This Week in Startups - Boom: Supersonic speeds for everyday travel with Blake Scholl | E2006

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://www.vanta.com/twist Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website! Go to https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. TWiST listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist * Todays show: Boom Supersonic’s Blake Scholl joins Jason to discuss the future of supersonic flight (1:18), Boom's vision and test flights (9:25), the evolution of hardware startups (22:29), the future of autonomous aviation (1:17:06), and much more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Boom Supersonic’s Blake Scholl joins Jason (1:18) Commercial flight speed & Concorde history (8:34) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (9:25) Boom's XB-1 test flights and airline partnerships (15:04) Pricing, market comparison, and venture capital's view on hardware startups (21:16) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (22:29) Evolution of startup market and hardware innovation (29:03) Boeing's innovation decline and attracting talent to projects (36:15) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist (37:42) Working with tech legends and overcoming engine design challenges (49:14) Cross-discipline innovation (57:01) Learning from Air France 447 and cockpit safety design (1:03:36) Cockpit technologies and the MH370 mystery (1:11:30) Public perception of aviation risks and airport security impact (1:17:06) The future of autonomous aviation * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Blake: X: https://x.com/bscholl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakescholl Check out: https://boomsupersonic.com / https://x.com/boomaero * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (8:34) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (21:16) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (36:15) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

If you look at aviation, you know, the early days weren't so safe. But every accident got a root cause review. And the industry at least used to be really good at learning from these things. Every time I read something that's like, well, we shouldn't have self-driving cars until we can prove they're perfectly safe. I'm like, no, no, no, you're actually killing the on-ramp. You're killing the on-ramp to safety. And, you know, we have to allow things to come to market so long as they're better. And then we can make them perfect over time.

This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

And Open Phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week. And startups, very excited to have our guest on again today for the second time. his name is Blake Shoal. He is the CEO

and founder of Boom Supersonic and they are making supersonic planes. He was last on this week and startups back on episode 638. It's been a minute. And as you know, we in this amazing technological

miracle of an existence have seen so much change in the past 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. One thing that's gone in the wrong direction is the speed of flight. Things have gotten slower. And the dream of supersonic flight, which I as a kid was enamored with because we had

something called the Concord that left out of JFK, not too far from my home at Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And you could get to London in a very short period of time. Welcome back to the program. Blake. When was the last Concord flight? Is that in the 90s or late 80s? It was the early 2000s, actually 2003. It shut down.

I was 22 years old. Never got to fly on it. Yeah, I never got to fly on it as well. But I knew people who did and I would regularly in New York meet people. So they were flying them as late as 2003 and there were one or two accidents, I think, tragically. And it also maybe was too expensive. Why did the Concord program fail? Why did nobody ever replicate it?

Well, there are many layers to that onion. There was one accident, which actually for a 1960s airplane design, one accident in 30 years of flying is actually a good safety record. So I don't think that was the real story. Go one level deeper, it was economics. This was an airplane with 100 not very comfortable seats. they cost $20,000 a ticket. And you just can't fill 100 seats to $20,000 a pop,

especially not with 80s, 90s kind of travel demand. And if you go a layer deeper than that, it's actually a story about product market fit because that doesn't make any sense as a product. That price point, that experience doesn't go to a scalable market. If you go a layer deeper than that, it's really about the birth and death of entrepreneurship in an industry. where for the first 50 years of aviation, from the Wright brothers forward, founders were in charge of their companies.

We had a very entrepreneurial-driven model of innovation in aerospace. What happened in the 60s is all the founders retired from the industry, and we shifted from commercially driven product development to national prestige driver. So Concord was not a startup. It wasn't even an established company. It was two governments. The French government, the British government got together. they basically handcuffed themselves together and said, we're going to build a supersonic jet to beat the Russians, and we're not going to think too hard about the economics.

And of course, the phrase perfect fit had not been invented yet. And so they went off and did something that was technically marvelous, but commercially made no sense. And that's really crazy to think of that it was a government-sponsored

program. Beating the Russians was one dynamic in it, but was there some economic or pride to doing this? Well, so it was established via treaty in 1962. And so this is the height of the Cold War. And the thing that I think helps to kind of hold in context is we had the first world, it was the West.

And we had the second world that was the communist world. And the first and second worlds were fighting over the third world. And the mindset that we were in geopolitically was that what we had to do was impress the third world. and that would like impact which countries would align with Soviet Russia and which would align with the West. And so this is very much the same motivation for why we did Apollo. You know, we went to the moon, not because it made any sense to go to the moon, at least not in the way we did it. But we wanted to, we wanted to show that American rocket technology was better than Russia rocket technology.

Yeah. And so, yeah, and for people who don't know, when you fly a supersonic, plane, it creates a boom, the name of your startup, boom, I guess as a as a hat tip to that. And this is why it only flew from the east coast of New York to those European cities. So there was also this geography that played a bit of a role, yes? He's sort of. I mean, I think it's half true and it's half mythology. So any time a supersonic plane fly a supersonautil. it creates a sound called a sonic boom, which if you do it really close to the ground,

it can be pretty obnoxious. But if you do it up at altitude, it's more like this sound of a thunder. And you can fly a supersonic airplane without making a sonic boom just by flying it a little bit slower. So the way we were doing our overture airliner is we're about 20% faster overland, right under the sound barrier.

So there's no question of like, is a sonic boom too loud or not? And there's still a speed up relative to a billionaire airbus. Then we got out of open ocean where no one's there to hear the boom, push the throttles forward, and we go fully two times faster. So it makes sense to focus on the roots that are more trans-oceanic because that's where you get the bigger speed-ups.

But that, you know, people remember Concord, New York to London, because it was the only one that had anywhere close to the economic legs to make it work. You know, we're going to be able to do Miami, in Seattle to Tokyo and L.A. to Sydney, and there are over 600 routes around the planet where this is going to have a big speed up and make economic sense as well.

You know, it's very weird. Everybody knows the typical routes. Like, I think it was Washington, D.C. and New York to Paris and London, obviously. It makes total sense. They also went to Barbados, which was bizarre, like Paris to Barbados four hours, which is incredible because that would normally be

eight or nine hours to the Caribbean. any indication of why they did that? Or did you even know that? Yeah, no, I do that. They did that. They did Bahrain. British Airways had one that would take to Singapore. I think with a stop in Bahrain,

it was kind of a neat concept. The airplane, if you looked up from one side, was British Airways delivery. Looked up from the other side, it was Singapore Airlines. So it was literally one logo on one side, the other logo on the other side. But yeah, they tried it.

a bunch of places, but just you fundamentally, you know, everybody wants faster flight so long as it's affordable and it's safe. The problem was that it wasn't affordable and it wasn't comfortable. And then that one accident didn't happen until it was about time to shut it down anyway. But you know, it left for this kind of hangover, like, is there a safety question? Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC2. What is SOC2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC2 compliant.

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we'll turn 10 on paper in a few weeks. In a few weeks, I had that idea, so it was a good idea to have you on here to talk about this 10-year journey. obviously a lot of this was just getting people to believe that it was even possible. You were able to raise some money for this. And recently you had a test flight, I understand, of one of the prototypes.

So take us through where you're at today. The question everybody wants to know is when can I get in one of these? Are they going to be for billionaires? Are they going to be, you know, as part of the United Fleet or JetBlue? And how much is it going to cost? So take us through where you're at today. and how many more years it will be before we're in one of these?

Well, I'll just start with the bottom line up front. The ultimate goal is to enable virtually anybody to be able to fly Supersonic. And the first airplane called an overture is basically all premium class. And so if you can fly business class today, you're going to be able to fly twice as fast on an overture. And so that's about a quarter of what it costs on Concord.

So I think Concord about a $20,000 ticket in order for it to make any money. It just didn't work really. No legs there. Is that 20 per leg or it's a 40 round trip? Per round trip. Okay.

So you think you can do it for five? I do five. It would be very profitable at five. You know, so just take one example, New York, London, with 80% of the seats full, which is a little bit less than what airlines usually get today. And the break-even fare will actually be $3,500 round-trip.

And so any dollar above $3,500, the airlines are making money. and I think what we'll find is especially in the early years there aren't yet enough of these flying, the market clearing fares are going to be pretty high. Stratosphoric, I guess, would be the phrase to use. And it's going to be a flying meant for the airlines. But with over to one, as supply catches up with demand,

the cost is going to come down. I think $5,000 is probably a good number to kind of hold in mind for what a typical ticket could be. Of course, it's not that different from what people pay in business class today. And that's actually Business class in the summer to Europe is more like 10 to 15,000 Pretty standard

So when? When, when, when? Five years. Five years. Five years. Five years for first passenger flight. And to give you sense of where we're at. Yeah.

