Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban

Why does it matter? Because a sonic boom can make a U-turn in the sky — and that one fact made supersonic flight legal again.

Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic with a pilot's license and a cardboard mockup, no aerospace credentials, and a mission investors called pie in the sky. Last year, his 50-person team broke the sound barrier six times — and nobody on the ground heard a thing. What follows is part physics lesson, part startup war story, and part argument that the world's best ideas often sit untouched for a decade before anyone bothers to start.

• The Mach Cutoff effect erased the sonic boom entirely, collapsing a decades-long regulatory standoff into 115 days
• Spreadsheet engineering is just bad software — converting it into version-controlled, integrated tooling collapses months of hardware iteration into minutes
• The "why now?" question filters founders toward a narrow band of recently unlocked ideas and away from vast categories of problems that were solvable all along
• Self-belief for doing something genuinely hard arrives after full commitment, never before it

The sonic boom made a U-turn in the sky — and 115 days later supersonic flight was legal again

The boom disappeared, and so did the argument. XB-1 broke the sound barrier six times across two flights, and not once did anyone on the ground hear it. Scholl's team had demonstrated Mach Cutoff: at sufficient altitude and the right speed for current atmospheric conditions, a sonic boom literally bends back upward and never reaches the earth.

"If there's no boom at all, there's nothing to argue about."

Within 24 hours of that flight, Boom was invited to the West Wing. Within 115 days, an executive order made supersonic flight legal again in the US. A House bill passed unanimously. The Senate Commerce Committee approved it unanimously. A ban that had persisted for decades — rooted in the legitimate complaint that Concorde shook homes and rattled windows — dissolved not because a lawyer found a loophole, but because a small team removed the empirical basis for the objection.

The lesson generalizes cleanly: when a regulatory ban rests on a single, demonstrable harm, the fastest path to legalization is demonstrating that the harm doesn't exist. Not lobbying. Not coalition-building. Demonstration.

Hardware iteration is only slow because engineering lives in spreadsheets — and that's a software problem, not a physics problem

Aerospace engineering classically exists in siloed Excel files: one for aerodynamics, one for propulsion, one for structures, each expert handing results to the next with no automated integration, no version control, no continuous testing. "This spreadsheet engineering is like baby software," Scholl says. "It's really code, but it's getting treated like a second-class citizen."

Boom built Makeboom instead. Define an airplane in a config file, run a script, and in a few minutes you have a full aircraft simulation: range, fuel burn, passenger capacity, every trade-off visible. The design space of infinitely many conceivable supersonic jets collapses into the one worth building. Blade Runner does the same for engine components — two engineers can change a turbine blade design in real time and immediately see both the structural and aerodynamic consequences. What previously took dozens of engineers many months now happens in minutes.

They also built their own machine shop in Denver — 24-hour turnaround from digital design to prototype part — because iterating through outside aerospace suppliers is something Scholl has "no kind words for." Version-controlled engineering software plus in-house manufacturing let 50 people build what previously required government budgets and thousands of employees.

Any hardware company still running its engineering in disconnected spreadsheets is dragging an anchor it built itself.

"Why now?" is the wrong question — the best startup ideas were often viable for a decade before anyone built them

A false belief nearly stopped Boom from being founded. Conventional startup wisdom insists that good ideas get built at the earliest moment of history that makes them possible — and therefore if nobody's working on something, there's probably something wrong with the idea.

Scholl thinks this is backwards. "The technology for supersonic flight existed a long time before Boom was founded. Technologically, the company could have been created 10 years earlier, but nobody started it." The startup world cycles through idea clusters — social, photo sharing, AI — chasing the "why now?" signal. But that signal filters founders toward recently unlocked opportunities and away from a vast category of problems that were solvable all along, just unstarted.

"The answer to why now can be because I started now."

This isn't an argument for ignoring market timing. It's an argument against treating the absence of prior attempts as evidence of impossibility. Jeff Bezos passed on Boom's seed round in 2015, writing in that year's shareholder letter that building airliners was something only big companies could do. He was wrong on the substance, and the reasoning — if it were possible, someone would be doing it — is wrong in general. "There are many, many unsolved problems in the world, many great ideas hiding in plain sight that were actually solvable, that could have been multi-billion or multi-trillion dollar businesses a while ago, but nobody's building them." The law of large numbers that VCs invoke just doesn't hold.

Whether to fight regulators or befriend them depends entirely on whether you have an active enemy

There's a startup trope that you should launch first, build a customer base as political cover, and deal with regulators from a position of strength. Scholl thinks Travis Kalanick was right to do exactly that at Uber — and would have been catastrophically wrong to do it at Boom.

"If Uber had tried to befriend the regulators first, it just wouldn't have worked. One of those reasons is that there was an active opponent. The entrenched taxi industry was using the regulators to block their competition."

Boom didn't have that enemy. Boeing considered them "kind of cute" and expected them to fail. Flying under the radar in a safety-critical domain meant the calculation flipped completely. Scholl went to the FAA from the start — showed them everything, asked for feedback before plans were finalized, framed every interaction as collaborative. The result: the approval process for XB-1, which typically stretches months for an R&D aircraft, took 90 minutes.

"We made it Boom plus FAA versus the problem, not Boom versus FAA."

