I want to start by saying Houston,

we have a problem.

In 1969,

we landed on the moon for the first time

and the same year we flew Concord, the

faster than the speed of sound airliner.

The future was supposed to be faster and

better. where we're supposed to look

forward to innovation in air and in

space. And yet, half a century later, we

can't go to the moon and we can't fly

faster than the speed of sound. And not

only have we lost the ability to go

fast, we've lost the ability to do

things even at any kind of reasonable

speed. This was the Wall Street Journal

just a couple weeks ago. It now takes

Lockheed more than two years to build a

new Patriot missile interceptor.

This is crazy. This is no way to build

the future and this is no way to win a

war. If we look back at history, this is

the Boeing 707. This is the airliner

that brought us into the jet age. But if

we fast forward half a century, this is

the 787, their latest airliner, which by

the way was launched more than 20 years

ago. You can't spot the difference. It

doesn't fly any faster. It doesn't make

the world any more accessible.

Prior to boom, the closest the America

ever got to a supersonic airliner was a

mockup.

But I guess it's all okay because

flying's really great, right?

But for me personally, there is nothing

so moving as flying. Think about that

experience of going down the runway, of

gathering speed, rushing to hundreds of

miles per hour, then climbing into the

sky, having this thing that we call a

bird's eye view, but it really is a

human's eye view in nearperfect safety.

Being able to look down at the beauty of

the natural world, as well as the beauty

of everything that humanity has created.

We get to ride aboard the wings of

Newton and the Wright brothers while

taking in the creations of Edison and

Rockefeller.

Yet flying, which would should be one of

the most inspiring experiences we could

ever do, we've turned into something

that most people dread.

But if we look back in history, it

wasn't always this way. Those first

jetliners truly did double the speed of

what had come before them. And was they

doubled the speed of air travel, the

most important changes were on the

ground. Hawaii was simply not a tourist

destination before the speed of the jet.

It was the ability to get from the US to

Honolulu in seven, eight, nine hours

that turned uh Hawaii into a mainstream

tourist destination.

Shoes.

There's a connection even between air

travel and the shoes we wear. Phil

Knight, the founder of Nike, started the

company in the 1960s on a chance trip to

Japan when he fell in love with Japanese

style running shoes. And Nike got their

start importing Japanese running shoes

to America.

or music. Long before Spotify or

Napster, music started to become global.

The Beatles took the First World Tour in

the late 1960s, a tour that simply would

not have been practical 10 years earlier

with slower airplanes. So, I'd like to

invite you to imagine with me what would

happen if we had another doubling of

speed. What would happen if we could

cross the Atlantic in three and a half

hours? What would happen if Sydney were

as easy to get to as Honolulu is today?

What would be the Beatles, the Nikes,

and the Hawaii of a supersonic age? In

my mid20s, I started to think about what

it would take to bring back supersonic

passenger travel. And I set a lifetime

goal of breaking the sound barrier. So,

like any tech nerd in my 20s, what did I

do? I put a Google News alert on

supersonic. And yet there was more

progress in supersonic music than

supersonic flying. So I started to

wonder how would it be that supersonic

travel could come back. The obvious

thing seemed to be that it would be a

private jet, a business jet made by

somebody like Gulfream for the

wealthiest people on the planet. But one

of the fallouts of the Concord era was

that we actually banned supersonic

flight in the US. And since most

Gulfream miles are overland in the US,

there simply wasn't much of a business

case without a regulatory change. And

nobody in the business jet world wanted

to try to change the regulations. They

didn't want to build an airplane that

might not be legal. What about an

airliner? Wouldn't you expect Boeing to

carry us forward into a supersonic age?

Well, no. They're not even building new

airplanes anymore, let alone innovative

new airplanes.

So, could a startup do this? Not all

that long ago, the idea of a startup

supersonic airliner seemed laughable.

Uh, one of my very many failed investor

pitches was in 2015 when Jeff Bezos

passed on our seed round at Boom. And

then he wrote in the 2015 Amazon

shareholder letter about how there's

certain things that only big companies

can do. And he cited uh airliners as one

of these. So uh an even more laughable

idea was one if I could do this. Uh, I

was a software engineer by training. We

spent time at early Amazon. I'd founded

an apps company that got acquired by

Groupon. Could I do this? My knowledge

about airplanes was limited to a pilot's

license. I could fly a Cessna. But one

of the things I learned from that time

was I didn't think I could really know

what I was capable of except by picking

a mission that inspired me, something

that I wanted to create in the world,

and giving it everything I could. Only

that way could I find my limits. So in

2014 we got started and it wasn't a very

auspicious start. That's right. This is

a supersonic airliner mockup made of

cardboard plywood and seats from Office

Depot. That was before YC. And by the

end of YC batch, this is what Boom

looked like. Now we had a cardboard

mockup of our first airliner prototype.

