Blake Scholl

And it's what every mom would say, right?

Because it's the conventional standard advice to work on what you know about.

And I think the actual much better thing is to work on what you love.

So if you stop any...

successful entrepreneur, so on the day they make it, let's say day of IPO, and you say, hey, of what you know today, how much of it did you know on the day you started?

And I think the answer would be almost none.

You have to learn the vast majority of how you scale a company and how you lead an organization and how you sell and blah, blah, blah.

Everybody has to get reinvented along this journey.

You're going to learn 99% new stuff.

So why not learn 99.5% new stuff and work on something that you really, really love?

So I sort of said, okay, I'm going to look at this supersonic thing.

And I thought I would get two weeks into it and be done with it.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, the weirdest thing was...

I mean, so I got slightly down path with it over a few months of expecting that I was going to talk myself out of it.

But every time I would go and study something, I would just find that the conventional wisdom was wrong and that anybody with a spreadsheet and a web browser could build a basic model that said you should be able to fly supersonic with today's technology.

So I took an airplane design class.

I put myself through remedial calculus and physics because I hadn't had any since high school.

I remember in the middle of 2014, I had a spreadsheet model of the airplane and a spreadsheet model of the market.

And I took them both to a professor at Stanford.