The Exchanges

Q Speaking about the future there, probably the most important and final one, what are the next five years hold for you and for Boom? Can you paint that product roadmap?

A Yeah, so today we're building our first aircraft, the XB-I, which will look like a fighter jet, but fly like an airliner. And that is history's first independently developed supersonic jet. So that's literally coming together as we speak. The, uh, the wings were finished a couple weeks ago. The fuselage came together earlier this week. Wings and fuselage together next month. So it's quite literally coming together in our hangar. So that airplane will be finished this summer. They'll be flying and starting to set speed records next year. And from that point, we shift our attention from that prototype to the production aircraft we call Overture. And so that airplane will carry 75 passengers at business class fares on flights that are half as long as they are today. So think, you know, New York to London and three hours instead of seven, you know, fast enough, you can go across the pond, get business done and be home to tuck your kids into bed. So that's going to be our major focus over the next five years. And it's a continual question of, okay, how do we build this to be safe? How do we build it to be sustainable, environmentally friendly, affordable to as many people as possible? And that's what we think about every day is how do we bring high speed travel to as many people as possible?

AI assessment note: “we shift our attention from that prototype to the production aircraft we call Overture”

Q ability to move between. I do want to ask about the topic of fundraising, because it is such a unique company, which means I'm sure there's a unique set of experiences in terms of the fundraise itself. How was the fundraising experience for you, given you're essentially building supersonic jets? This is not an enterprise company, and can you share some memorable moments or elements that stood out for you?

A Fundraising's been incredibly challenging, yet I'm super excited about the success we've had. We've raised now a bit over a hundred and fifty million dollars from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley and really around the world, but it has been an arduous process. The very first seed round, I started by calling the people who had invested in my first company and made money in that, including people who had said, Blake, we'll invest in anything you ever do. And some of them wrote checks, but some of them were like, well, we said we'd invest in anything you'd ever do, but we didn't think you'd do something this crazy. Uh, So we found the people who are willing to do it. We found the people who were excited about the vision, who would say things like, we think you're probably crazy, but I'd really love this to work. So here's 25 K. And that was the start of it. And over a series of rounds, you get better at telling the story and you get better at reaching the people who are very long-term minded. And that in particular has been one of the most interesting challenges is boom is a company that will probably be on the order of 10 to 15 years from founding to Carrying passengers in volume. And that time horizon, even though the IRRs and the multiples will be great, makes it an impedance mismatch for most venture capital funds in the early stages. And so a lot of our capital as…

AI assessment note: “Fundraising's been incredibly challenging, yet I'm super excited about the success we've had.”

Q do want to dive a little bit more into the leadership, so to speak, of the team and for you. I guess, you know, first when we think about building the team itself, we have to acquire the incredible talent. You mentioned culture there and helping in terms of building culture and how VCs do that. What deliberate choices did you make to attract the best and brightest talent, Blake?

A So culture, you do have to be very deliberate about, and culture is bespoke. The culture at Apple is good at solving some kinds of problems. It's very different from the culture at Facebook or the culture at Google. And so when you're building a culture, you want to think about what are the attributes, Of a culture that are going to be necessary for succeeding at your goals. And for boom, we're working on something that is incredibly long time horizon that requires a great degree of perseverance through the inevitable ups and downs. And so we chose to optimize for mission passion as the fundamental tenet of our culture. And so we look for people who were as excited about supersonic flight as I am. We're incredibly committed to the mission of making the world more connected, making earth a smaller place. And that's a filter even on great technical talent. If you're not excited enough, we don't hire you because it's too hard, and if you're sane, you're gonna give up somewhere along the way. So that was first and foremost a filter. And second, we systematically searched the world for the best and the brightest, especially in the early days. I had no connection at all in aerospace. My best intro was a guy who had worked for me at Groupon, had played hockey in college, was someone who now worked at SpaceX. And so that was my first meeting. And I showed up to that meeting in an airpl…

AI assessment note: “we chose to optimize for mission passion as the fundamental tenet of our culture”

Q Can I ask just on that? Sorry, I'm too interested. Do you drive the conversation now and set the discursive threads? Or do you let them have their own discussion and really kind of observe from the outside?