So we had our first test flight in March with our second test flight two weeks ago. And that's on what we call the XB1, which is near one third the size of overture. So I think you have a picture of that if we want to show it. Yeah, let's show the test flight.

So this is really the manifestation of how many years in the laboratory? How many years in the laboratory is this? I mean, you know, we spent a lot of time kind of just figuring the company out. Like on day one, it was really just me. And we didn't start building the airplane for quite a while after that. We had to get the resources together. It actually turned out it was critical to get orders before we started building in order to be able to obtain financing.

That makes sense. So the last two, three years have just been enormous acceleration. So we, so XB1, so that's what you're looking at there. It's the scale of a fighter jet, but this has got all the airliner technology on it. It's got a carbon fiber composite fuselage. It's got an augmented reality vision system for landing. It's got software optimized aerodynamics. And the most shocking thing is that we didn't actually invent anything to build that airplane.

all we did is bring technologies together that were technologies have been invented over the last 50 years since Concold was designed that allow us to get past a tipping point on efficiency so that we can get to product market fit. And so that airplane's about 66 feet long. It's got about a 20-foot wingspan. And overture is about three times bigger. It's about 200 feet long. actually even proportionally bigger wingspan, about 100 foot wingspan. And on board,

it's all premium class. So I think business class, maybe some first class, 64 seats. And we actually just opened the factory where we're going to build this in North Carolina. And so we are, we're getting going.

And yeah, the goal's didn't ready for you and I to fly on it in five years. Now that has a United logo on it. Is that customer zero? United? Yeah. So we actually,

Japan Airlines was first to pre-order. Okay. Then United was the first to make an order with a non-refundable deposit, which that was a real big deal. And then American Airlines also made an order with a deposit. So we've got about 130 announced orders and pre-orders between United America and Japan Airlines. And to put that in context, basically what that means is the first five years of production of booked. Like there was a line out the door for airlines. wanting Super Sonic Jets,

it's just our job to go deliver them. And these are going to cost $200 million, something in that range? Yeah, it's $200 million a copy. And that's one of the interesting things with the business is, like surprising things. One, we don't need to deal with a Sonic Boom in order to have a business model here. Number two, we don't actually have to invent anything fundamentally new.

It's just engineering with technology that already exists. the yeah and then and then you know number three you know all we have to do is take the small scale design and scale it scale it up so if we were to compare this in terms of price I mean the highest end of the private jet market tops out with the like global 700 or something 7075 million dollars it's kind of like as good as it gets in private in terms of speed and height and that stuff and then you start looking at like the Boeing line up, the 737s, those go for a buck 50-ish, buck 25, am I correct?

That market has very obscure pricing. The real price is usually about half of the advertised price. And so, yeah, yeah, so a 737 goes for approximately half a list price. Same thing true with all these aircraft. And the reason is that it's a commodity market. For every product in Boeing's catalog, there's an Airbus product, which is a near-identical clone. So the 737 and the A320, as an airplane nerd, I know which one I'm on. I can tell even what engine it is.

But for 99% of passengers, they have no idea. And unless they're worried about the airplane coming apart, they don't even care. And then from an airline perspective, you know, so the A320 kind of equals a 737. A 787 kind of equals an A350, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you're saying those $120 million planes actually get sold for 60 or 70? Yep. It's a stupid question. Why don't private buyers buy some of those?

Is it the maintenance or it's just obscenely large and you can't land them at most airports and the maintenance? It's the size in the airport compatibility. You know, part of the idea of flying private is that you're able to get in closer to your final destination. And so there are all these, you know, a lot of people that like commercial don't realize this. The country is covered in small airports and a small airplane can get in and out of a small airport. And then that saves the hassle, the big commercial terminal, and it probably gets you close your destination. And so you can get a whole 737 for your own use. And Boeing sells that it's called a BBJ, Boeing Business Jet.

Yes, I've been on a couple of those. Yeah. A couple friends who have those. They're ridiculous. They don't suck. Let's just call it that. But yeah, it's crazy. The one I was on was set up with, I would say, six or seven, like, individual cabins, maybe eight.

even. It was crazy and like each one had multiple seating areas. So it was quite a lot of airplane. A lot of airplane. And those range you said yours is how many feet long? About 200 feet long, tip to tail. Got it. Got it. So it's even longer

it's longer than the 320 or something like that, right? Yeah, just by a little bit. It's probably about 20, 30 feet longer than the longest A320 series are plane. So it's almost exactly the same length as a triple setter.

To put that in context. But it's much skinnier. And so actually can kind of see it behind me. So I'm standing in our passenger experience lab. And one of the things we can talk about is that whole aspect of it. But what you're looking at is kind of a full scale of mock-up

tip to tail of the passenger cabin. Of course there's cockpit in front of it and there's baggage and, you know, mechanically put up behind it and that all adds up to the 200 feet. So that the passenger cabin is is less than less than 200 feet and it's also

it's also a bit skinnier and this will be closer to you know what's the configuration one seat on each side like that was how the Concord was one on each side or was it two on each side

Concord was was two and two the whole way through and we've talked about having one and what it's actually one of things that makes over to more efficient than Concord is we've shaped the fuselage

different so it's actually if we could pull that United Render back up you could see in the in the front of the airplane, it's actually a bit fatter. And as you go back,

it gets skinnier. And you'll notice that the windows actually stop. The last passenger row is actually ahead of the engines. That's an important safety feature. But the airplane's bigger in the front, and it's skinnier in the back. And in the back, it's a one plus one.

And the front, we've talked about it could be a two plus two. And so the back could have seating. But as you go back, narrows. So nobody is, nobody doesn't have a window and nobody's above the engine or? That's, that's right. So in the back is, the back is really nice actually. So it's one seat on each side of the aisle. So you don't have to choose windows seat or aisle. And everybody gets both. And when you say the back, you kind of mean the middle of the plane, right? Like the middle of

the airplane, but the back of the passenger cabin. So you know, if you look at the last, you like seven windows there. Yes. Those are the last seven rows of seats. Got it. So these are all business class seats. And so it will feel like a large private jet or a small commercial jet. I'm not sure what the width of a commercial jet is. I'm trying to think of the ones that have two and two. Right. So by the way, we haven't revealed the final design.

And I think when people, so we've said it's two plus two. It may or may not actually be two plus two. Sure. There's something, well, there's something I can't talk about yet. Oh, okay. I hope you can hear it in my voice. I'm really excited about it. Are you going to stack people on top of each other?

I saw like some crazy Japanese airline had done that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But, you know, there, I mean, if you have cabins or you do what Jet Blumentas, where they do the 212, there are some really interesting things you can do in terms of maximizing space. So I'm sure you've got some ideas there. One of our philosophies is that you really want designers that think like engineers and engineers the things like designers. And so we've put a lot of energy into building that into the product of all my culture.

And we've got something really magical that we'll show up probably next year. And when people see it, they'll be like, there's no way you got that in a small skinny airplane. It just couldn't be. Because the first time I saw it, that was my reaction. I thought there's just no way. So that's what you in that customer experience behind you is what you're working on. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. We'll have you back next year to Dave. view that here on this week in startups. I don't care if you're building enterprise SaaS, a verticalized AI startup, or the next great consumer app. No matter what you are cooking up, you have to have a brilliant website. It's the first thing that people see or read from your startup and it has to be beautiful. You've got to make a great first impression. People do judge a book by its cover. It's that simple. That's why we have that expression. But since you're building a company, you're strapped for time. You know that. And wouldn't it be nice to have some world-class help?

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or, you know, anything in that software realm has changed radically since, you know, I think since Uber, Airbnb and SpaceX and Tesla. I think when you saw those four cohort, that cohort, those four, they really operated in the real world in a way that I remember watching them. They were received very poorly by venture capitalists at first and then very significantly. You know, that's changed dramatically. Now you got Parker doing Andrew. You've got all kinds of space products. You know, people are not afraid to do large-scale big tech products, whether it's bombs or drones or, in your case, planes. So tell me about, you know, you straddle that market. You've been around for 10 years, so SpaceX existed, Uber existed, but they were kind of upstarts,

and then you struggled a bit to get people to believe in this. So take us with that journey. Yeah, I think if we pull the camera back even like one click further from that, it's the period where we weren't doing hardware startups. It's really the anomaly. It's, it's, you know, if you look backwards to the early 1900s, from the Wright brothers forward, so the Wrights first flew in 1903, of course, they were bicycle entrepreneurs. That was a startup. And by the way, one with no credibility that they should have been able to go vent the airplane, but yet they did it.