And people laughed. Who would name an

airplane startup after the sound of an

explosion? But we didn't let this deter

us and we kept going. We started

building uh our first prototype airliner

uh XB1 uh which started life as baby

boom. Uh we didn't know what it would

really take to build a supersonic

passenger plane. And so we figured the

only way to learn the lessons was to go

build to go build the first supersonic

jet made outside of a government or

military. And that was how XB1 got

started.

Last year, XB1 became the first

independently developed jet to break the

sound barrier more than a decade after

founding the company. I'd like to invite

you to relive that moment with me from

just about a year ago in the Mojave

Desert.

>> 20 to 45,000.

>> Historically, the human race has always

wanted to [music] go faster.

Control,

you are Gopher Excel to Mach 1.1. Copy.

Go for Excel. Castro [music] gate.

There we are. XB1 is supersonic, faster

than the speed of sound.

>> Congratulations to you, you made history

today.

>> Congratulations to the whole team. Super

thankful for you guys.

The future of supersonic travel is

looking incredibly promising.

It's not just about speed. It's about

making the world more connected.

[applause]

>> Thank you. Um I've I've come to come to

believe as a startup founder, you really

have to optimize for two days. The worst

day and the best day. There's no such

thing as a startup that doesn't have

tough days. Along the way to that

flight, Boom nearly failed several

times. There was a moment where we got

down to seven days of cash and the board

told me to shut the company down. I told

them, "No, we're getting through this.

We just haven't found the way through

yet." And we did. And because I believed

that what we were creating was

important, because I wanted it to exist

in the world, I was able to keep going

even when it seemed almost impossible.

And because of that, we got to have the

best day. that moment where I got to

watch the team pull the airplane out of

the hanger, watch the uh pilot push the

throttles forward and see that we'd

broken the sound barrier. This is why

you have to build things that matter,

things that matter not just to yourself,

but to the world. Things that inspire

you, things that keep you going through

the inevitable ups and downs. So, XP1

accomplished some radical things. Not

only did we break the sound barrier, but

we did something that we didn't even

think was part of the original plan,

which is related to solving sonic boom.

XB1 broke the sound barrier on two

flights, six times through the sound

barrier. Each time no audible sonic boom

in the ground. We t uh actually

demonstrated a principle that had been

talked about for a long time called mock

cutoff where if you break the sound

barrier at a sufficiently high altitude

and at the right speed for the current

weather, the sonic boom actually makes a

U-turn in the sky and never touches the

ground. So it's like if a tree falls in

a forest and no one's there to hear it,

did it really make a sound? So, by

making the sonic boom disappear

entirely, we are able to put aside a

question that had long plagued people

talking about supersonic flight, which

is how quiet is quiet enough? If there's

no boom at all, there's nothing to argue

about. And so it was about 24 hours from

breaking the sound barrier to be invited

to the West Wing and 115 days from

breaking the sound barrier to uh an

executive order making supersonic flight

legal again in the US.

[applause]

Yeah. People talk about isn't it a bad

idea to build in a regulated industry?

Turns out you can change the

regulations. And the way you do it is

just by building the thing and

communicating why it's okay. By

demonstrating that we could have

supersonic flight without a sonic boom.

Everybody got excited about it. And I

like to say that supersonic flight isn't

red or blue. It's red, white, and blue.

After the executive order, a bill

dropped in the House and the Senate to

make the supersonic legalization

permanent. It passed the House

unanimously.

And just last week, it got out of the

Senate Commerce Committee again with a

unanimous vote. So, supersonic flight is

coming back. Thank you.

[applause]

We were able to do many things for the

first time on that airplane. First, the

first privately developed supersonic

jet. Previously, this had been the work

of governments and militaries with

enormous budgets. It was also the first

supersonic jet made in America. The

first humanpiloted airplane landed

solely on augmented reality with no

natural view of the runway. And the

first supersonic air-to-air live stream

filmed on an iPhone, streamed via

Starlink, and of course, the most

importantly, legalizing supersonic

flight in the US.

We did all of this with a remarkably

small team. The XP1 team was just 50

incredibly committed, passionate men and

women who are willing to keep going when

other reasonable people would have given

up. So how is it that something that

used to take billions of dollars and

thousands of people was suddenly done by

a small team with a comparatively small

budget? The key thing is to make

hardware development look more like

software development to reduce the cost

of iteration both in the world of bits

and in the world of atoms. So what does

that look like? If you're coming at this

from a software perspective, I think we

all know that great software is modular.