A Some of both. So I drove the agenda. So day one was a jam session on everything technical. What would you need technically to make this work? And what was the current state of the art? What technology would need to be created? What already existed? And so the structure and discussion around that would bring out a lot of interesting things. And then day two was about company building. And we asked questions like, should you start with a prototype or should you go straight into production? What do you look for in a great engineer? How is that going to be different in aerospace versus a software team? And so if you provide the right sort of structure, and then let people riff on those questions, you're covering a lot of ground systematically, but also allowing people to take the conversation in places where you might not have thought of taking it.

AI assessment note: “Some of both. So I drove the agenda.”

Q Can I ask just on that? Sorry, I'm too interested. Do you drive the conversation now and set the discursive threads? Or do you let them have their own discussion and really kind of observe from the outside?

A Some of both. So I drove the agenda. So day one was a jam session on everything technical. What would you need technically to make this work? And what was the current state of the art? What technology would need to be created? What already existed? And so the structure and discussion around that would bring out a lot of interesting things. And then day two was about company building. And we asked questions like, should you start with a prototype or should you go straight into production? What do you look for in a great engineer? How is that going to be different in aerospace versus a software team? And so if you provide the right sort of structure, and then let people riff on those questions, you're covering a lot of ground systematically, but also allowing people to take the conversation in places where you might not have thought of taking it.

AI assessment note: “Some of both. So I drove the agenda.”

Q I would, though, love to kick off today with a little on you. So talk to me. How did you make your way into the world of startups? And no offense, Blake, but it's very rare I have a company quite like Boom on the show. So how did you come to the idea of founding Boom and changing the way we think about travel and flight?

A Well, startups have been my blood for a long time. I started my first company in my parents' basement when I was about 15. That was a tiny internet service provider, so I've wanted to start things virtually my entire adult life, and my first company, Kima Labs, was a mobile e-commerce company that was acquired by Groupon, and I looked back at that experience, and one of my biggest learnings was that startups are hard. Even things that are theoretically in your wheelhouse are going to have challenging moments, and if you want to be successful, you have to think about your personal motivation and pick a mission that you will never, ever give up on, no matter how hard it is. So aviation has been something that's been in my blood for a long time. I've been flying for fun since I was in college, although I had a first career doing internet things and didn't really think about bringing aviation into my career until my mid twenties. And in 2007, I put a Google alert on supersonic jet because I wanted to be first to know when I could go buy a ticket and go Mach two. But for the better part of a decade, it was crickets. There's just no credible effort to build a supersonic aircraft that I could see myself or friends and family flying on and benefiting from. So after having left Groupon, I wanted to work on something more impactful than internet coupons, and I wanted to work on something…

AI assessment note: “I organized all of my ideas by how happy I would personally be if it worked”

Q ability to move between. I do want to ask about the topic of fundraising, because it is such a unique company, which means I'm sure there's a unique set of experiences in terms of the fundraise itself. How was the fundraising experience for you, given you're essentially building supersonic jets? This is not an enterprise company, and can you share some memorable moments or elements that stood out for you?

A Fundraising's been incredibly challenging, yet I'm super excited about the success we've had. We've raised now a bit over a hundred and fifty million dollars from some of the best investors in Silicon Valley and really around the world, but it has been an arduous process. The very first seed round, I started by calling the people who had invested in my first company and made money in that, including people who had said, Blake, we'll invest in anything you ever do. And some of them wrote checks, but some of them were like, well, we said we'd invest in anything you'd ever do, but we didn't think you'd do something this crazy. Uh, So we found the people who are willing to do it. We found the people who were excited about the vision, who would say things like, we think you're probably crazy, but I'd really love this to work. So here's 25 K. And that was the start of it. And over a series of rounds, you get better at telling the story and you get better at reaching the people who are very long-term minded. And that in particular has been one of the most interesting challenges is boom is a company that will probably be on the order of 10 to 15 years from founding to Carrying passengers in volume. And that time horizon, even though the IRRs and the multiples will be great, makes it an impedance mismatch for most venture capital funds in the early stages. And so a lot of our capital as…

AI assessment note: “Fundraising's been incredibly challenging, yet I'm super excited about the success we've had.”

Q with today is when obviously VCs help in terms of hiring and winning talent. When assessing like CTOs, I find it fundamentally challenging not being an engineer myself. You mentioned your lack of experience in the domain specificity of space and supersonic travel. How do you analyze effectively the quality of roles where maybe you don't have the domain expertise? And I guess what advice would you give me, Blake?

