Blake Scholl

And I said, dude, would you look at this?

Because I don't know what I'm doing.

But if my math is right, this is all practical.

And he looks at it and he clicks around.

He says, Blake, if you're going to actually consider this, you need to be more aggressive because all your assumptions are conservative.

I remember leaving his office and thinking, either I have no courage, or I'm going to try to find some great people and go do this.

But that was the weirdest part, because I'm like, who am I to go build a supersonic jet company?

And I would tell my friends I was looking at it, and I could just see their eyes roll back.

And I struggled with my own ego a lot in that, because it's such a bold declaration to say, I'm going to go build a supersonic airliner.

Um, like if it works, you know, I'm almost definitionally part of history.

And so I'm like, I'm like declaring to myself and my friends that I, I'm going to try to be a historic figure.

Like that was really weird.

And I think like, man, does this make me somebody really arrogant to even go try this?

And I struggled with it.

And that I remember thinking back about, um, Bill Gates's story.

He'd been one of my heroes in high school and he had, um,

famously, I think in the late 70s, said that his goal for Microsoft was to put a personal computer in every home and on every desk running Microsoft software.

He said that in, I don't know, something like 78.

Then he did that and then some.

I tried to ask myself, what was it like to be Bill Gates and say that?