrong to have to do those things. It felt like I should have known them, but the truth is I didn’t.

Taking confusion by the horns

How Blake thinks about these seemingly showstopping deficits actually indicates a unique strength of his: the willingness to be shamelessly confused, and the relentless clarity that he imposed on his confusion.

I kept a confusion list, meaning when I felt confused about something I’d write it down. I had a goal of taking one thing off the confusion list every week. I think I had in my head initially the idea that that list would one day become empty, but no, it actually it only gets clear every week. But what it did have for me is self-awareness about what I was and was not clear on. That turned out to be super valuable.

Confusion versus clarity and not accepting confusion if it’s something really important, that would be lesson one.  Lesson two is about thinking in terms of first principles. I think again, we tend to get taught that if we're really smart then we handle complex things and subtle things.

I think the opposite is true. I think the real wisdom is in very simple, basic understanding. One of the advantages in coming to a new domain into my career, I didn't have four years to go get a four-year degree in aerospace.

Embracing and self-authoring the new entrant narrative

Blake understood that being a new entrant mattered. More than simply understanding it, he fully narrativized and romanticized being a new entrant. In his words:

When I was wrestling with whether to start Boom, one of the exercises I did was say, Okay. Let me get my own ego and insecurity out of this. Let's imagine the year is 2050 and I'm sitting on the beach, sipping Mai Tais, and reading about aviation history.

First off, do I still think we're flying around at 80% of the speed of sound, or do I think we've gotten to supersonic? I sure as hell hope we're going supersonic now. Okay, great. How did that happen? How do I think that history reads? Do I think after 150 years of not doing it, Boeing did it? Yeah, probably not. History doesn't go like that. It was probably a new entrant.

Okay, what would that new entrant look like? Well, they’d probably be from outside the industry because everybody who grew up in the industry, would’ve learned all the lessons about why it can’t be done, so it's going to be an outsider. Okay, great. What would the outside effort have to look like? …

I could keep going, but my point is I was able to take myself out of it. Imagine what a success story would have to be like. Then it's like, “Okay, turn that around, go become that.” What I've found is that working backwards, reverse historical reasoning has provided an ever-present view of what are the things that are going to really matter.

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There were tons of other insights—including on how to think about seemingly intractable problems like traffic, how to pick personally motivating problems (as opposed to problems on whose importance there is banal universal consensus), how he thinks about personal growth and leveling up, and much more. Again, check out the full transcript.

In the 18 months or so since this interview, Blake has led Boom through a number of milestones, most notably achieving private supersonic flight. The amount of thoughtful innovation this has required—from aircraft material to jet engine design to cockpit layout to AR landing systems—is a testament to the power of the ambitious epistemics that are Blake’s distinct strength.

See my Intellectual humility is a cop-out, Vision vs delusion, and The best way to build yourself is by building for broader takes on Blake’s virtues highlighted here.