And then from the Wright brothers through about 1921 was sort of a golden age of aviation. And there's a lot of companies that got created then, the ones that we all know the names up now. So not just right, but also Douglas and Lockhe and Boeing all got created. But the last one was 1921. And by the way, if you go look at automotive industry, you see the same pattern. There was a golden age of automotive. And then there was this long period of no entrepreneurship. And in aviation, the founders all retired in the 1960s.

and in fact, the introduction of the last mainstream speed up in flight when we went from props to jets coincides with the retirement of founders. So the first jetliner was the De Havelin Common. The first successful one came from Boeing, but the actual first one that really kicked off the jet aid with the Dehavelin comet, created by Dehavelin while he was still running the company. And then what kind of happened is the people who had worked with the founders took a and so and then we end up in this kind of there's innovation happening but um

much more from an optimization kind of perspective you know so the 707 which is bowing's first jetliner put it right next to the 787 which is their latest unless you're an airplane nerd it's hard to tell the difference um it's a long skinny tube with some wings and the engines hanging under the wings looks kind of the same and by the way it flies basically the same speed uh and then the even worse thing happened which was that the people who are respected and learn from the founders left, and then the bean counters took it. And then that really wrecked aviation.

That just wrecked commercial aviation. I wish that were just purely metaphorical, but at Boeing's literal. So let's pause it for a second. I think it's like a good thing to double click on since we went down this sort of history lesson, which is super fascinating, because these companies,

people forget how old Boeing is as a company. You know, these were an Arabos. These were created in the 20s and 30s, correct? No, no, before then. The last one was Douglas in 1921, and Boeing was 1910s. Oh, wow. Incredible. So these things are incredibly old and is really interesting to see who winds up running them.

They are being run now. You said being counters, but they're being run to lower the cost of aviation. And that reminds me in some ways of the Uber story, because the goal was, how do you get this in the of more people. It reminds me of the Android story or the PC story, you know, Dell computers, etc. How do we have these devices become incredibly affordable or services, you know, Uber Black, SUV, X, then even pool, and then eventually self-driving might be cheaper. We'll see. It might be more expensive. And then you have this counter trend, which is luxury comes back or performance or elite services. And I guess the comment about luxury is,

like luxury begins. I think Trump said the famous quote is luxury begins where necessity ends. So that's different luxury because that would be more like iPhones versus Android phones. But really, they just tried to make each mile and the maintenance of these planes cheaper and cheaper to the point at which Boeing was so, the being counters and accountants there tried to put through that goddamn MCAT system. in order to not have to train people. So take me through the state of like how deranged these people are behaving. I think there are two things that we're conflating here that are really important to tease apart. Because there is a totally valid journey of bringing the cost to travel down.

Whether we're talking a car, you can send them from your phone or an airplane. They'll take you other side of the planet. It makes sense to bring the cost to that down because what that means is more people can go more places more often. And that will absolutely be part of our journey at Boom. we're starting with, you know, 70% less expensive than Concord, still business class, still not for everybody,

but, you know, I want to get to the point where, um, it's, you know, it's never as a never a cattle car experience, but,

but it's, it's the, where the cost has come down enough that people, people will travel around the planet, just the same way they would call on Uber today. Um, and, you know,

like, imagine that future where flights are faster. And the cost is, the cost is a point where you don't think about it too hard. And, and therefore you can, you know, the way you'd imprompt you'd,

get around your city, you prompt you go around the planet. Like, that's a very, very exciting future. And so that's one trend. And, you know, Boeing for a while was part of that trend of bringing the cost down. And I think that's all valid and appropriate as part of reaching a larger, larger market, which is entrepreneurs we should do. And then there's the other piece of it, which I think is pathological, which is a very short-term focus on financial results.

And the best metaphor I have for this is, so let me. give you a little of a Boeing company history that will contextualize it. So through about the 1990s, Boeing was really good at developing new aircraft. So they did it pretty quickly, they did it pretty efficiently, and you could trust the airplane would come out with me safe. But they would invest a lot of money. They'd invest a few billion to develop an airplane, and then they'd ship it, and then they'd sell a lot and make for money back. And that continued through about 2004, when I think the last good CEO at Boeing left. And then they had a new guy come in, who said the most insane thing. He said, we're not going to do any more moonshots.

And of course, it's ironic because, like, this is the company used to be literally in the moonshot business. Like, literally, it wasn't a metaphor. Literally. Literally. I can't believe people say these things. But the, so then they said, all we're going to do is tweak the products we already got. And we're going to, and the motivation for this was optimization of basically like next quarter

financial results. And so a lot of Jack Louch acolytes kind of took over at Bowen. If you trace the histories of the individuals, involved, they traced back to the Jackalchacolites. And Jack, Jack's thing was, you know, he wasn't one to beat the street by a nickel every quarter. And you can do that for a little while.

But it's like, it's like flying an airplane were only looking straight down. And, uh, it's so it'll be good for a little while, but pretty soon you're not going to be happy with where you're at. And that's, you know,

so Boeing, bowing tried to tweak the 737 and they, you know, did a bunch of unnatural things. The MCAS, uh, which is that's the system that was responsible for those crashes. That's one example.

But you're doing it now with the triple seven. It's a big disaster. You know, they have not, we should pause on this because I think, you know, the people who are listening today are all builders, entrepreneurs,

and like it's so normal that we make new things. Boeing has not launched an all new product for 20 years. Right. They're just trying to make the existing ones more price competitive in a really rabid market where, as you said, the list price and the actual price varies by double or 50% because you have a situation where it's too competitive

and it's just a race to the bottom and all margin has been taken out? Yeah, well, it's a duopoly. And so between Boeing and Airbus, and so nobody moves unless the other one moves. And so the margins get compressed and the world of margin compression because there's like a product differentiation,

then it really creates, incentive. Well, when we build a product, we want to keep it production for like decades, and we want to not reinvest because without the margin, you know, it's harder to adjust it by the payback. But it's this, it's just kind of this death spiral where all the innovation drops up. If you drop the innovation out, it kind of kicks off the rest of this death spiral. It's okay, now there's no differentiation. Lack of differentiation drives lack of margin. Lack of margin drives lack of desire to invest in innovation. It just goes around in a bad way. This is something you and I know natively, but might not be obvious from the outside,

which is it's not compelling to work in a company like that for top performers. Like, if you go to Facebook, you know, the people working on trying to make the incremental click on a Google ad or a Facebook ad, you know, if they were that good, they would be working at Boom or Andrel or SpaceX or XAI or ChatGBT, which is what happens. Really supremely talented people are drawn to the project, all things being equal, which is why some companies will give fantastical amounts of RSUs and stock basecom

because they know, gosh, this person could work at Boom or XAI or wherever, or they could work on the ad network. I mean, that sounds like death to us, right? Ryan? Like, yeah, I mean, I've very ironically, earlier in my career, I worked in building auto-big advertisement to the Amazon, but the, but back when that was new and exciting, and, you know, and it's not, it's not now. And so that center of gravity of innovation swings around, within an industry, it swings between companies, but I think, I think it also swings between industries. And, you know, the, if you look at people who were the big innovators,

I think it's interesting to look back at what was going on when they were kids and what inspired them. And, you know, so, you know, in the late 1960s, we lost our way as far as how to develop new products. We did Concord and Apollo. Actually, both were 1969. And both are regarded in this big technical breakthroughs. I think both were actually disasters. I think, you know, can't go back to the moon, can't fly supersonic. Like, it literally killed progress. But what it did still do was inspire people to go into aerospace. And then we got into this moment where, like, nothing in aerospace was even exciting. And so, you know, people of my generation, uh, I, you know, I've loved airplanes since I was a kid. It never occurred to me to go have a career in. And I spent my first 15 years

in tech, because that's where new stuff was getting, though. Yeah. I mean, the internet, you know, was so inspiring and dial up even before that in the 80s into the 90s. The idea that you connect with anybody on the planet was like kind of mind-blowing. Like, it was kind of trippy. And it, it did capture everybody's imagination for a very long period of time. And then you get to a certain point where we are today and you're like, yeah, everybody's online and it's a mess and there's great things and there's, you know, misinformation and hate and rage and doom scrolling. So you kind of see the full cycle. And then it's nice that people are kind of coming back to looking at projects and saying,

well, what does this do for humanity and how exciting and thrilling is it? It's not very exciting or thrilling in many cases. And if you're doing things for just the money, which is what, in a way, Boeing was doing, when you're doing something for just money, at some point you get the money, and then all of a sudden, you lose motivation, you know? Yeah.