The strategic variable isn't how powerful the regulator is. It's whether an incumbent is already weaponizing the regulatory process against you. If yes: build the customer base first, use it as leverage. If no — especially in a safety-critical domain — bring regulators inside the tent immediately. Choosing the wrong playbook in either direction is expensive.

Boom solved its billion-dollar financing problem by selling its supersonic engine as a power turbine

Deep tech companies often collapse while waiting for their primary product to become fundable. Boom found its way around this almost by accident. Because they'd chosen to vertically integrate their own propulsion, they ended up with a supersonic engine — and a supersonic engine adapted for ground power generation turns out to be a compelling natural gas turbine.

They called it Superpower: a supersonic engine that ships without the airplane, generating test data, reliability learnings, and capital. "We were able to take the engine that we were building for supersonic flight and sell it separately on the ground as a natural gas power turbine." The first unit is under construction and goes to a customer in less than 12 months.

The structure is elegant. The same hardware that must be tested for airworthiness accumulates operating hours and failure data whether it's sitting in a power installation or attached to a wing. Investors can fund a product that ships now rather than a development program with an uncertain timeline. The financing problem and the validation problem dissolve together.

For capital-intensive deep tech, this is the pattern worth studying: somewhere inside your core technology, there is almost certainly a separable sub-component that can be productized and shipped independently. Finding it before you need it is easier than finding it when you're running out of cash.

AI's real hardware leverage isn't automation — it's making bespoke engineering software affordable for the first time

The physical-world AI story is mostly noise. Scholl is direct: "Despite lots of pitches about AI for industrial automation, we haven't yet seen much that works." But there's a different, quieter impact already reshaping what small hardware teams can build.

At early Amazon, Bezos could staff software teams to build systems that fit the business perfectly — personalization algorithms, warehouse logistics, all custom. That required scale. A 50-person hardware startup couldn't afford it. AI changed the cost curve.

"AI allows anybody who is a user to become a tool builder. And I think that's a really, really big deal."

Makeboom and Blade Runner exist because building them became affordable. More counterintuitively: Boom needs more software engineers in a post-AI world than before, because the cost of development dropped enough that hardware engineers can become coders — and someone has to ensure the architectures are coherent. "The notion that software engineering is dead, I just don't buy it."

The programming-is-dead narrative gets causality exactly backwards. When custom software gets cheaper to build, organizations that would never have justified the investment now can — and each piece of internal tooling that fits the operation like a glove compounds into a structural advantage over competitors still running on generic systems.

"Work on what you know" is the worst career advice — knowledge is learnable in weeks, passion cannot be installed

Scholl's first company was mobile e-commerce because his resume pointed there. He knew Amazon. He knew mobile. He shipped high-quality apps, had no product vision, and "didn't really give a shit about anything we were building."

He had nowhere near the credentials to build a supersonic airliner when he started Boom. His aerospace knowledge at founding was a Cessna pilot's license. He taught himself from textbooks and Khan Academy physics, keeping a "confusion list" of things he couldn't explain from first principles — a list that grew faster than it shrank, but that built in him a sharp awareness of the difference between real understanding and hand-waving.

"I had nowhere close to the resume to build a supersonic airliner."

The advice to work on what you know minimizes onboarding friction at the cost of the thing that actually produces great companies: founders who desperately want the product to exist. Knowledge is acquirable. The compulsion to care isn't.

This holds in hiring too. The screen Scholl has never found a workaround for: "The one thing I've never been able to teach somebody else is to care when they just didn't care." Technical skills, domain knowledge, even leadership — these can be developed. Caring about the outcome can't be manufactured after the fact, and it's the thing that keeps a company moving when every reasonable person would have stopped.

Self-belief arrives after full commitment — waiting for it before you start is a category error

He didn't have self-belief on day one. His friends' eyes glazed over when he described the idea. One told him to call back when he had "something less pie in the sky." He had no aerospace credentials, no proof he could do it, and no one handing him permission.

"Nobody comes down and taps you on the shoulder and says, by the way, you're the one."

What Scholl did instead was redirect every unit of mental energy from whether to how. Stop interrogating whether you can do it; put everything into figuring out the path. The self-belief came later — and some days it still doesn't fully arrive. There was a moment Boom had seven days of cash left and the board told him to shut the company down. He refused: "We just haven't found the way through yet." They found it.

This is a precise inversion of the conventional model. Conventional advice: build confidence, then attempt the hard thing. Scholl's claim: waiting for confidence is a category error, because confidence is a product of committed action, not a prerequisite for it. The only way to discover what you're capable of is to commit completely and stop allocating mental resources to the question of whether you're capable at all.

The sectors that look most impregnable to startups are usually the ones where nobody questioned the constraints

What Boom actually demonstrates is that aerospace wasn't hard because planes are hard. Every drag Scholl identified — slow iteration, regulatory deadlock, financing gaps, credential gatekeeping — yielded to attacking the problem from software-first first principles rather than from inside the industry's inherited assumptions. The sonic boom was physics, not policy. Spreadsheet engineering was a tooling failure, not an inherent cost of complexity. The supersonic ban was an empirical objection, not an ideological one.

The industries that look most untouchable are often the ones where insiders stopped questioning whether the constraints were real. Find the one still running on disconnected spreadsheets, deferring to incumbents who expect you to fail, waiting for someone to start.

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Topics: supersonic aviation, hardware startups, deep tech, regulatory strategy, iteration speed, AI for hardware, founder mindset, startup financing, aerospace, YC