A So I can tell you a story of how we hired the first couple people, because we had exactly that problem. I had spent a year self-educating, reading textbooks, taking airplane design classes, so I knew enough to be dangerous, but I didn't know everything myself. And so we had gotten to the point in In early 2015, where we had half a dozen candidates for the first couple jobs in the company, and what I did is I flew them all out to the Bay Area, where I was living at the time, and I convinced a friend at Sequoia Capital to loan us a conference room for a couple days, and we did a jam session with all of the candidates together in the room at the same time, and you might not know all the questions to ask yourself, and you might not know all of the answers, but if you get a group of smart people talking about your problem space together in a room, you can quickly tell who really knows what they're talking about, And also, who has the personality and ability to lead in a room that you really want to go get in the trenches with? And so out of that half a dozen people, we hired two and a third as a consultant to the company now. And just watching smart people interact with each other outside of your own domain, you can learn a ton. So that's, that's story number one.

AI assessment note: “watching smart people interact with each other outside of your own domain, you can learn a ton”

Q this incredible domain expertise, and you've seen it all before? Or is it better to come afresh and have that kind of useful naivety to address things in a fundamentally innovative and different way? How do you advise founders in terms of, especially your experience, kind of coming into boom without maybe the domain specificity that others have, in terms of whether to pursue something they know versus maybe don't?

A I think passion trumps expertise every time, and if you're smart and you're good at learning, you're going to be able to pick up a new domain relatively easily. I think people generally underestimate their ability to learn, and if you've got that excitement, you're going to be able to push through it, and there are benefits of being an outsider, because domains often are littered with conventional wisdom that's false. A supersonic flight was like this. Six years ago, when we were starting Boom, the conventional wisdom was no one would pay enough to be able to fly supersonic, that it would have to be really That the sonic boom was an insurmountable barrier that would take decades of R&D to solve. And it turns out that basically all of that is false. It doesn't stand up to even a brief amount of systematic quantitative analysis. And an outsider who doesn't come burdened with that preconceived conventional wisdom has a huge advantage in being able to tackle problems that other people are ignoring. We have a saying at boom, which is you have to be naive enough to start and wise enough to finish. So I think there's a huge benefit in going Into something that's not in your domain expertise, but then rapidly being able to burn down your naivete, understanding what assumptions you might be bringing that are false, and being able to get oriented rapidly in the new domain.

AI assessment note: “passion trumps expertise every time”

Q Who was the first check-in to Boom, and how did it come about?

A It was John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe. And this was in the relatively early days of Stripe before it was the massive success that it was today. John was a pilot. I met him through a friend and we went out to dinner or talking about what we were doing and why I thought it would work. And John is awesome. He said, well, I'll write you a check now if you can promise me that I'm the first one. And we said, of course, yes, let's do it. And he's been amazing to have involved. He is a brilliant operator, you know, comes out to boom from time to time and kind of helps Deep dive on things and coaches me. Amazing person to have involved.

AI assessment note: “It was John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe.”

Q with today is when obviously VCs help in terms of hiring and winning talent. When assessing like CTOs, I find it fundamentally challenging not being an engineer myself. You mentioned your lack of experience in the domain specificity of space and supersonic travel. How do you analyze effectively the quality of roles where maybe you don't have the domain expertise? And I guess what advice would you give me, Blake?

A So I can tell you a story of how we hired the first couple people, because we had exactly that problem. I had spent a year self-educating, reading textbooks, taking airplane design classes, so I knew enough to be dangerous, but I didn't know everything myself. And so we had gotten to the point in In early 2015, where we had half a dozen candidates for the first couple jobs in the company, and what I did is I flew them all out to the Bay Area, where I was living at the time, and I convinced a friend at Sequoia Capital to loan us a conference room for a couple days, and we did a jam session with all of the candidates together in the room at the same time, and you might not know all the questions to ask yourself, and you might not know all of the answers, but if you get a group of smart people talking about your problem space together in a room, you can quickly tell who really knows what they're talking about, And also, who has the personality and ability to lead in a room that you really want to go get in the trenches with? And so out of that half a dozen people, we hired two and a third as a consultant to the company now. And just watching smart people interact with each other outside of your own domain, you can learn a ton. So that's, that's story number one.