And you have to then say, well, am I actually into this? I see this inventor all the time. You have somebody like Paul Graham or myself or, you know, some other folks who are really into startups because we're passionate about entrepreneurship, whatever.

And you make some money, and then I watched all my contemporaries who made money retire. they were like yeah I hit Uber I hit Airbnb I hit Angelist I hit this I hit that and they're like I'm going to go meditate I'm going to go do things that are more important to me so then you realize like okay they were into it to an extent but they were mercenary in another way which is when the money came in they stopped being investors and then you have people like Vinode or like Michael Moritz and Doug Leone who are supposed to be retired but I go to Sequoia and I see them running around doing stuff so or Bill Gurley's supposed to be retired and all he's doing is talking to me about startups and he's doing all kinds of he's still on boards and stuff like that

so I do find that super interesting like... Yeah, it is interesting because by the way, Paul Graham and Mike Moritz are both significant investors and boom and both actually pretty involved. If you use multiple devices and apps to run your business, you need open phone.

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but one example. And we love having a shared number for customers. customer support as well. We do a little round robin where different people can pick up the one phone number. So customers have one number, but we can have that phone call go to multiple people on the team. So we, you know, can just have somebody pick up the phone quicker. It's that simple. Answering the phone quickly is a best practice and it makes people love your product or service. Open phone is already super affordable at just $13 a month. My lord, that's affordable. But twist listeners can get an extra 20% off for any plan. The first six months, that's incredibly generous. Just head over to openphone.com slash twist. And what if you have an existing number with another service that you hate? Well, Open Phone will port them over at no extra cost, easy, easy, lemon squeezy. So head over to openphone.com slash twist and get a free trial and get 20% off. What's it like to work with Michael Moritz? Because, you know, we have right now a lot of the investment class, whether it's Winode or Michael Moritz or Mark and Treasonin Horowitz fighting over Trump versus not Trump and never Trump's. Put all that politics aside, what is the nature of Michael Moritz as a partner? I'm really grateful to have him involved, and he's, he's, he's, he's, I've always experienced him as, and Paul Graham is the same way. Like, like, the, they show up more when things are hard than when things are used, and, uh, and, uh, and you know, both of them, you know, there are other

folks that are on this list for me as well, uh, where, um, yeah, when, when, when it's going well, we don't hear from them. And when there's some hard problem to solve, I get on the phone with them and we work on it. And, you know, and one of the things I will love, I love about both of them, is they tell me what I need to hear,

even when it's not pleasant to hear. Candidness, right. It's a, hallmark. I think actually what you're experiencing, is this your first startup, by the way, I never asked you.

No, it's like, I don't know, it's my first significant one, my first venture back, my first venture back? No. So, you had a venture one back for that?

Kind of, anyway, like a big baby startup. Like in high school, I started an ISP in my parents' basement. But that never was. I tried to raise an angel around from my parents. I never succeeded in that. But we got to be ramen profitable. And then I sold it when I went to college.

And then my first, what you really think of as a startup was in 2010, which was an iPhone e-commerce company. Oh, cool. Which we sold a group on. So that was the first thing that was what you would really think. You got a singular double out of it. It is, but it also was incredibly motivating for me because what we made, and I feel a little embarrassed to say this,

we made a barcode scanning game. Oh, wow. If you make a list of like the most important thing in the world down to like the least important, like barcode scanning games, that's like a new low. What was the output of barcode scanning? Understanding all the prices and skews and where they existed in the world?

Yeah, that's, that's, that's, where we wanted to go with it. But it had a great idea, actually. It had like a force. The idea was it would have a four square like game dynamic. It would cause people to put in content. And then you could go scan a barcode and like price compare. And, you know, that was sort of the notion of it.

Until you got kicked out of Walmart for doing it. Yeah. And well, mostly like I would get up in the morning and it was really hard because there's no such thing as an easy startup. They're all hard. And I would get up in the morning and I think, why am I doing this? Yes. And so, And so when we had a chance to sell it to Groupon, like, I was so excited to tap out.

Because it just wasn't worth the, like, pain. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze, as we say. The juice was not worth the squeeze. What you're experiencing, by the way, with Michael Moritz in that instance or Paul Graham, is not that they show up when, this is my, I suspect. It's not that they show up when there's hard problems. It's that when there's hard problems, you go to them. and they find out about the hard problems.

And when things are going well, they know enough to let you cook. And this was a big lesson for me. And I got to work with Michael Moritz and Ruloff. And I got to meet Paul Graham in the very, very, yeah, first couple of classes. And I think in the earlier part of investors' careers, they want to be involved in everything. And it's exciting to be a part of the winning stuff. And then what you realize is, hey, when you get product market fit, you have market pull. And, you know, you hit that magical moment where you're united.

is putting in orders and then, oh, they'll put a deposit down. Oh, they'll check the box and initial the box that says non-refundable. You know, when you start getting those things done, you don't want to mess with the magic. Now it's like the band is in the studio and the tracks are laying down. Now, if the band is fighting and somebody's not showing up and, you know, there's a fist fight over the console and people can't get the lyrics. Yeah, that's when the producer and the manager got to get in there. say, hey, I noticed we haven't laid a track. Should we maybe do a cover song here and get back into the groove?

And I think that was one of the major lessons for me as an investor is knowing when you can be of service and you can truly be helpful and knowing when you're just noise. And I remember with Uber in those early days, there was a couple of investors who when it was taking off were super like, I don't want to say taking credit for it, but like doing a lot of press hits about it, et cetera. and then when you go back to that time period and you see me doing press hits, which sometimes you get either asked to do

or you volunteer to do them, I jumped in when Travis was getting destroyed when there was some controversy over variable pricing and surge pricing. I thought, you know what? Use me when nobody else will say yes to go on CNBC and you can find these hits where I'm saying like, listen,

all companies have crucible moments, things are hard. And, you know, that's kind of what makes the entrepreneur. So let's let these entrepreneurs keep growing. It's an amazing service and go like butt, bud, bud, but. And I'm like, yeah, you know, I've seen this before, trust me. But it is a, it is important to stay the heck out of the way when things are cooking. And then when things are hard, yeah, that's when you're like, show up on a Saturday or

Sunday with the founder and say, let's go for a hike and let's have a real deep discussion about this. How are we going to solve this? What's the most challenging moment you had? Did you have any moments of like running out of money, complete death? This thing's going to get unplug? I mean, we've had all of those. My expectation at this point is we have one major crisis every year.

And, you know, maybe the, maybe the one that's kind of most fun to tell a story about is this was just two years ago, almost exactly now, where we, we sort of famously been dating with Rolls-Royce for them to build an engine for our airplane. and we had long story short we had decided that ultimately that was not the smart decision

that it didn't make sense for us to put all of our eggs in the basket of a 100-year-old British company that was sometimes on some days not even sure even wanted to stay in the jet engine business and so we said

just like SpaceX we're to build our own engines and you know that was that was a project that we now started on and we were you know spinning it up and incubating it and we'd had a conversation

with roles privately, you know, where we thank them for the partnership. And we said, look, we're going to do this a little bit differently because we're not getting there together. And let's find a face-saving way to hug each other and say goodbye when we're ready to go say exactly what we're doing. And we just smiled at shakans. And in the meantime, we were in the process of incubating what became our symphony engine. And then American Airlines placed an order. It was our largest order yet.

And then there was this freak out because I think we had been this, you know, sort of, you know, this cute thing that maybe wasn't super credible. You know, in United Orders, maybe that's an anomaly. Maybe they did it for PR. The United Ordered and American Ordered. Like, you know, once you're lucky, twice, there's something interested in there. Yeah. And it's always where people, yeah. But you're making the own engine now.

We are. And the crazy thing was the idea that we would ever not do that, by the way. But what happened is, so rolls ran to the press and broke up with us. And so we went from being, you know, this darling thing that everyone was so excited about. So, like, they've got no engine. There is, you know, none of the engine companies are going to work with them. And this whole thing is just a glider. And, like, so, you know, overnight, my ability to fundraise dropped to zero.

