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

And what she said was, shouldn't you work on something you know something about?

And this is common well-meaning advice, right?

When I started my first company, I figured I knew e-commerce from my time at Amazon.

I'd been at one of the very first mobile app companies, so I thought I knew mobile.

So I thought I should work on mobile e-commerce because my resume said that's where I would have expertise.

And yeah, so I actually knew how to do mobile e-commerce, but I had no idea what mobile e-commerce should be.

And I actually didn't really give a shit about anything we were building.

And so although I cranked out high quality apps, I wasn't having a good time and I had no product vision.

So I think the worst advice is work on what you know.

What you know can be changed, particularly in a world where everyone has personalized AI tutors.

Anybody with passion and dedication can learn new knowledge and learn new skills.

But what you can't change easily is what you love.

Knowledge is changeable, passion is not, and never has there been more reason to work on what you love.

Okay.

It took Boom about 10 years just to break the sound barrier.

Yeah, oof.

How do you convince investors to give a deep tech company enough runway to survive that long before there's a real payoff?

So I don't recommend following in our footsteps in this regard.

Boom nearly died many times.

It took a lot more time and a lot more money even to get to a real proof of concept than I expected.

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