AI assessment note: “if you get a group of smart people talking about your problem space together”

Q Can I ask for you as a leader, how do you think about giving people enough accountability and freedom to really pursue those big things that they want to achieve, but also creating a culture where it's okay to fail and they're not fearful of failing with that pursuit that they've chosen?

A Well, we have something at Boom we call the blade in the nut, and this started from the earliest days of the company. It was about a five-person company. And I had bought an engine blade out of Concord on an online auction just for fun, and I brought it into the company, and it sort of became a trophy. When you did something really great, when you went above and beyond, you could have the blade, you know, we put it on your desk until someone else did something amazing, then it would move. And along the way, somebody else brought in a nut on a rope, and they're like, if the blade is for when you do something really awesome, the nut is for when you really screw up. And I thought, oh no, this is horrible. The last thing I want to do is build a culture where People are shamed for their failures. We want to build a culture where everyone can own the mistakes they inevitably make, where you're rewarded for surfacing problems quickly, and then getting together with your teammates to overcome the setbacks. And this amazing thing happened while I was trying to figure out how to get rid of the nut. What happened was people started taking the nut when they own mistakes. And so it became, you could be given the blade and you could take the nut. And so we have this culture here where you are rewarded for doing amazing above and beyond things, but you're also rewarded for owning your mistake…

AI assessment note: “we have this culture here where you are rewarded for... owning your mistakes”

Q What's your superpower and then weakness in company building? 30 seconds on each.

A My superpower is being a strong futurist, being able to see around corners and paint a picture of how better the world is going to be when we have supersonic flight. I'm really good at telling that story, inspiring people to want to go make it real. The flip side of that as a weakness is I run at problems that most people consider impossible, and sometimes that can make you unwise Going and tackling something that is actually impossible. So it's a challenge to know when are you asking people to push and go figure out something they're going to succeed at versus when you're actually asking for a bridge too far and you're pursuing something that won't actually work.

AI assessment note: “My superpower is being a strong futurist... The flip side of that as a weakness”

Q do want to dive a little bit more into the leadership, so to speak, of the team and for you. I guess, you know, first when we think about building the team itself, we have to acquire the incredible talent. You mentioned culture there and helping in terms of building culture and how VCs do that. What deliberate choices did you make to attract the best and brightest talent, Blake?

A So culture, you do have to be very deliberate about, and culture is bespoke. The culture at Apple is good at solving some kinds of problems. It's very different from the culture at Facebook or the culture at Google. And so when you're building a culture, you want to think about what are the attributes, Of a culture that are going to be necessary for succeeding at your goals. And for boom, we're working on something that is incredibly long time horizon that requires a great degree of perseverance through the inevitable ups and downs. And so we chose to optimize for mission passion as the fundamental tenet of our culture. And so we look for people who were as excited about supersonic flight as I am. We're incredibly committed to the mission of making the world more connected, making earth a smaller place. And that's a filter even on great technical talent. If you're not excited enough, we don't hire you because it's too hard, and if you're sane, you're gonna give up somewhere along the way. So that was first and foremost a filter. And second, we systematically searched the world for the best and the brightest, especially in the early days. I had no connection at all in aerospace. My best intro was a guy who had worked for me at Groupon, had played hockey in college, was someone who now worked at SpaceX. And so that was my first meeting. And I showed up to that meeting in an airpl…

AI assessment note: “we chose to optimize for mission passion as the fundamental tenet of our culture.”

Q Yeah, no, I totally agree. Sorry, the second, what was the second story?

A The second story is about interviewing, and for the first 50 or so hires, my favorite interview question was, teach me something. And so we were optimizing for people who not only knew deep technical things that mattered in aerospace, but were really great communicators. And that formed the foundation of a teaching culture and a learning culture. It also set me up for success because I would bring in people who were deep technical experts. We wanted to hire the ones who are not just good at doing what they do, but able to explain it to the team around them and teach people like myself. And so along the way, I learned a ton. And if you couldn't teach me something, you didn't get hired at Boom.

AI assessment note: “The second story is about interviewing, and for the first 50 or so hires”

Q Who was the first check-in to Boom, and how did it come about?

A It was John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe. And this was in the relatively early days of Stripe before it was the massive success that it was today. John was a pilot. I met him through a friend and we went out to dinner or talking about what we were doing and why I thought it would work. And John is awesome. He said, well, I'll write you a check now if you can promise me that I'm the first one. And we said, of course, yes, let's do it. And he's been amazing to have involved. He is a brilliant operator, you know, comes out to boom from time to time and kind of helps Deep dive on things and coaches me. Amazing person to have involved.