Overnight, my ability to get new customers dropped to zero. overnight, you know, it just like, it completely blew up on us. And, you know, we were, we were well into the process, but we didn't want to talk about it half baked with doing our own engine. And so there was this, I think it was from August or September through to December when we said, okay, we're ready to talk about what we're doing and how we're doing it, that there was this like big stink over the company. And, you know, and then we had to go rebuild all the industry confidence

because the way we went through that, you know, it created such a negative stink that, you know, the suppliers wanted to work with us were like, you know, but you have no engine. And so, you know, it took us probably another 18 months to just kind of get all that momentum back. And that's like basically a second startup inside your existing startup, like making the engine yourself sounds to me like it's technically more complex

than making the plane, am I correct? I don't think so. Like it's, it's, um, yeah, probably, it's probably 50-50. Oh, okay. But the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, this would work if we weren't doing it that way. Not just, not just because, not just because, I mean, so, can you imagine SpaceX if, if Elon went to aerojet rocketine for engines?

Yeah. Like, like, can I get Merlins? It's like, how many do you want all of them? Right. No, you would take them, it would take them five years to decide whether they wanted to, to do it, let alone to go invent and move with their speed. And so, and with a supersonic airplane, there's even stronger coupling because the, um, the way the engine and the airplane worked together has to be really, really tightly matched. And so if you've got a company boundary between, you know,

between the airplane company and the rate of iteration is, is very low. And, and if what ends up happening is the product isn't nearly as good, you know, so, you know, we were talking earlier about the breakthrough passenger experience that I can't share the detail yet. That is actually enabled by us doing our own engine. That makes no sense, but okay. It makes no sense. Let me explain why.

To get the passenger experience we really wanted, we had to change the tube of the airplane a little bit. Got it. Okay. So that makes sense. And it set us backwards on range. And we said, wow, okay, well, we want the airplane to be able to fly as far as we need it to fly, but we also want to have this thing that passengers were going to love.

like how do we do both and that we found the missing efficiency by more closely matching the airplane engine and there was a moment this is actually pretty recent it would just cross the like yes we can do all this technically and I was in the

I review the airplane engine together a couple times a week and we were in one of our Friday reviews and the head of arrow and the head of propulsion were like making out with each other in the meeting and they're just like look we have both been at engine companies before. We've both been at airplane companies before. We've never been able to

work together like this. And we just found 500 miles of range that we needed for the airplane to be able to do its mission. And we would never have found it any other way. Well, this is, you know, one of the great skills of great entrepreneurs, but also of just contributors inside of entrepreneurial organizations is cross-discipline. And, you know, if you are somebody like Joe Jebbya, you know, and the co-founders, you know, Brian at Airbnb, they have, like, they went to RISD. They got a lot of design skill. You start thinking about Airbnb. Every time you go to an Airbnb, you're like, this place is designed really beautifully.

Well, that's because they looked at it and they would see the pictures of an, you know, an Airbnb. I'm like, this is not beautiful. And then they take better pictures. I'm like, oh, these pictures are better, but this is still not beautiful. And it's like, you know, it would be nice. if there was like a coffee set up in the Airbnb that was stunningly beautiful.

Now when I rent an Airbnb and I love Airbnb's and my family, I prefer them to hotels and I can afford to do either. You know, I noticed they all use very beautiful coffee station.

So something happened where, and then beautiful outdoor seating areas and then like a foosball table or a ping pong table. Like there's something happening in that design panache and that patina,

you know, that you see on the website that then translates to the experience and he really has thought about that in a way that's, you know, not possible if you were just a business person trying to optimize a marketplace for the take rate

or the supply side. You know, these are kind of intangibles and there's a ton of stories about this as well with Tesla where, you know, they were using Mercedes drive train. So on my model S, which I just took, which was the first one, it has a Mercedes

shifter and drive train. Um, what after the drive train? I think it's the, you know, the steering wheel, all that kind of stuff. And so when I first like had to teach a nanny how to drive it to take the kids to school or whatever, pick them up, I was like, it's just like the Mercedes. we had a Mercedes next door and it's the same exact thing, except you don't hear noise. But over time, he started, I remember when he started, when I started touring the gigafactory with him and he would be like, this is where we're going to make this.

And this is where we're making that. And by the way, here's what we're making with the HVACs. Now, you'd be like, why would you possibly waste time on the HVAC system, Elon? It's like, what do you think the number two after moving the car use of the battery is? It's not the display. Those LEDs don't use a lot of energy. It's the HVAC system. And so the fact, and that's when you see, I've ever seen this guy who takes cars apart,

Sandy B'N-Roe when he took apart the Y, it's an incredible video. He loses his mind when he sees the HVAC system. of how innovative it is. And those are things that you would never think, like, okay, the HVAC's going to unlock 30 miles or whatever. It might have unlocked more than 30 miles. I don't know, 10%, 20%,

so you could either increase the price of the car and the weight by putting more batteries in or wait for physics and innovation to change batteries or you fix the HVAC system. Pretty dope. Right. Yeah, it is. It's so dope.

Actually, I'm glad you brought that up because it also, the technological arc of development at Tesla and at SpaceX, and at Boom, actually have some really interesting commonalities that somebody should write a book about this one day because I think it actually will become the playbook for how you do a hardware startup. And if you look at SpaceX or Tesla today,

they've earned the reputation as somebody who reinvents every piece of it. Because they have, but if you look back, that's actually not where it started. The original Tesla Roadster was a Lotus and Leaves Body with a cell phone battery.

And the original Falcon 1, it didn't land. It didn't even try to land. And it was small and it never carried a payload. And so they didn't actually invent anything new on the roadstreet. They didn't actually invent anything new on the Falcon 1. Well, the battery and the engine was probably a bit. Well, no, they used cell phone batteries.

I take it back. They had a motor, but it wasn't built out of like unobtainium. You know, it was, it was, The thing that was, you know, if you want to say there's one miracle, the one miracle is a startup could do it. You know, that is the miracle. Well, think about it too. The roadster, I remember, I remember taking a plane ride with Elon where he was essentially, I don't want to say losing his mind, but he was perplexed because they had just told him that the $150,000 roads that I bought number 16 was going to cost $190,000 to deliver. And they said, well, why didn't we charge

$2,000? He's trying to figure out, like, how these idiots were like, who had been running the company shortly before he, you know, took over with founder authority and was like, wait a sin. And that doesn't make any sense. And man, they just were not doing that grinding

of every single component. If you are making every component, well, think about the games. If you wanted to make something 100% more effective or efficient, well, there's probably not, nothing that you can change that will make it 100% efficient.

But there are certainly 25 things you could make 4% efficient in the next year or two. Yeah. That's exactly right. You know, but I think this goes back a little bit to what's surprising to people about boom. I don't know if you want to throw up the picture of the XP1 flying again. Oh, yeah. Um,

the, uh, but there is nothing that we invented on that airplane. Like, okay, it's got a carbon fiber composite fuse wash. Guess what? Boeing did that in the 70s.

You know, we just made it the right shape. Um, oh, there's, there's engine. You know, ours are pretty efficient, but that's the same basic architecture for an engine intake that was done on Concord in 1960s. There's an augmented reality vision system for landing, so we don't need that group knows that Concord needed.

Well, and this was, but guess what? Gulfstream put something not all that different on the G650 for people to land on the clouds. And so, you know, so the, you know, there is going to be an over at XP2 and there's going to be an overture 2. and these things are going to have a lot of new technology. Hey, with that augmented reality, angled, you're looking up? You're actually looking down. So if you look at a pilot there,

so the reason Concord had that brute nose was two things. One is for a supersonic airplane wants to be long and skinny, big, pointy nose. And the other thing is with that triangular kind of delta wing, or take off and landing for that to generate lift, the nose needs to be pretty high. So you come into land like this.

And if it's a 19-sand, 60s, the pilot can't see the runway. So they had to move the nose. Yeah, that's what I'm sort of getting at is like you're, you just don't have the ability to see the runway. So game over. Because the nose is in the way. Well, so today we've got this amazing thing called a camera, right?

You put a couple of those up front. We put a couple of those up front. And they're about the wingspan of a bird apart from each other. So no, no, no single bird can take out both cameras. And then there's a little, the pilot's a little toggle where they turn on the, the, the pilot screen basically flipped over from a normal instrument to an algorithm reality rule and just look at the screen and you land the run away on the airplane on the screen. The greatest, my point, I'll keep on you.