If you change something in this pit of

code over here, it shouldn't change

something in the behavior of this code

over here. Not if it's welldesigned. But

great airplanes are incredibly

integrated and everything affects

everything else.

uh the the best airplane design is

interplay of propulsion, of

aerodynamics, of structures, of all

kinds of optimizations, how you fit the

systems into it. And if we do something

like add another row of passenger seats,

it makes the fuselage heavier, the

engines have to get more powerful, the

wings have to get redesigned, everything

changes. And so classically, these pace

of iteration for complex integrated

hardware has been very slow. Imagine a

whole bunch of engineering specialists

each working in an Excel spreadsheet on

their own discipline and then handing

off the results of analysis from one

engineer to another. So iteration would

take very large teams enormous amounts

of time and eventually you'd have to

just say good enough it's time to move

on and actually build. Uh but instead we

took a different approach. We said all

of this engineering that historically

exists in spreadsheets really should

exist in software. The spreadsheet

engineering is like it's like baby

software. It's really code, but it's

getting treated like a secondass citizen

with no automated integration, no

automated testing, no continuous

integration, none of that stuff. So, we

said, let's fix it. And we built a

system called Makeboom. And Makeboom

lets you literally define an airplane in

a configuration file and then you could

run a script that does a whole aircraft

simulation. And in just a few minutes,

you could have a good idea of how well

your design performed, how far could it

fly, what would its fuel burn be, uh how

many passengers could it carry, what

would the trade-offs be? And this would

allow us not just to evaluate design

ideas. It would allow us to go do

studies of what airplane we should build

out of the infinitely many conceivable

supersonic jets, what is the correct one

to build? How do we get to product

market fit? You can't get to product

market fit on a supersonic jet by

building it and seeing if anybody likes

it. You have to analyze very carefully

the art of the possible and also what

will maximize the market opportunity.

And by being able to understand the

universe of conceivably buildable

airplanes digitally, we're able to

narrow in on the one that we would

actually want to go build. We're also

taking the same approach to how we

design uh our engines, which we're now

building for the first time. And we

built a tool called Bladeunner. And

Bladeunner allows us with really just a

couple engineers to change a blade

design in real time and see exactly how

it's going to behave structurally and

aerodynamically. This reduces literally

to real time a process that previously

would have taken dozens of engineers

many months.

So investing in iteration in the world

of bits is very important. And with

thanks to AI, the cost of software

development is dropping. And it's now

possible to have many more uh uh

software tools than previously would

have been possible to build. But you

also have to iterate in the world of

atoms. And one of the most important

things we discovered along the way is

it's extremely difficult to iterate with

outside suppliers, particularly outside

suppliers in aerospace, which are let's

just say I have no kind words for them.

So we chose to build our own machine

shop. And now we can go from a digitally

designed engine part to a prototype part

in about 24 hours. This is a uh this is

our R&D shop in Denver. This is a room

that does not exist at GE or Rolls-Royce

or Boeing or any other large aerospace

company.

So, our engineers are able to work

handinhand with our manufacturing

technicians and we're able to go from

design idea to part in hours and then

iterate much faster than is otherwise

possible. We're also vertically

integrating our own test assets. We're

building our own engine stand about half

an hour from where the engineers and the

manufacturing facility exists. This

means that when we've got something

ready to test, we can test whenever we

want. We don't have to reserve time in

someone else's test cell and wait for

that slot.

So what happens next? As we're scaling

up from XB1, the test airplane to

Overture, the passenger airliner that we

all get to fly on, we have to go big. Uh

we're taking our vertically integrated

manufacturing and building a superactory

that will allow us to build engines and

ultimately airplanes at scale. This is

what it will look like uh when it's

complete in just a few months. And this

is what it's been like over the last few

months. In January, uh, this was an

empty building, uh, with a lease that we

had just signed. And now, six months

later, the first machines are going in.

And in just a couple weeks, we're making

our first production engine parts. Along

the way, we solved what was the other

hard problem with building a supersonic

airliner, which is how do you finance

the development? uh when you're building

something that you know is going to take

billions of dollars in R&D capital and

when it's impossible to predict exactly

how much capital it will take or exactly

how long it will take it's very very

difficult to raise financing and but we

discovered along the way that because we

had made a choice to vertically

integrate our own propulsion we were

able to take the engine that we were

building for supersonic flight and sell

it separately on the ground as a natural

gas power turbine and that's what we

call superpower this This is a

supersonic engine adapted for ground

power generation that can ship without

the rest of the airplane, thereby

generating the test data, the learnings,

the reliability, and also the capital

that we need to go big. The first

superpower turbines under construction

right now and goes to the first customer

in less than 12 months.

So, let's take a step back and think

about why we're doing this.

I think it's important to create things

that we want to exist in the world and I

think it's important to create things

that inspire other creators. Because of

that, we chose to live stream XP1's

supersonic flight. This was the first

supersonic installation of Starlink, the

first supersonic air-to-air live stream.

And when we turned that stream on,

millions of people around the world

tuned in. And some of my favorite shots

were from classrooms around the country

where kids who were otherwise not tuned

in to aviation or to science uh tuned in

and some of them stood up and some of

them jumped up and down.

In one of those classrooms somewhere in

the world is the next chief engineer of

another supersonic jet. I just haven't

gotten to meet him or her yet.

>> [applause]

>> We think it's important to do that

inspiration and so we build in public.

The best way to follow along is to

follow me or follow the company on X.