AI assessment note: “It was John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe.”

Q What's your superpower and then weakness in company building? 30 seconds on each.

A My superpower is being a strong futurist, being able to see around corners and paint a picture of how better the world is going to be when we have supersonic flight. I'm really good at telling that story, inspiring people to want to go make it real. The flip side of that as a weakness is I run at problems that most people consider impossible, and sometimes that can make you unwise Going and tackling something that is actually impossible. So it's a challenge to know when are you asking people to push and go figure out something they're going to succeed at versus when you're actually asking for a bridge too far and you're pursuing something that won't actually work.

AI assessment note: “My superpower is being a strong futurist... The flip side of that as a weakness”

Q I would, though, love to kick off today with a little on you. So talk to me. How did you make your way into the world of startups? And no offense, Blake, but it's very rare I have a company quite like Boom on the show. So how did you come to the idea of founding Boom and changing the way we think about travel and flight?

A Well, startups have been my blood for a long time. I started my first company in my parents' basement when I was about 15. That was a tiny internet service provider, so I've wanted to start things virtually my entire adult life, and my first company, Kima Labs, was a mobile e-commerce company that was acquired by Groupon, and I looked back at that experience, and one of my biggest learnings was that startups are hard. Even things that are theoretically in your wheelhouse are going to have challenging moments, and if you want to be successful, you have to think about your personal motivation and pick a mission that you will never, ever give up on, no matter how hard it is. So aviation has been something that's been in my blood for a long time. I've been flying for fun since I was in college, although I had a first career doing internet things and didn't really think about bringing aviation into my career until my mid twenties. And in 2007, I put a Google alert on supersonic jet because I wanted to be first to know when I could go buy a ticket and go Mach two. But for the better part of a decade, it was crickets. There's just no credible effort to build a supersonic aircraft that I could see myself or friends and family flying on and benefiting from. So after having left Groupon, I wanted to work on something more impactful than internet coupons, and I wanted to work on something…

AI assessment note: “organized all of my ideas by how happy I would personally be if it worked”

Q In terms of where they could improve, help me out. I'm a VC by day for my sins, Blake. What could we better as like an asset class in terms of providing service and structure to you?

A I think the biggest thing that stands out is being able to structure funds so that you can make longer time horizon investments. That's the biggest reason that fundraising for boom had been challenging is that timeline to exit as long, even if the multiples are going to be great. And that causes some funds to set on the sidelines. So lengthening funds and focusing on multiples and IRRs instead of just your timeline to exit it would be super helpful. And then I think there could be more venture and venture capital. The industry as a whole pattern matches very strongly on exactly what successes have existed previously. So for example, for today, it's really easy to raise money for a rocket company because SpaceX is a success, but that doesn't strongly translate over into aerospace as much as you would hope it would. I'd love to see longer time horizon investments. I'd love to see more venture, more willingness to try new concepts.

AI assessment note: “structure funds so that you can make longer time horizon investments”

Q Yeah, no, I totally agree. Sorry, the second, what was the second story?

A The second story is about interviewing, and for the first 50 or so hires, my favorite interview question was, teach me something. And so we were optimizing for people who not only knew deep technical things that mattered in aerospace, but were really great communicators. And that formed the foundation of a teaching culture and a learning culture. It also set me up for success because I would bring in people who were deep technical experts. We wanted to hire the ones who are not just good at doing what they do, but able to explain it to the team around them and teach people like myself. And so along the way, I learned a ton. And if you couldn't teach me something, you didn't get hired at Boom.

AI assessment note: “The second story is about interviewing, and for the first 50 or so hires”

Q the talent, both especially kind of talent at Position tougher than ever. Here's the leader. A big thing that I think about now is kind of psychology of leadership. How do you manage the psychology of being CEO? And I guess, how do you deal with the shit hit the fan moments that are inevitable, but also more inevitable when it's a much longer timeframe in terms of the opportunity?

