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

This is one of, for me, this has been one of the most difficult things to really learn and to get right, is building the team.

And in particular at Boom, the last company entrepreneur founded that went on to build a commercial airliner was Douglas Aircraft in 1921.

So this is an industry that has not had startups for an incredibly long time.

And it has only kind of big companies, Boeing, Lockheed, et cetera, that are really terrible cultures.

And so we often found that we had this tension between being able to hire people who are technically competent, who are good culture fits, and who are really experienced.

And so what I found is

that when looking to really value early career talent, people who are young, ambitious, smart, who have not yet been destroyed by working at one of the legacy big aerospace companies, value people who are hands-on, who've gone out into the world and built, smart, gets things done, optimistic.

At senior levels, it gets even harder.

And that's one of the reasons why when you're building a company, if you can manage to promote from within people that you've grown up in your own culture, that is much, much better.

Okay, what are some products that Boomerai wished existed?

From a boom perspective, actually delivering on physical AI for manufacturing would be huge.

Imagine a large format manufacturing capability that could go from a CAD design to an automatically QA'd part with one machine without a programmer.

That would be incredible.

There's no reason to believe that's impossible.

It just hasn't been created yet.

For an early hardware startup in a regulatory gray zone, do you engage regulators before deploying or deploy first and legitimize after?

How do we make that call with Boom?

I don't think this is one size fits all.

I think this is very contextual what you should do.

So for example, in building Uber, Travis basically ignored the regulators and built the service anyway, built a fan base of customers that he could use against the regulators that were trying to shut him down.

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