And now we have uh actually quite a bit

of time uh for Q&A. So I'd love to make

this interactive. I'd love to make this

a conversation. uh and uh you know if

you can send your question to the Y

combinator agent uh they are filtering

them backstage and uh we'll uh we'll pop

them up here and we'll talk about them.

So

uh what is something widely believed in

tech that's just not true? Boy, uh lots

of things. Uh but there was one false

belief that almost stopped me from

founding Boom. uh just you you tend to

get told that every technology gets

created kind of at the earliest moment

of history that it that it could be and

if you're therefore if your idea is any

good and nobody else is working on it

there's probably something wrong with

the idea and maybe there's something

wrong with you and what this uh and then

investors ask you the question why now

and so all of this kind of compounds to

uh a whole bunch of founders running at

a relatively small base of ideas that

are only recently possible. This is why

we've got an explosion of AI companies

now and why a little while ago we had an

explosion of like photo sharing apps. Uh

but it's not true. There are many many

unsolved problems in the world, many

great ideas hiding in plain sight that

were actually solvable that could have

been multi-billion or multi-t trillion

dollar businesses a while ago, but

nobody's building them and not for any

reason other than nobody went and did

it. The technology for supersonic flight

existed actually a long time before boom

was founded. Technologically the company

could have been created 10 years earlier

but nobody started it. Uh the law of

large numbers you might think applies to

startups just doesn't. The world is a

smaller place than we're told. Um so I I

deeply believe that you should pick a

problem that you want to go solve in the

world and don't worry too much uh about

the answer to why now. Uh the answer to

why now can be because I started now.

Okay. Uh is it possible for America to

actually compete with China on

manufacturing at scale? Yes, absolutely.

Um the uh but we have to do it smartly.

Uh it it won't work to try to repatriate

uh the the manufacturing that left the

US. Um that's a uh you you don't you

don't beat China at its own game. What

you do is invent the future, invent the

next wave of manufacturing uh and build

that here. And uh and I I can give you

some examples of that. So uh one of the

ways that that China hollowed out

American manufacturing was by kind of

hoovering up the tool and die industry

and uh which used to be big in the US.

And by so if for any of you are not

hardware people uh one of the things you

need to understand about building

hardware is uh you have to make custom

precision molds, tools and fixtures to

create your precise parts. And uh you

know so for example uh for a a um a

carbon fiber wing uh there is a mold the

size of the wing uh the contour of the

wing in which you lay up layers and

layers of carbon fiber fabric and then

cure in that mold to make your make your

wing. uh or for metallic parts uh you

might have stainless steel tools in

which you injection mold or make wax

masters that then go through some other

complex process. And the the downside of

all this this tooling uh a couple fold

one is because so much manufacturing

went to China the tool and die industry

in the US basically died and it's very

very hard to find tool and die engineers

in the US. Um, but if you throw a

baseball in China, you'll hit one. So,

uh, a lot of what we're doing at Boom is

trying to figure how to get rid of the

tooling entirely. Uh, for example, for

our turbine blades, we're working in an

all digital manufacturing process that

will let us go in 24 hours from a

digital design to the most advanced

turbine blade in the world with

absolutely no tooling. And that example

matters because this is, I think, how we

win versus China. We don't win uh in a

game where the most labor is what

matters. We don't win in a game where

having the tool and die industry is what

really matters. Uh we need to invent the

next generation of manufacturing scale

that here because what America is still

best at is invention and freedom and

innovation.

Okay.

Uh in what ways has AI made building in

the physical world easier? Uh what

things remain really hard? Um the the

first thing I think we've seen is that

the AI has dramatically reduced the cost

of software development

and uh and what that means is that we

can have uh custom engineering tools

that otherwise would have been

unaffordable to create. Uh I was lucky

to start my career at uh at Amazon uh in

uh 2001 when my my family thought it was

a bookstore. And uh one of the things

that was I think great about Amazon

culture is they built their own business

software to run their own business. Um

like the personalization algorithms that

powered the recommendations on the

websites, the things that powered people

who bought this item also bought all of

that was in-house software. The back-end

software was also completely uh uh

custom that the things that would power

the warehouses and the delivery trucks

etc. And uh and I think that is a part

of why Amazon was able to be so uh to be

the winner in e-commerce is that they

had software that fit the business

operation like a glove. But to do that

in the early 2000s required scale. That

much software couldn't have been created

by a small company with a small

operation. And what AI does is reduce

the cost of building custom software

which I think allows more businesses to

have software that fits them perfectly.

And uh one of the things that's you know

traditionally inefficient about custom

software or really software at all is

the people building the software the

people using the software uh are in two

different companies and two different

organizations and they don't necessarily

understand each other very well but AI

allows uh uh anybody who is a user to

become a tool builder and I think that's

a that's a really really big deal and so

that's I think that's what uh AI has

already made better about building the

physical world. Uh, I think what's left

is we don't really have great physical

world AI yet. Like programming a CNC

machine is still an incredibly manual

task. And despite lots of pitches about

AI for uh uh industrial automation, we

haven't yet seen much that works, but I

think that's going to come.