Tell your money. But my point was like, we're cobbling these things together, but none of them are actually new. And I think that's, I think that pragmatism, it is a, in the initial part of hardware, there's a really important lesson to learn if you're doing a hardware startup. Like these, these complex integrated hardware startups like Tesla, like SpaceX, like boom. the first places they're starting, they're actually integration of things that are proven where all they're doing is bringing the integration together.

And then because they want to have a sexy brand and they actually do want to go and get new stuff, pretty quickly they get to the state they're in today where you've got Starship and you've got the Octovalve on the Model 3 and you've got the steer by wire on the cyber truck and all there's all this stuff. But then people forget where it started and that it has to start with that pragmatism.

Yeah. And you then earn the ability with your investors, with capital, with timelines to say, you know what, we're going to do this project. It's the unibody project. You know, we're going to just stamp like that's like a moonshot kind of ish project or we're going to land this thing or we're going to make it much bigger. You know, you start earning the right to do all that. Yeah. I have a stupid question, you know, at the front of all of these supersonic planes, you know, is like a stick, an antenna, like a little tip on top of the tip.

What is that for? So that's on a, it's been a picture back up to people that see what we're talking about. So that that's an artifact of it being a test airplane. What is that for? Yeah, so that it's, that it's an air probe. And it's something called a Pito tube. Oh, yeah, of course, Pito tubes do airspeed, right? And stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah, they measure what's called RAM air pressure, which is the force of the air coming at the airplane. And basically, if you compare the RAM air pressure to the ambival pressure, the difference tells you what the speed is. And so if you look at the nose of XP1, we've got a P or two at the end of it. And then we've also got what are called alpha and beta veins, which basically measure the nose angle relative to the uncoming airflow. So as the nose up or down, is it left or right? And the reason on a test airplane's way out in front of the airplane is we don't yet have

calibration data to put it near into the airplane. We put it right next to the airplane before we're 100% certain what that airflow pattern really is. it could be wrong. And so you put the sensors way out in front of the airplane where they're going to be in clean air and therefore be more accurate. But once you've got calibration data

and you're in production, you get rid of the nose boom and it looks like everyone. But all planes have those, I think, right? Because there was that flight, there was an Air France flight from South America where these young pilots didn't understand the air speed of the plane because I think the Pito tubes, or one of them,

had frozen or something. It was, or was giving a wrong. Yeah. Do you remember that one? Oh, yeah, that was Air France 447, was from Rio to DeGall.

And yeah, what happened was, actually, this is a lesson in cockpit design. Yes. Because they had, the rapid altitude, and the Pito tube,

which did the airspeed sensor, Iisto, and so all of a sudden, the airbus, there were certain kind of automated protection features in the cockpit that would work only

if it knew airspeed. And so the moment the airspeed data went away, it stopped having that protection. And then the two pilots, so they both had joysticks. And they're going to think of them as like your joystick on your, you know, on a home flight sim or on your Xbox or whatever. And so if you and I are flying an airplane together and you're on your stick and I'm on my stick, they can both move independently. So one of the pilots freaked out and hold all the way back on the stick. And the You can try and get elevation. You want to get altitude. Yeah, but we all know what happens when you do that.

That's right. So then the other pilot was doing the rational thing, which is a little bit of forward pressure. So, okay, they're not physically coupled. And what does the aeroplass cockpit do when you're pulling all the way back on my stick and you're pushing? I don't know. Split the difference? Split the difference. It's the most insane thing.

It's the worst decision. It flies the average. So the average of catastrophically back and a little bit. but forward is still catastrophically back. And so they just stole the airplane all the way

the nose is going up. The lift goes away and it just drops and the pilot wakes up the captain comes out who knows how to fly an airplane because these guys don't obviously know what they're

or one of them didn't know what he was doing you know and he kills all the passengers and he's like no the nose. They had and by the time

they hit the ocean the ice had all melted off and they had a perfectly fine airplane. And the uh, But there's a lesson in pilot trading there, which the industry is really taken to heart. But there's also a lesson in cockpit design. And so when we revealed our cockpit about six weeks ago, like Airbus, we've got these side sticks, but they're forced feedback side sticks.

So that if you and I are, the Airbus thing had this alarm that would go off and say dual input. But by the way, when you're in a crisis, there are a thousand alarms going off. And you miss the one's doing like a Christmas tree. Right. So we did it in a mortgage, the connection with the pilot and it's, it's the connection with the pilot and Until we can do autonomy, which I think is going to be ways off for airplanes. Until we do economy, the tangible connection, the visceral connection with airplane and pilot really matters. And so if you and I are flying the airplane together, that we can feel each other on the stick.

And an overturing from the autopilot on, it acts like a third pilot, and it moves the stick. And so you can feel the autopilot forces. If you did take over from the autopilot, you're literally reaching your hand to the word that, the autopilot's flying and you're taking over from that exact position. So there's this great, like, tangible, uh, visceral sensory awareness of what's going on with the airplane. So if they had that on the airbus, they never would have had that accident. Oh, do we have a picture of your new cockpit design?

Let's pull that up if we have that. I think we have a video of it. I really love this. This is like going from a Blackberry to an iPhone. Like we got everything on this airplane you can control through software. Yeah. So it's glass avionics. With the exception of that section in the middle where you,

you have the thrust, right? That needs to be more visceral tactile. Is that right? That's, that's right. Well, there's, um, we basically said, everything needs to be software control. Some things also you want to have a physical control. And then we only added the minimum of physical control where it was important for that visceral feel. And, you know, for normal flying, there's also, we also think about emergency situations. Like, if there's a smoke in the cockpit and you can't see, there's certain things you need to be able to do just by feel. Oh, wow. I never thought about that yeah, if you have smoke, you got to feel around to, you know, change the flaps maybe or change the air speed, right? Those are important. So if you look at the details of the cockpit

design, the really critical controls all have a physically different shape. So you put your hand on it, you know what it is. Like the landing gear controller there is, it looks like a wheel. And you touch it. You don't have your hand on anything other than the landing gear controller. Yeah. And the flap controller feels different. It literally looks like the landing gear. It looks like the landing gear. It you put your hand on it, it feels like the landing gear. So if you, and this is really, you know,

this is really important in emergencies. Because what happens in an emergency is that the pilots get saturated. They're, like they get overwhelmed, and then, so if you're using only the communication channel of the screen or an audio alert, you have a very narrow bandwidth ability to get put more information to the pilot. So you have to make use of the,

of the, uh, touch. And, and that, you know, like, oh,

this can't be what I should have my hand on. It feels. lot. Right. Let me ask you some stupid questions here, since we're diving into the pilot experience. We'll have automation. Obviously, that's super important. But why are planes? You know, we had MH370 disappear. I'm really into this kind of stuff. Like, once you go down the YouTube rabbit hole, I watch this guy called Blanco Lirio. Do you ever watch the Blanco Lirio channel? I don't know that one. Okay. Blanco Lirio. YouTube channel and I give this guy

five bucks a month on Patreon only because I think he ultimately will make people safer so there's a channel here and you can see he just takes every crash

and he breaks it down he takes all the data he'll do like the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash the day it happens three months later three weeks later three months later

six months later a year later it's incredible for education. And you have 370 disappears, right? And we have this, the greatest aviation mystery. I'm curious what you think happened. I have my own thoughts. I think it was intentional. But that's me.

The thing that comes up is, why are these given Starlink, given that we're all on the internet, why aren't these remote controllable from the ground? Obviously, hacking is a piece of that. Or why aren't people in the control towers or at boom or at

United not able to pull up the cockpit, a virtual cockpit, and watch the pilots in this Air France situation and say, hey, we're watching Air France. Do you guys have peto tubes that are frozen? What are you doing? You're both pulling the stick the wrong way. And when is that coming? That's coming on overture. Okay. So I think I just made an announcement. We haven't talked about that before. Okay. But yeah, so Overture will have basically a remote tech support feature where pilots on the ground can get into a flight sim and it will mirror exactly what somebody in the sky is seen in real time. Now, they can't control it. You know, and that's kind of a hardware of lockout because you go down that rabbit hole and now there's a security question.

Yeah, now you have Al-Qaeda trying to hack into it and take a plane down. That's right. But it's the airplane equivalent of, uh, We call tech support, and you can screen share with tech support. And the airplane equivalent of that is you press a button, and there are two factory-trained test pilots that can see and feel exactly what you're seeing and feeling and help you through it. And so that's, I think, and if you pull that in your back and say, why has no one done that

before? It's the lack of innovation. Right. Back to our original discussion. Back to the original discussion. The last time Boeing did an all-new airplane was 2004. now satellite Wi-Fi hadn't really been invented yet. Right.