A I don't think there's a silver bullet answer to that. First and foremost is you optimize for your own motivation. And I spoke about that earlier. If you've picked something that really, really matters to you personally, then you're going to keep going no matter how hard it gets. And when you have a longer time horizon, one of the things that actually helps Is you can anticipate that certain problems are going to come up at some point and be prepared for them. Again, if you know it's going to be 15 years when you're founding an IPO, the chance that there's a macroeconomic event sometime during the lifetime of the company is basically a hundred percent. And so you prepare for it, you make sure you always have more than a year of cash in the bank, and you have contingency plans for what would you do if the shit hit the fan. And that's something I've been preaching to the team for years now, and it feels very fortunate that we did that now with the coronavirus hitting, that we're able to say, great, well, good thing we planned for it Something happening at some point, and we're ready to weather the storm.

AI assessment note: “First and foremost is you optimize for your own motivation.”

Q I mean, I love that in terms of tying happiness to the idea itself. I do have to ask, you mentioned Groupon, you also spent time at Amazon. In terms of kind of Formative to how you think. Both incredible companies. How do you think that your time there impacted how you think about operating with Boom today?

A It was incredibly valuable to spend time at both companies because they are extensively have some similarities, but have some really deep cultural differences, and one of the best ways to learn is to experience contrast. Amazon, as we all know now, is an insanely well-run company, but when you work there, especially if it's your first job out of Like it was for me. It's like the sky is blue. You can't actually see the background. You just take everything in the culture for granted. But having seen the contrast, one of the things that pops most is the importance of building long range thinking into your culture and building a place where you optimize for the long term, not for the next quarter. And it was very interesting to watch how those two different companies would respond when there were short term trade off pressures. For example, if there was a supplier that was offering Short term discounts because they were having a soft quarter in order to get Amazon to stock up on a product. Like Amazon would take that deal if the long term cash flow forecast was positive. And so they would allow earnings to be lumpy in the short term in order to have long term good cash flows. And Groupon honestly was very much the opposite. If a quarter was coming in soft, the response was often to, hey, send more email. You know, we'll pump up the short term, but it's a little bit like eating your…

AI assessment note: “one of the best ways to learn is to experience contrast”

Q I mean, I love that in terms of tying happiness to the idea itself. I do have to ask, you mentioned Groupon, you also spent time at Amazon. In terms of kind of Formative to how you think. Both incredible companies. How do you think that your time there impacted how you think about operating with Boom today?

A It was incredibly valuable to spend time at both companies because they are extensively have some similarities, but have some really deep cultural differences, and one of the best ways to learn is to experience contrast. Amazon, as we all know now, is an insanely well-run company, but when you work there, especially if it's your first job out of Like it was for me. It's like the sky is blue. You can't actually see the background. You just take everything in the culture for granted. But having seen the contrast, one of the things that pops most is the importance of building long range thinking into your culture and building a place where you optimize for the long term, not for the next quarter. And it was very interesting to watch how those two different companies would respond when there were short term trade off pressures. For example, if there was a supplier that was offering Short term discounts because they were having a soft quarter in order to get Amazon to stock up on a product. Like Amazon would take that deal if the long term cash flow forecast was positive. And so they would allow earnings to be lumpy in the short term in order to have long term good cash flows. And Groupon honestly was very much the opposite. If a quarter was coming in soft, the response was often to, hey, send more email. You know, we'll pump up the short term, but it's a little bit like eating your…

AI assessment note: “one of the things that pops most is the importance of building long range thinking”

Q Can I ask, in terms of, like, the meetings that you had, you obviously don't always get the money, and people sometimes say no for whatever reason. Which individuals didn't invest, but did you really like and admire? And I guess, what did you like so much about those interactions?

A So, I can think of many amazing conversations. It was very typical that we would make it to the full partnership stage, and the fund would end up passing, although individual investors in that group would come in personally. I think of one full partnership we had where the conversation was super amazing and Incredibly engaged group. And then you get the call back after the meeting. And they said, well, at this fund, we score every deal one to 10 before we have a debrief discussion. And this really strange thing happened, which was you got only ones and tens and nothing in the middle. And the partnership can't figure out what to do with this deal. But amongst the 10 group were a couple of well-known investors, and they want to do the deal personally. So you should do that.

AI assessment note: “I think of one full partnership we had where the conversation was super amazing”

Q I do want to ask, because you mentioned kind of the learnings from those mistakes. I spoke to many of your investors before the show, and they said about your learnings as a leader and how you've really excelled in terms of scaling yourself. I'd love to hear, how do you see and how have you seen yourself change and evolve as a leader over the last few years, Blake?