Okay. Uh what do I look for when uh when

when hiring people? Um this is uh this

is one of for me this has been one of

the most difficult things to to really

learn and to get right uh is building

the team and in particular at boom you

the last company uh entrepreneur founded

that went on to build a commercial

airliner was Douglas aircraft in 1921.

So this this is an industry that has not

had startups for an incredibly long

time. uh and it has only kind of big

companies, Boeing, Lockheed, etc. that

are really terrible cultures. And uh and

and so we we often found that we had

this tension between being able to hire

people who are technically competent uh

who are good culture fits and who are

really experienced and uh and so what I

what I found is that uh when looking for

you know to to really value early career

talent uh people who are young,

ambitious, smart who have not yet been

destroyed by working at one of the

legacy big aerospace companies. um value

people who are hands-on, who've gone out

into the world and built smart, gets

things done, optimistic. Uh at at senior

levels, it gets even harder. And uh

that's one of the reasons why when

you're building a company, if you can

manage to promote from within, people

that you have been grown up in your own

culture, that is uh much much better.

Um okay. Uh what are some products that

Boomer uh wished existed? Uh from from a

boom perspective um you know

actually delivering on physical AI for

manufacturing would be huge. Uh like

imagine a large format uh uh

manufacturing capability that could go

from a CAD design uh to an automatically

QA part with one machine without a

programmer. That would be incredible. Uh

there's no reason to believe that's

impossible. It just hasn't been uh just

hasn't been created yet.

Uh for an early hardware startup in a

regulatory gray zone, do you engage

regulators before deploying or deploy

first and legitimatize after? How do we

make that call with Boom? I I don't

think this is one-sizefits-all.

I think this is very contextual what you

should do, you know. So, for example, at

in building Uber, uh Travis basically

ignored the regulators and built his

service anyway, built a fan base of

customers who that he could use against

the regulators that were trying to shut

him down. And uh I I don't I think if uh

Uber had tried to befriend the

regulators first, uh it just it just

wouldn't have worked. And and one of

those reasons is that there was an

active opponent, right? like the the

entrenched TR uh uh taxi industry was

using the regulators to block their

competition. By the way, this is the

pattern in a lot of regulation. It

doesn't come from like some well-meaning

person trying to keep the public safe.

It comes from some entrenched, frankly,

lazy interest that doesn't want to have

to compete and runs to DC or runs to the

local regulator and tries to use the

power of government to shut their

competition down. I think this is deeply

unethical, but it happens all the time.

And so, uh, so if you can do what Travis

did and go launch your product and have

your customers be your ally, I think

that can work great. That was never

going to work in aviation. And, uh, uh,

on the other hand, we didn't really have

an entrenched enemy. Uh, Boeing has

plenty of its own self-inflicted

problems. Uh, they thought boom was kind

of cute, would probably never succeed.

Uh, so it turns that we were flying

under the radar. And in that context and

also building a product that was safety

critical, it made a lot of sense. uh to

engage regulatory early. So uh when we

started the company, started building

XB1, uh I went to the FAA, I told them

what we were doing, why we were doing

it, why we thought it mattered, and we

asked them to help us. Uh we asked them

for feedback. We said, "Hey, come

anytime you want see anything you want

to see. Uh if you see us doing something

we could do better, please tell us. Uh

we're going to show you our plans before

they're finalized so you can give us

feedback and we want to listen." And so

what we found was that the approvals

process for XB1 that even for an R&D

airplane could stretch on for months uh

actually happened in 90 minutes uh from

when we said we think we're ready to fly

and FAA said here's the paperwork we

agree. Uh we got the first ever permit

for flying a civil supersonic airplane

supersonic even before the airplane had

flown for the first time. Why? We

engaged early. We made the regulators

part of the team and we worked together.

We made it boom plus FAA versus the

problem, not Boom versus FAA.

Um,

what's the best piece of advice I ever

received? Um,

I think about uh

I think about what Steve Jobs talked

about in his Stanford's commencements

address, which I assume many of you have

seen. Uh, but if not, you should watch

it. If you've watched it, go watch it

again. and he talks about what it takes

to do great work and how it's important

if you're going to do great work to work

on something you love and the importance

of not compromising on that and holding

out to find that thing that you really

want to go build that you really want to

go do because that's the only way to

build something great and I think this

also hearkens back to the earlier

question about what do we look for in

people one of the most important thing

to look for in people are those who

actually care is you can teach skills

you can teach knowledge you can learn

any kind of engineering But the one

thing I've never been able to teach

somebody else is to care when they just

didn't care. And that is an important

thing to look for in your partners

personally, professionally, and your

employees, people who care.

What's the worst piece of advice I've

received and why? Uh

the worst piece of ad So my mom, hi mom.