Right. And there's your answer. Right. Because it's an overture. This blows my mind to say that in the year 2024, overture is the first airline designed in a world where internet connectivity is a standard assumption. Like if you look at every other airplane out there, they've got the satellite humpback on that.

They're pinging to a satellite every minute. And like we're, we are. we are worried, we are literally going to the bottom of the ocean trying to find a flight recorder to figure out what happened. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's great to have flight record.

It's great to be flight record. But all that should be real time and it should be built in. Like literally the satcom on today's airplanes is a bolt on. And you can tell it's a bolt on because it's got a hump. What about pilots and having cameras in there to monitor the pilots in the cockpit? This is a controversial union issue, I understand. But you do have situations. situations with pilots. Sadly, you know, it's one in, I don't know, a million or something. Some pilot shows up drunk. We had one who showed up on mushrooms and tried to hit some, you know, shut the engines down. I mean, there's some crazy stuff that's occurred. You have the Egyptian pilot who ran the plane into a mountain and committed suicide by commercial airline. These are very rare things that occur, but it would seem to me that on a human factors basis and studying pilots having the video of the pilots in the,

box or being streamed when that plane went down, you know, from MH70 or the 447, whatever it is, would be invaluable. It sure would be. And also, by the way, I think you're right that it was intentional. And the strongest evidence from that, from my perspective, is that there was a bunch of equipment that was turned off. And so they would have turned the cameras off, you know, the first thing. So if they were allowed to, there could be a lot. a camera that's not allowed to be turned. So you think

MH370 was intentional to? I mean, certain no. On a probability basis, on a probability basis, it seems to be the only thing that's consistent with the facts from, you know, from my YouTube study of that.

But if you think about it on an, if you, if you'd think about it on who would want to do a cover up here. If you had a pilot who suffering from depression or whatever mental illness and who did this intentionally

and you knew about it and you would cover it up, right? And it would be very confusing to the rest of the world and I think that's Hannah what happened here. The reason this is such a mystery and feels so weird to me, I think into the rest of the world is there's some amount of data

it feels like the Malaysian government just didn't give to people. That's me saying it. I know you have to work with people, but I think there's some conspiracy going on here where they're like, let's not investigate it too much. That I see a little bit differently. I'm not aware of what data they could have shared that they didn't share.

You know, this is not like, you go back and look at the, boy, we're not a conspiracy theory chat here. Now, if you look at the origin of COVID, there's a lot of data that the Wuhan or Chinese government had that wasn't public. And I'm not aware of any analog on that on MH370. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm just thinking like,

they seem, you know, to not have done the most thorough job. That's my kind of, I feel like they slow walked it in a way. So they might have. So there's a, so you have a favorite YouTube teared out of this. My favorite YouTube teard out of this is from a channel called Mentor Pilot,

M-E-N-T-O-U-R pilot. And he does these awesome accident tear-downs that go all the way down to the, the cockpit design, but he's got a really good one on MH370, including there's new data that did not exist when it first happened. This is a whole new way of tracking what happened to that airplane that they've been able to do in the 10 years that elapsed,

that suggests a place where it might be that no one has looked. Oh, wow. Is that the deepest location? Because they said in his simulator he had flown a sim to like one of the deepest cliffs in locations. and so if he was intentionally trying to ditch in that area to make it unrecoverable, it wasn't a Mariana trench,

but it was like similar to like the depth. And then when they found the wings and stuff like that, they said, these wings are indicative of a controlled landing in water because they didn't shatter. So you're like, wait a second. It's, yeah, so crazy. I would love to see us go look at a place we haven't looked for

it seems you can find that airplane, find the black box, and then we're going to know what happened. It's that it extraordinary how safe it all is. It is. Actually, there's this weird paradox of safety in aviation work, but literally the most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport. Not by a little bit, by a lot. It's great we've been able to accomplish that.

It creates this sort of paradoxical situation where if something even like a little bit bad happens on an airplane, it's news, versus in automotive, in automotive, we have the equivalent of a 737 crashing every 48 hours and everybody dies. That's just the U.S. Auto fatalities in the U.S. And if you reported on it, you couldn't report on anything else

as you just take over all the news. And this is what kills me on the pushback people have about wanting driver automation to be perfect before we can roll it out. It's like, no, I would take a half automation because it would still be better than the carnage than we have on roadways today that nobody talks about. 30,000 deaths, about 100 a day,

and it hasn't gotten better, meaningfully, which is super interesting because you have Uber and Lyft and options for drinking and driving, yet you still have it, and it seems from the statistics that you still have a ton of drinking and driving, but we have this addition of distracted driving, and if you told me, I'm with you, you know, every single car has to have level two,

adaptive cruise control, and stay in the lane. Oh, and automatic braking, which I guess would be three. I don't know if automatic braking, emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control are considered the same thing. But I kind of are, right? Stop if you're going to hit something or, you know,

adapt to the speed. It'd be very interesting if everybody was forced to have those on. Yeah, I think there's something interesting there. And it's also how you manage safety over time. So if you look at aviation, you know, the early days weren't so safe. But, you know, every accident got a root cause review. And the industry,

aside, at least used to be really good at learning from these things. And the safety bars come up and come up and come up and come up and come up and the expectations come up. And, you know, I think that like on-ramp is actually really valuable. And we, you know, every time I read something that's like, well, we shouldn't have self-driving cars until we can prove they're perfectly safe. I'm like, no, no, no, you're actually killing the on-ramp. You're killing the on-ramp to safety. And, you know, we have to allow things to come to market so long as they're better. And then we can make them perfect over time. Yeah. Availability, the, I just looked it up while we're talking. Availability heuristic is the cognitive bias where people overestimate the likelihood of a bad thing happening based on some recent event in psychology, you might call it, catastrophizing where you'd think about the worst thing. But our minds remember these things. And there are famous cases where in New York City, a child was abducted in Manhattan and that everybody stopped letting their kids walk to school in Manhattan in Brooklyn when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s because rightfully, every parent was like, I

I don't want my kid kid kidnapped. And I was like, this doesn't happen that often. And the ritual of being able to walk yourself to school at 9, 10, 11, 12 years old is what turns you into an adult. And then the damage that caused to independence in kids in different generations would probably be greater than the occasional kidnapping and murder of a child as horrible as that is, which speaks to like what you have to deal with with, I don't know, suicidal pilots. or al-Qaeda taking over an airplane. These are edge cases. I think it's exactly the same situation where we can trade a visible but small risk or an invisible but actually much larger risk. And so that's exactly what happened after 9-11.

Airport security went way up. And it's hard to measure what the real impact of that would be. But I suspect that airport security has killed more people than that. the terrorist did. And the way it did that is to at the margins nudge people from flying to drive. There's some tipping point on how long does it take and how convenient is it? And at some point putting a bit more friction at the airport pushes passengers at the margin out of the airplanes and into cars. You can see it on routes like New York, Boston. You used to have a lot more shuttle service than they do now. The air shuttles, a bunch of air shuttles, the friction killed a bunch of air shuttles.

Yeah, I used to take the Boston one all the time And it would go from This Marine Terminal I forgot the name of it But it was that Laguar It was the Marine Terminal LaGuardia Yeah Yeah, exactly

And you would go there It was the greatest experience ever You could walk up It was every hour You didn't book a flight It was like taking the subway You walked up You would go

In my day You went up to a counter You gave the woman your credit card You bought it And then shortly thereafter You had a kiosk And there was like very little security, it was just you go through and you get on and you could show up

five, ten, fifteen minutes before the flight and still get on because what you would do is you would queue up at the gate. Imagine how revolutionary would be. If you could go from L.A. to San Francisco on Southwest and it left on the hour and you got there, if you got there an hour before, you definitely got a seat. If you got there 15 minutes before, maybe you got a seat. But if no big, you get a cup of coffee and you go on the next one, you're first on the next one. Right.

Right. We need to bring that back. and I think that's actually a harder problem with Super Sonic Play because the safety protocols can often be one-way doors even when they're not really effective. Like, I'll tell you a fun story. When I first got married, flew from San Francisco to Seattle, got married on would-be Island,

then flew through Heathrow and onward to Italy for my honeymoon. And we're like somewhere in Venice, and my now-ex wife is like, honey, can you get the like, blah, blah, blah out of my purse and fishing through a purse. And I find a box cutter, which is the literal weapon used in 9-11. It's gone through airport security in SFO and in C-TAC and in Heathrow. And not found. And so the, by the way, if there's a bottle of water, we're really good at finding that.

