Blake Scholl

The early team was the people that I could convince to join a supersonic jet company headquartered in my basement.

So, definitionally, they had to be kind of bold.

And nobody big and good was gonna work in my basement.

Then we made a bunch of first-timer mistakes.

Then we made this other mistake of saying, well, let's go hire a bunch of experienced people.

We started bringing people in from big companies that thought they knew how to do this.

Then we went through a period of time where we looked way too much like a big company, not enough like a startup.

Where I landed on this, I think we finally cracked it.

It's something I call a talent distillery.

So what's that?

Well, we get a bunch of young spirits, people just a few years into their career or right out of school, smart, driven, hardworking, innovative, passionate,

And we get just a little bit of, I call it the oak.

The people have a bit of gray hair to kind of help contain them a little bit.

And the magic happens when you got way more spirits than you've got oak.

And there's a little bit of an interplay between the spirits and the oak.

The spirits make the oak better and the oak infuses a little bit in the spirits.

And that turns out to work very well.

I can tell a story about this.

We did the landing gear on our XB-1 with a team of great engineers that had never done a landing gear before.

They were bold enough and passionate enough that they were willing to take that on.