Uh

my mom told me not to start boom. And

you know what she said was, "Shouldn't

you work on something you know something

about?" And this is this is common

well-meaning advice, right? Uh you know,

when I started my first company, I had

uh I I figured I knew e-commerce from my

time at Amazon. I been at one of the

very first mobile app companies. So, I

thought I knew mobile. So, I thought I

should work on mobile e-commerce because

my resume said that's where I would have

expertise. And yeah, so I actually knew

how to do mobile e-commerce, but I had

no idea what mobile e-commerce should

be. And I actually didn't really give a

about anything we were building.

And so although I cranked out, you know,

high quality apps, I wasn't having a

good time and I had no product vision.

So I think the worst advice is like work

on what you know. Uh what you know can

be changed. Particularly in a world

where you everyone has personalized AI

tutors. Anybody with passion and

dedication can learn new knowledge and

learn new skills. But what you can't

change easily is what you love.

Knowledge is changeable. passion is not

and there never has there been uh uh uh

more reason to work on what you love.

Okay. Um it took Boom about 10 years

just to break the sound barrier. Yeah.

Oof. Uh how do you convince investors to

give a deep tech company enough runway

to survive that long before there's a

real payoff? Uh so I don't recommend

following in our footsteps in this

regard. Uh boom nearly died uh many

times. uh it took a lot more time and a

lot more money uh even to get to a real

proof of concept than than I expected.

And so uh two things one one is I mean

in with the benefit of hindsight we were

very early to deep tech uh and we should

uh had we known on day one what I think

the whole community knows today it

wouldn't have taken five years it would

have taken more like two or three and it

would have been much easier and so if I

say okay what are the what are the

specific lessons uh behind that part of

it is about iteration and the most

important iteration in hardware by the

way is to integrate iterate at the

product level uh we bit off an extremely

challenging prototype challenge in XP1.

What we should have planned is something

simpler and easier that that would give

us multiple shots on goal is that is how

you discover not only have you gotten

engineering decisions wrong, maybe

you've gotten requirement decisions

wrong. And if you do that, you can

iterate faster. You can get to proof

points faster. And the fundraising

challenge that Boom had is not one

you'll have. So, I guess I recommend um

uh I I recommend not following in our

footsteps in that that regard. Um,

okay. Uh, what would I work on if I was

20? Um,

I I I think founders should work on the

most uh exciting thing uh that they can

imagine themselves doing with a stretch

wherever they are in life. So if you're

20, uh if you have a startup that is

like calling you

um that that you think about day or

night, maybe you're not even sure

whether you can pull it off, but if

you're in that state, you should go

build that thing.

Um and if you don't have that, you

should go uh work with the best people

you can find solving the problem they're

working on that you're most excited

about solving. The magic happens early

in your career when you find an

intersection of uh what you love doing

that you can become really good at that

matters to the organization uh around

you. When you hit all three of those,

your career goes vertical. At early

Amazon, I was lucky to get to work on

something uh that Jeff Bezos cared about

that mattered to Amazon. So there I was,

I was like 23, 24. I had a $300 million

P&L with a project that one of the

world's greatest entrepreneurs cared

about. So when I screwed up, I had the

most like significant people at Amazon

telling me how I screwed up and trying

to help me not fail. Those are the kinds

of things that are game-changing

experiences to have early in your

career. So go work with great people uh

on a problem you care about that matters

to the organization you're in. And if

it's a startup that you want to go

create, that you love that you can't get

out of your system, then don't wait,

just go start it.

Okay? uh on paper uh uh you didn't have

the credentials to start boom but you

did it anyway. Where did that

self-belief come from? Can it be

cultivated? Um

truth be told, I didn't have the

self-belief on day one. Uh I had nowhere

close to the resume to build a

supersonic airliner. Uh when I told my

friends I was thinking about it, I could

just watch their eyes roll back and the

oxygen [snorts] would left the room. One

friend told me like, "Call me back when

you got something less pie in the sky.

Um, but I started thinking about uh the

founders that I admired the most, the

Steve Jobs's, the Bill Gates, and I

think in particular about something that

Bill said in the 1970s. Bill said his

goal for Microsoft was to put a personal

computer in every home and on every desk

running Microsoft software. And this was

at a time where personal computers

mostly didn't exist. And not only does

he want to make them exist, he's going

to put them everywhere and he's going to

own the market. And of course, Microsoft

did that and then some. But you know

what was it like to be Bill on that day?

Nobody comes down and taps you on the

shoulder and says, "By the way, you're

the one out of all the billions of

people that could have done this

incredible thing. Like you're the one

that's actually to do it. So like here's

the confidence. Go." Like that. Like

that conversation never happens. No one

gives you that permission. And a thing I

came to believe was that uh the only way

to know what I was capable of was to

pick something that I'd work really hard

at and give it everything I got and to

stop worrying about whether I could do

it and to put all my mental energy on a

how to do it. H and so the self-belief

actually came uh late, you know, and

there's still some days I get up and

think, "Oh man, this is hard. Can I pull

this off?" Uh I think that kind of

self-doubt is is normal. you have to put

it aside, do it anyway, and become the

person you need to become to succeed at

um uh what you've set out to do.