And so the, like, it's not, whatever has made our planes safer since 9-11. And I think they actually are safer since 9-11. It's not the airport security. No. I mean, yeah. And then we probably, you think about those doors, right? We reinforce every door so you can't kick in the door. Like, that's a great innovation, right?

It is. I think two things have actually mattered. The doors one, and there's a second one. And it's social. Hold on. Let me see if I guess it. Oh, see something. Say something.

People are super aware. It's obvious. That's right. That's right. And in fact, in fact, that learning happens. quickly it happened on the day of 9-11. The passengers learned that they that they should fight back.

Right. And that's why the fourth flight didn't make it into the right house. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, that learning happened in a few hours. And so those two things have actually made a safer, but now we've got this airport security theater and like nobody knows how to get rid of it or simplify it.

Yeah. Amazing. What is the, what's the, since we're wrapping up here, what's the path to autonomy in airplanes? Because we do have many things. Like, I bought one of these latest DGI drones.

I was shocked you're allowed to fly this in Manhattan. And like my friend's flying his drone. He's teaching me how to do it. And you just hit a button, return. And this thing's, you know, 10 blocks away, whatever. It's out of visual sight. He just presses return and it returns and lands in this little tiny park. We were sitting in Manhattan.

Well, I think it's going to start in counterintuitive places. It's definitely not going to start with over time. like this is not what we're doing here. But the, I think the place where it will start is, um, with, with the small kind of vertical take off of landing airplanes that are

developed now where they've only got four. Yeah, like the jobies and archers. They've only got four or five seats on them. And when one of those seats is taken by somebody you have to pay. Yeah. Versus somebody who's paying to be there. Economically, it's a huge difference.

And so like if you want air taxis to work economically, like one, we're just like doing fine enough pilots for us. things. Yeah. So it's not a job's problem. It's like, we can't find a point of flying a quadcopter like that. These things know exactly where they're going. They have very short

missions. It's a very constrained environment. You're only going up to, I don't know what they fly, 5, 10,000 feet. They're just zipping from Manhattan to JFK or, you know, across the bay and from Oakland to San Francisco. I mean, this is going to be very short missions. And

those things are already, doing massive calculations in terms of the rotors and if they do get knocked off balances load balancing them, it's kind of baked in to what they do, right? Yeah, I think it's, I think it'll start there and I think for commercial airplanes,

it's going to be really, really, really a long time. And, you know, and the reason is because we've made that, one, when there are a couple hundred people on the airplane, their two pilots, economically, it's not that significant. So there's just nobody with a strong financial incentive to go change this up.

On one hand, on the other hand, the platform has gotten to a near perfect level of safety. And the question becomes, you know, is there a way to actually move forward on safety with autonomy? And it's really hard to do that, given how nearly perfect the safety barters today. And you look at things like, you know,

Solly landed in the Hudson. You know, maybe I'm going to date myself quickly here. But I think it could be a long time before we have an AI that's going to say, I'm going to land in the Hudson. I'm going to, I'm with you on that. Yeah, like I, the edge cases is always the hardest part, which is why today, when a airplane is at whatever, 34,000 or 40,000 feet, it's on autopilot.

When it lands in a storm, it's on autopilot, right? If it's in fog, it's on autopilot in almost all cases. And like, when do pilots actually fly a commercial airline, I wonder, but to your point, why wouldn't you have the two? if it's perfect, why would you take on that complexity? And it's already, what percentage of commercial flights are on autopilot, do you think? Every flight uses it at least once. And, you know, what percentage of the time is the autopilot act? I mean, it's on the entire cruise.

And the longer the flight, the greater the percentage that is. So it's, you know, I don't know the numbers. It's got to be in the 90s. Got to be in the 90s, right. Yeah. That's amazing. But then it turns out that there are those edge cases where you're going to be really, glad there's a pilot there.

Like when those tubes freeze over, pretty good to have a pilot. Yeah. Pretty good to have a pilot. Now, there's a different way to solve that problem. I watch like every accident tear-down video I can find. And then we try to learn what's the root cause and how do we fix it three different ways, which they can never happen in overture.

And so we were talking earlier about the active force feedback side sticks. That solves Air France 4047 one way. Another way to solve it is something called synthetic airspeed, which is even if the airspeed tube freezes over, you can use GPS and recent wind data to come up with a pretty good estimate. You can also use inertial navigation. There's a lot of ways you can synthesize an airspeed.

So if the tube freezes over, it's not a, you know, all the automation still works. And the last thing is you make the automation not need a lot of sensors. And so, you know, on overture, I don't think if you look at the Airbus cockpets, that flight controls have many different modes they can be in their normal mode, there's alternate mode one,

there's alternate mode two, and it keeps going. There's a long list, and you spend almost all your time in normal mode, and if something goes, happens, and all of a sudden, your alternate mode, the pilots may not even remember what that really does and how it's different. And so a thing that we put a big focus into is not having a bunch of modes. Like, the overture has two modes.

Normal mode and reversionary mode. And reversionary mode depends on very, very little for it to work. You know, it's really interesting. I was talking to my friend Skydaten, who was the original investor in Jobby, and he was giving me the statistic. Like, we haven't had a commercial death in the United States, knock on wood. Got some wood over here. Since 2009, and I was just looking as we were talking at the last couple of fatalities, tragically. And when you look at them, like, it's unbelievable, like, college and air.

I'm not getting on any airline called Calganair. Calganair? Sorry to college in. Calganair. That was in Buffalo. It's one of these regional airlines. College and Air is really good for your skin now. College and James Fair for your skin.

Homair. Flight 5191 in 2006. Again, one of those regional things. I don't fly regional airlines as a rule. No American Eagle for me. Yeah, I won't fly that. You know why? I looked it up because I'm like you.

I watch these things. If you eliminated the regional airline and recreational pilots, I mean, you've just accounted for the overwhelming majority of accidents are small planes with recreational pilots. I will not get in one of those. I have friends who have little serious,

they got this thing, that thing, yep, no thanks. You got two gray hair pilots in the front or preferably one salt air, salt and pepper, one younger, I kind of like that combo. I never go in with one pilot, always two, never a regional airline and never a small plane. You take those out.

You've just eliminated, it's like eliminating getting in a car with a drunk driver or an old car with mechanical problems or a speeder where a distracted driver. I've been in a car where an Uber driver will start using their phone

and I'll say, excuse me, I'm sorry, I have anxiety when you're using your phone. Can you please not use your phone? I'm still going to give you five stars. It's me.

I'm just getting very anxious. Oh, no problem, sir, no problem. It's a great way to handle it. That's the way I handle it on. Always put it on me. That's the best way to handle with service. You have a problem.

Maybe you can help me. You know, it's like a Jedi thing. Listen, you're fascinating. Congratulations. We put you in the Twist 500. It's our top 500 private market companies. That doesn't mean anything right now because I just started it.

But I'm indexing the top 500 private companies based on Alex Wilhelm and I is the co-host now formerly of TechCrunch. And we're building this twist500.com. So everybody can go check that out. Welcome to the 500. Continued success. We're rooting for you.

We cannot wait, cannot wait to get to, you know, for me, it's to get in L.A. and go to Japan. I don't know if you can make that one, but Hawaii and Japan is my dream. It is. Well, I've got to tell you the story about that, then we'll let you're let you're out. But today, as you know, if you're leaving West Coast and you're going to Japan, let's say you've got a Monday morning morning, you've got to leave midday Saturday.

You get there on a day Sunday. You go to a hotel room. Try to sleep in the hotel. Next morning, your alarm goes off. You're going to try not sleep in the meeting. And then you come home, and the whole thing takes at least three calendar days. and you're messed up from the jet lag the rest of the week.

And Supersonics doesn't just save you time. It saves you two whole calendar days. Instead of leaving Saturday night, you sleep at home. Sunday morning, the flight from West Coast to Tokyo is about six and a half hours of Supersonic. What that means is

an 8 a.m. departure, say from San Francisco, gets to Tokyo six and a half hours later. It's now 8.30 a.m. Monday morning in Tokyo. And so, But to you, it's just Sunday afternoon. So we're awake, they're awake. Right to the meeting and go to the meeting.

Go to bed early. Come home if you want. You can do the whole thing in 24 hours. And so that's the magic of this. It's not just about hours, it's like days. Amazing. Listen, we love what you're doing, continued success. And we will see you all next time on this week in startups.

Bye-bye.