Blake Scholl

speaker

562 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 29 Jul

Blake Scholl’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

I was lucky to start my career at Amazon in 2001 when my family thought it was a bookstore.

And one of the things that was, I think, great about Amazon culture is they built their own business software to run their own business.

Like the personalization algorithms that power the recommendations on the websites, the things that power people who bought this item also bought.

All of that was in-house software.

The backend software was also completely custom.

The things that would power the warehouses and the delivery trucks, et cetera.

And I think that is a part of why Amazon was able to be the winner in e-commerce is that they had software that fit the business operation like a glove.

But to do that in the early 2000s required scale.

That much software couldn't have been created by a small company with a small operation.

And what AI does is reduce the cost of building custom software, which I think allows more businesses to have software that fits them perfectly.

And one of the things that's traditionally inefficient about custom software, or really software at all, is that people building the software, the people using the software, are in two different companies and two different organizations.

And they don't necessarily understand each other very well.

But AI allows anybody who is a user to become a tool builder.

And I think that's a really, really big deal.

And so I think that's what AI has already made better about building the physical world.

I think what's left is we don't really have great physical world AI yet.

Like programming a CNC machine is still an incredibly manual task.

And despite lots of pitches about AI for industrial automation, we haven't yet seen much that works.

But I think that's going to come.

Okay, what do I look for when hiring people?

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