Uh okay. What did I learn from working

at Amazon in the early days? Uh and any

lessons from from Bezos? Um I have I

have an enormous enormous respect for

Jeff and I was very lucky to get to work

with him even a little bit uh when I was

young. Uh I think one of the things that

that Amazon did really well that is

difficult to do together is is to think

uh very long range while having

incredible operating discipline in the

moment. Uh so Jeff liked to make kind of

seven-year business plans. Uh and

because of that he would tackle things

that um uh seemed bizarre to much of the

rest of the world. Uh he was laughed at

internally and laughed at by his board

when he launched Amazon Web Services.

who was laughed at by the world for

e-commerce and yet both of those stories

ended really well. Uh I think you can

tell a lot of a character of a company

uh particularly a public company by its

its quarterly behavior and uh you know

when it got to the end of a quarter uh

Amazon would never like massage you know

their choices to try and make earnings

look good that quarter. They just take

the long-term cash flow decisions and

yet at the same time there was

incredible operating discipline. There

were goals, operational excellence,

focus on the here and now. I think doing

those two things together, uh, a vision

that exists long range and the

operational excellence day-to-day,

that's unusual. It's rare. Uh, but, uh,

this is what great companies, uh, are

made of.

Um,

you taught yourself the fundamentals of

aerospace engineering. Uh, do I have any

advice about how to teach yourself hard

things? Uh I think it's important to

know

the difference between uh knowing enough

to pass a test and really understanding

something. And at least for me going

through school, you know, I got mostly

good grades. Uh but I didn't understand

half of what I was actually doing. Uh

not not really deep down, not first

principles. Uh but uh as I was learning

aerospace engineering, you I bought

textbooks. I went back and I did

remedial Khan Academy physics and

calculus because I hadn't had any since

high school. I was doing the problem

sets and I uh I I started making a list

that I called my confusion list which is

my list of things I didn't think I

really understood even if I could answer

the question uh on a test or answer the

question plausibly. And uh my goal was

every week to take one thing off the

confusion list. It turns out that was

wildly optimistic. the confusion list

grew without bound uh because I was

always finding things that I wish I

understood completely that I just didn't

understand yet. But what it created in

myself is a a mental awareness of that

difference between I really get this and

I'm kind of waving my hands and uh and

so that that self-awareness I think

really matters. Uh because when there's

a thing that you don't know yet that you

need to know, you can stay on it and do

whatever it takes cognitively until you

have that internal sense of uh uh of

clarity of not being confused.

Um

let's see. There's a lot of uncertainty

about what jobs will look like as AI

develops. Uh do you have advice to early

career technical people about what

skills to learn? Um, I think all this AI

dumerism is like deeply wrong and

confused. So my my biggest piece of

advice is don't worry about it. Just go

do useful things. And um you as an

example like this notion that software

engineering is dead. I just don't buy

it. At boom we need far more software

engineers in a postAI world than we need

in a pre-AI world. Why? Because the cost

of software development has dropped.

anybody including hardware engineers can

now become a coder and we need software

engineers to make sure the architectures

are right and make sense and are

coherent. Uh so our need for software

engineers has actually gone up as the

cost of software engineering has gone

down. Uh so the the thing that you know

again I think let's go back and think

about uh you know what what really

matters from first principles what will

be true over a long period of time. uh

the the being able to discover what's

useful in the world and go learn how to

do it and go create something that's

real working with other people uh being

multi-disiplinary like one of the

reasons I went to Amazon early in my

career is I knew that I'd be able to

work on software for marketing and I

didn't know jack about marketing and I

wanted to learn it uh and so finding a

way to kind of see things from multiple

perspectives matters but mostly go find

something you want to create and go

create it um and uh I I I don't don't

worry too much about being repled

Um, in software, young builders have an

edge. In hardware, experience seems to

win. High barriers, deep expertise

required. Uh, how does a young engineer

break in and actually stand out? I don't

believe the premise of the question. Uh,

this this like in hardware, uh,

experience wins. This is one of these

lies told by old people at big dumb

companies, and it's just not true. And

by the way, all those people suck. Uh,

so don't worry about it. uh go build

real things, go have hobbies. Like if

you're into airplanes, do RC model

airplanes. Um and uh and you know, and

learn not just how to design things, but

learn how to actually make them. And and

the barriers are not actually that high.

You can just go do this stuff. Um so, uh

don't try to become a deep expert. The

moment you become an expert, what you're

steeped in is the past and then you're

completely useless. Uh so um and you

don't listen to all the people that tell

you you need ages and ages of

experience. There is one thing about

experience that matters though. Um and

and a rule we have developed a rule

about this at Boom. It is totally okay

for a young engineer to do something

they've never done before just the way

it's okay for them to do something that

nobody has ever done before. But uh but

if somebody has done it before in the

world, uh our rule is you have to go

find one of those people, call them, and

ask them your advice. And you don't have

to take it. You just have to hear it.

