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

He was laughed at internally and laughed at by his board when he launched Amazon Web Services.

He was laughed at by the world for e-commerce.

And yet both of those stories ended really well.

I think you can tell a lot of a character of a company, particularly a public company, by its quarterly behavior.

And when it got to the end of a quarter, Amazon would never massage their choices to try and make earnings look good that quarter.

They just take the long-term cash flow decisions.

And yet at the same time, there was incredible operating discipline.

There were goals, operational excellence, focus on the here and now.

I think doing those two things together, a vision that exists long range and the operational excellence day-to-day, that's unusual, it's rare, but this is what great companies are made of.

You taught yourself the fundamentals of aerospace engineering.

Do I have any advice about how to teach yourself hard things?

I think it's important to know

the difference between knowing enough to pass a test and really understanding something.

And at least for me going through school, I got mostly good grades, but I didn't understand half of what I was actually doing.

Not really deep down, not first principles.

But as I was learning aerospace engineering, I bought textbooks.

I went back and I did remedial Khan Academy physics and calculus because I hadn't had any since high school.

I was doing the problem sets.

And I started making a list that I called my confusion list, which is my list of things I didn't think I really understood, even if I could answer the question on a test or answer the question plausibly.

And my goal was every week to take one thing off the confusion list.

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