Blake Scholl

I mean, I had my pilot's license, and that was about as close as I got.

I remember the early days when I was recruiting, I'd fly down to Hawthorne, where SpaceX was, to try and recruit out of SpaceX.

We'd fly down to Mojave, California, to recruit out of scale composites.

And I'd fly my little airplane I could fly myself.

And that was like the only cred I had showing up to these meetings.

And I remember talking to people and they were all, there was sort of this pattern of like internet guys that want to go start airplane companies.

And all the airplane guys were used to hearing pitches from internet guys that didn't make any sense.

And in fact, they had a term for it.

People would say, oh, that's fruitcake.

And I remember when I first met with the guy who ultimately became our first chief engineer.

And I think we ended up meeting at the subway at SFO airport because he happened to be flying through SFO.

And I was like, great, I'll come over.

And I sat down with him and he's eating a sandwich.

And I showed him the spreadsheet model of the airplane and the sizing calculations I'd learned how to do out of a textbook.

And he looked at it and he said, no, I didn't think you'd be this far along.

And then our next conversation, he's like, man, I've been pitched a lot of ideas by internet guys, but this one actually makes sense.

So there's no, my experience has been, there's no substitute for actually knowing what I'm talking about, actually doing the work.

Like I'd pick up, it was one of the things

that I realized would have to be true about myself is I would have to be technically deep in order to know what I was doing, make the right decisions, to be able to pick the right people and have them want to follow me.

If I didn't know what I was talking about, if I was just some business guy, great people don't want to work for bosses that don't know what they're doing.