And uh I find it's very rare that there

are uh experienced accomplished people

that aren't willing to take that call in

some form of passion um and to give you

that give you that advice. So so go seek

that wisdom where it's out there, but

don't listen to it too much and uh just

go build.

Uh do I recommend starting a company or

working at a company early in your

career? Uh I don't think this is a

one-sizefits-all.

Uh, I think the moment you have a

startup that you desperately want to

start, a thing that you want to go

create, even if you're not sure how to

do it, even if you worry you might fail,

uh, but you can't get that idea out of

your head, I think at that point you

should go start it. Uh,

and don't wait. And the world is full of

examples of great companies that were

started by young people. Uh, the world

is also full of great companies that

were started a little bit later in life.

Um, I started Boom when I was 33. Uh, I

started my first company in my parents'

basement in high school. Uh, an internet

service provider that I basically

started because I wanted to get a better

internet connection and I needed a way

to finance it and starting an ISP was

the way to do it. Um, right out of

college, I didn't really know what

startup I wanted to start and so I went

to work at Amazon and got some great

experience there. So, I don't think this

is an any sizefits-all. Uh, and don't

start a company just to start a company.

Uh, that's a good uh recipe for misery.

And the the worst the worst thing you

can do is start a company that you don't

love and then get stuck. And uh this

sounds like a champagne problem, but

it's actually pretty bad. And I know I

know like successful founders that have

had this problem who are running like

successful companies that they actually

don't love, but they feel the debt of

responsibility to their employees and

their investors. And it's very hard to

replace a founder CEO. So now they're

like trapped. So start a company, but

only if one only if it's a company you

want to keep.

Okay. Uh, it says we've got time for

three more questions. Um,

okay. Do uh do founders need to move to

San Francisco? Uh, no. This founder

moved from San Francisco to start Boom.

uh you know we we uh we I left San

Francisco and moved to Denver uh to put

boom uh to put boom there because it it

did not seem feasible to build uh uh in

the physical world affordably uh at

scale in the Bay Area. Uh that said, I

do think there's enormous benefit in uh

being surrounded by other ambitious

people and there is there is no

ecosystem uh uh better than that than

what exists you know here in San

Francisco. So unless there let me put it

this way uh unless there is a specific

reason why the the uh you should not be

in an ecosystem you should be in an

ecosystem like think San Francisco uh LA

Austin uh be around other people that

will inspire you.

Um what would I look for in a freshman

or sophomore in college who doesn't have

work experience yet? Um

side projects. Uh when I was something

like 15,

uh I got my first real software job at

what was probably the only software

company in Cincinnati where I grew up.

Uh I think because I did okay in an

interview and I'd built some things on

the side and they felt like they just

kind of had to give me a chance. And uh

at at Boom, we will um we will hire

people early career uh with no work

experience, but they have to have done

something else that demonstrates having

been extraordinary. So So if if you

want, for example, to come work at Boom

uh go to boomupet.com/careers

and there is a there's a job opening.

It's called your dream job and it's

basically go create whatever you want to

go do. But in in in doing that, you have

to tell us something extraordinary about

yourself, something that makes you

really stand out. And uh if you don't

have work experience yet, uh just show

the most impressive thing that you've

built on the side and show it with

pictures. And that's how you can

bootstrap yourself. And I I find this is

true of a lot of good good people. They

they find a way to do things at

abnormally young ages. And you so this

notion of like, oh, you have to be like

a junior in college to get an

internship. Nope. That's bologn. Uh, all

the best people have gotten internships

way earlier than that and you can do it,

too.

Um, okay. Does work life balance matter?

Uh, I think, um, I believe in work life

harmony like this this notion that like

there's like life and work and there's

somehow an opposition uh doesn't doesn't

make any doesn't make any sense to me.

If you have meaningful work, it is a big

part of your life and the meaning of

your life. And you know, I I believe we

spend so much of our, you know, so much

of our energy doing our work that we

should find work that we love that that

is meaningful that is not just punching

in and punching out. Um, and I've I'

I've never um I've I've never found that

when there was one more thing I wanted

to like add to my life that I couldn't

find a way to do it. when I when I

started Boom um I had three kids under

the age of two

and uh and you know it wasn't easy but I

but I but I made it work and uh you can

have a family and be a good dad and be a

good CEO too. Uh it's not easy but it

can be figured out and uh in fact I find

that like doing you know being being a

parent and being a good CEO is very

synergistic. Sometimes I take a

parenting lesson and uh uh and bring it

uh bring it to work and find it's the

exact same leadership lesson at the

office that was part of help me with the

kids. So it crosspollinates all the

time. Just do things in your life that

you love. Don't let detritus into your

life. Uh don't let things that are not

meaningful soak up your time and energy

and passion. Okay, we are done. All

right. Well, thank you all very much uh

for coming. And if I leave you with just

one thing, go build something you love.

Go build something that should exist in

the world. Leave this planet better than

you found it. Thank you all very much.