How I Invest with David Weisburd
E153: Blake Scholl on Boom Supersonic: Learning from Elon Musk & SpaceX
08 Apr 2025
Blake Scholl started with a crazy idea: bring back supersonic flight. A decade later, Boom Supersonic pre-orders from the likes of Virgin, United, and American Airlines, and is building the fastest commercial jet since the Concorde—without the sonic boom. But what looks like an inevitable success now was, at the beginning, a nearly laughable dream. In this episode, we break down how Blake went from crashing a Virgin Galactic rollout to pitching Richard Branson over breakfast, to getting a “yes” 24 hours before Y Combinator Demo Day. It’s a masterclass in high-agency entrepreneurship and building something audacious from first principles. From pitching billionaires to proving physics, from engineering emotional payoff for teams to raising capital from LPs directly, Blake unpacks how to build hard tech companies that actually work. If you’re a founder, builder, or dreamer, this one’s for you.
Full Episode
A couple months ago, we did our boomless announcement. We announced that in the morning and tweeted about my least favorite regulation. Elon responded and said, this administration will solve this and all the other dumb regulations that don't make sense. And I flew to D.C. that night for a whole bunch of meetings. By the time I landed, I had an invitation to come to the White House.
Since then, we've been making a full court press on getting that regulation repealed as quickly as possible. You know, one of our employees had actually made both the machine that made the model and the model. We brought that, painted it from virgin colors, and we sort of explained to Richard what we were doing and why it made sense and why it was a step forward versus Concord.
He was copiously taking notes. He kind of leans back in his chair and says, gosh, guys, like, this is brilliant. I love every part of it. But I said, Richard, you know, let me be clear. We're not asking for your money. We're asking for you to say that you want the product. We're asking if you want the first 10 of these to have a Virgin logo on the tail.
You believe that the bigger the idea, the easier it becomes. It's very counterintuitive. Explain why.
Boom, we have days where I look at a problem and it feels like the startup equivalent of a cancer diagnosis. It's like, oh, I'm going to fight and win against cancer. We have just the best of the best people in the world working on this. And they do it at the team level. They do it at the board level. They do it at the investor level. They do it at the advisor level.
They build in a supersonic jet. Like, everybody wants to talk about it. Everyone's excited. I believe that there are second-order effects of being able to fly to London, more often flying from New York to L.A. What do you foresee to be the impact to business, to society? How did Boom become the most talked about company at YC Demo Day over a decade ago?
The lead up to Demo Day was really painful. I remember a few weeks into YC, we were talking about what we'd actually bring to Demo Day. And all the other SaaS companies were like, bring in a product and a growth chart. We are... We're not going to have a product in demo day. It'll take more like eight years, not like eight weeks to ship a supersonic airliner.
I didn't believe we could have sales before it actually built a product. The YC partner said, Blake, if you have a demo day without sales, your goose is cooked. So I looked at our product pipeline, our sales pipeline, and I was like, man, I'll be lucky to sell airplanes in eight years, let alone eight weeks. It's not going to be like a United or a Lufthansa pipeline.
that would be willing to pre-order a supersonic jet from a startup company. It's going to have to be either a startup airline or somebody as bold as Virgin who would be willing to jump and lean in. So we focused kind of all of our sales efforts on those two categories. It'd be a startup airline or it'd be Virgin.
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