A It's been a tremendous journey building a startup, but by the end of it, you're not the same person you were when you started. I think it's toughened me a lot. I've learned how to be a better operator, how to operate at the right altitude, how to be able to helicopter up to the biggest level, but also get down in the details, how to do trust, but verify and how to get really good at the things that are critical for success in this business. Like I can share a little bit of a story. When I started the company, I couldn't recruit at all. I couldn't sell. I probably couldn't sell you a dollar bill for I'm thinking about what would be the attributes of success for something like this to succeed, and we call it reverse historical reasoning. Like, imagine yourself in the future reading the history textbooks about how the world made the leap to supersonic flight, and how do you think that story is going to go? Well, it's not going to be after a hundred years of doing nothing, Boeing finally did it. It's probably going to be someone from outside the industry, and what would that leader and what would that team have to look like? Well, they have to have an incredibly long-range perspective. They have to be incredibly perseverant. They have to have a really high Talent Bar and build a dream team. They have to be incredibly persuasive because they don't have to go convince airlines and su…

AI assessment note: “I've learned how to be a better operator, how to operate at the right altitude”

Q I do want to ask, because you mentioned kind of the learnings from those mistakes. I spoke to many of your investors before the show, and they said about your learnings as a leader and how you've really excelled in terms of scaling yourself. I'd love to hear, how do you see and how have you seen yourself change and evolve as a leader over the last few years, Blake?

A It's been a tremendous journey building a startup, but by the end of it, you're not the same person you were when you started. I think it's toughened me a lot. I've learned how to be a better operator, how to operate at the right altitude, how to be able to helicopter up to the biggest level, but also get down in the details, how to do trust, but verify and how to get really good at the things that are critical for success in this business. Like I can share a little bit of a story. When I started the company, I couldn't recruit at all. I couldn't sell. I probably couldn't sell you a dollar bill for I'm thinking about what would be the attributes of success for something like this to succeed, and we call it reverse historical reasoning. Like, imagine yourself in the future reading the history textbooks about how the world made the leap to supersonic flight, and how do you think that story is going to go? Well, it's not going to be after a hundred years of doing nothing, Boeing finally did it. It's probably going to be someone from outside the industry, and what would that leader and what would that team have to look like? Well, they have to have an incredibly long-range perspective. They have to be incredibly perseverant. They have to have a really high Talent Bar and build a dream team. They have to be incredibly persuasive because they don't have to go convince airlines and su…

AI assessment note: “I've learned how to be a better operator, how to operate at the right altitude”

Q around the corner, see that change management is going to be a real problem in this enterprise company, and that we should really focus on investing in customer success up front six to nine months ahead. Given this is such a different proposition, a question from Josh Buckley, what do you find most helpful about your investors, and where do you think VCs, I guess, could do better and improve?

A So Boom substantively is very different from a software-as-a-service company or your typical Silicon Valley startup, but Company building is really the same, regardless of what you're doing. You have to build an executive team, you have to build a culture, and those things pattern match very well across sectors. And so being able to talk with investors about how you build a culture, about how you structure an executive team, how you prioritize short-term versus long-term, how to time a fundraise, all those kinds of things, our backers have been insanely helpful. And I feel really honored, like the quality of the people who are kind of watching Boom, who've invested in it, and will send me an email when they think we're making a mistake and give advice proactively. It's just Phenomenal.

AI assessment note: “our backers have been insanely helpful”

Q around the corner, see that change management is going to be a real problem in this enterprise company, and that we should really focus on investing in customer success up front six to nine months ahead. Given this is such a different proposition, a question from Josh Buckley, what do you find most helpful about your investors, and where do you think VCs, I guess, could do better and improve?

A So Boom substantively is very different from a software-as-a-service company or your typical Silicon Valley startup, but Company building is really the same, regardless of what you're doing. You have to build an executive team, you have to build a culture, and those things pattern match very well across sectors. And so being able to talk with investors about how you build a culture, about how you structure an executive team, how you prioritize short-term versus long-term, how to time a fundraise, all those kinds of things, our backers have been insanely helpful. And I feel really honored, like the quality of the people who are kind of watching Boom, who've invested in it, and will send me an email when they think we're making a mistake and give advice proactively. It's just Phenomenal.

AI assessment note: “being able to talk with investors about how you build a culture”