Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186
Episode
65 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Productivity, Remote Work, Fundraising & VC
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Boomless Flight Technology: Boom solves sonic boom using ray tracing algorithms from computer graphics to calculate flight trajectories based on atmospheric temperature gradients. Flying at sufficient altitude with speed-controlled boom angles allows sound waves to refract upward, never reaching ground. Maximum quiet speeds range from Mach 1.05 to 1.3 depending on weather conditions, enabling 50% faster travel than current jets without ground noise.
- ✓In-House Engine Development: Boom builds Symphony engines internally using vertical integration and three-d printing to achieve 10x cost reduction and 50% time savings compared to traditional aerospace. The slacker index metric measures productivity as wait time divided by build time. Buying a million-dollar machine enables 24-hour turbine blade printing versus six-month traditional procurement at similar cost.
- ✓Product Market Fit Validation: Boom secured firm orders with deposits from United, American, and Japan Airlines totaling five and a half years of production capacity before building the commercial aircraft. This demonstrates specific demand for their exact specifications: 4,000 nautical mile range, 62 seats, business class economics at $5,000 round trip transatlantic versus Concorde's $20,000 tickets with inferior comfort.
- ✓Hardware Iteration Speed: Boom embeds software engineers with hardware teams to automate design changes through their Make Boom platform. Updating one airplane component triggers automatic redesign of dependent systems via push-button automation. This agile hardware development approach mirrors software sprints, reducing iteration costs and enabling faster product development cycles than traditional aerospace twenty-one year product stagnation.
- ✓Starlink Revenue Strategy: Boom developed an undisclosed hardware product launching before the supersonic airliner with over one billion dollars in orders. This Starlink-equivalent strategy provides earlier revenue to finance the longer development timeline of Overture, similar to how SpaceX funded Falcon 9 development through satellite internet services. The product ships from their Denver factory using the same core supersonic technology.
What It Covers
Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic discusses breaking the sound barrier with their XB-1 demonstrator aircraft, developing the Symphony engine in-house, solving sonic boom through software algorithms, and targeting 2029-2030 for commercial supersonic passenger flights at business class prices.
Key Questions Answered
- •Boomless Flight Technology: Boom solves sonic boom using ray tracing algorithms from computer graphics to calculate flight trajectories based on atmospheric temperature gradients. Flying at sufficient altitude with speed-controlled boom angles allows sound waves to refract upward, never reaching ground. Maximum quiet speeds range from Mach 1.05 to 1.3 depending on weather conditions, enabling 50% faster travel than current jets without ground noise.
- •In-House Engine Development: Boom builds Symphony engines internally using vertical integration and three-d printing to achieve 10x cost reduction and 50% time savings compared to traditional aerospace. The slacker index metric measures productivity as wait time divided by build time. Buying a million-dollar machine enables 24-hour turbine blade printing versus six-month traditional procurement at similar cost.
- •Product Market Fit Validation: Boom secured firm orders with deposits from United, American, and Japan Airlines totaling five and a half years of production capacity before building the commercial aircraft. This demonstrates specific demand for their exact specifications: 4,000 nautical mile range, 62 seats, business class economics at $5,000 round trip transatlantic versus Concorde's $20,000 tickets with inferior comfort.
- •Hardware Iteration Speed: Boom embeds software engineers with hardware teams to automate design changes through their Make Boom platform. Updating one airplane component triggers automatic redesign of dependent systems via push-button automation. This agile hardware development approach mirrors software sprints, reducing iteration costs and enabling faster product development cycles than traditional aerospace twenty-one year product stagnation.
- •Starlink Revenue Strategy: Boom developed an undisclosed hardware product launching before the supersonic airliner with over one billion dollars in orders. This Starlink-equivalent strategy provides earlier revenue to finance the longer development timeline of Overture, similar to how SpaceX funded Falcon 9 development through satellite internet services. The product ships from their Denver factory using the same core supersonic technology.
Notable Moment
Boom stopped selling Overture pre-orders despite interest from Lufthansa and British Airways because five and a half years of production capacity is already sold. Scholl argues every airline will inevitably need supersonic capability once competitors offer three and a half hour transatlantic flights, making additional order book validation unnecessary.
Episode Transcript
Think this thing people don't appreciate is, like like, the amount of space you want in transportation is adversely proportional to how long it takes. Like, if you're on a boat going across an ocean, you have a suite. And it was a hotel room on a boat. Right? If you had a literal transporter beam, you don't sit down. So, you know, and everything else is kind of somewhere in the middle. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Dev Stats. Check out Dev Stats today and get 20% off plus access to their dedicated Slack channel. Just go to devstats.com/twist. Nexos.ai. Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free fourteen day trial at nexos.ai/twist. That's nexos.ai/twist. And Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months free at gusto.com/twist. Hello, and welcome back to Twist, everybody. This is Alex. And today, we have three founder interviews for you. First up, Boom, one of my favorite companies on the Twist 500. This is a startup that wants to bring supersonic travel back to the people. If you yearn for the days of the Concorde, well, this is a company you should care about. I got the CEO to come on the show and tell us how much progress they've made, how much more work is still ahead of them, when we're gonna get to take one of these jets, and, of course, how much more money do they need. It's all rather bullish, and I am stoked for boom. Then we turn to the gamma pitch deck competition. 10 different companies made pitch decks with gamma. You can think of it kinda like an AI assistant for making beautiful presentations. And now those founders are using what they cooked up to pitch Jason. The winner's gonna get $25,000 from Twist. So who are we talking to today? Well, the folks behind confi dot tech. They have built an app that helps you find the right people at the next event that you're going to. So if you need help picking out the right person to talk to or break the ice with, it's gonna help. If you're going to a conference and you wanna find, I don't know, let's pick an example, all the small business owners, well, Confie wants to help you find just those people. Then to close out the drive.ai, bringing together things like file management and AI agents, collaboration, and even AI writing, the drive AI is a multimodal, agentic workspace that isn't quite like anything that I had used before, but that just makes me all the more interested. After all, if AI is actually gonna change the way that we work, shouldn't it change the way that we work? Alright. Let's dig in. Alright. So, I used to live both in San …
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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode
SignalCast may earn commission on purchases via these links. As an Amazon Associate, SignalCast earns from qualifying purchases.
Tools
- Make Boom PlatformBy guest
by Boom Supersonic
“Boom embeds software engineers with hardware teams to automate design changes through their Make Boom platform. Updating one airplane component triggers automatic redesign of dependent systems via push-button automation.”
Products
- Symphony EngineBy guest
by Boom Supersonic
“developing the Symphony engine in-house, solving sonic boom through software algorithms”
company
“Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic discusses breaking the sound barrier with their XB-1 demonstrator aircraft, developing the Symphony engine in-house”
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