
Founder Stories: Blake Scholl of Boom (YC W16) - craigcannon
https://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-stories-blake-scholl-of-boom-technology/
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helloworld
This part was inspiring:

 _And so we went from what could have been the biggest laughingstock at demo
day, to the team who showed up with five billion in LOIs, a record that
probably won’t be broken soon._

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blackguardx
I thought that story was cool, but I was intrigued why he felt demo day was so
important to their success. If anything, writings from Sam Altman and Paul
Graham encourage one to focus on customers and product and ignore everything
else.

They could have privately taken those LOIs to VCs and ended up with the same
funding.

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nether
Looking at their about page, these guys have a lot of aerospace experience:
Lockheed, Boeing, Gulfstream, Scaled Composites (!), SpaceX, NASA, P&W, and
more. I'm optimistic about this project. Hopefully they'll turn out more like
SpaceX and less like Eclipse Aviation (also founded by a tech guy).

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lacker
I was hoping for more talk about how great a foundation Mr. Fritz's
programming class at Sycamore was.

~~~
avichal
This should be the top comment.

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bscholl
Lol!

~~~
bscholl
Will never forgetting getting marked down in that class for producing a
square, when I was asked to produce a rectangle. "No, I meant a rectangle
rectangle!"

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btbright
The comment about Boeing overshooting on the 787 surprised me. Here's an
article with the original quote and more background:
[http://old.seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/20236688...](http://old.seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2023668895_boeinginvestorconfxml.html)

~~~
notahacker
There's two reasons why commercial airliners are conservative with their
projections: the first being that "moonshots" like the 787 embarrass them with
programme delays and compulsory groundings due to unanticipated faults costing
their clients a lot of money, and the second being that _more_ ambitious
projects might threaten to render the aircraft they expect to deliver to their
existing loyal customers over the next five years prematurely obsolete.
(airframe/engine update cycles and percentage efficiency improvements are
pretty predictable, and embedded in a lot of financial models that involve big
Boeing/Airbus customers borrowing a lot of money)

But to put that in context, the major airframers and engine manufacturers also
have a lot of talented aerospace engineers very keen to make their mark with
more radical innovations, well-publicised "concept planes" with funky designs
like open rotors and even those skunkworks projects likely have a bigger
budget than aerospace startups

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teddyh
> _Blake: I mean, far and away my favorite book is Atlas Shrugged_ […]

Eehh. _Atlas Shrugged_ is surely great in its own way, but I’m not sure it
really is a great choice to be a favorite book.

~~~
johan_larson
I'm pretty sure it's one of the diagnostic criteria for egomania. "Only we,
the very special people, can do the essential work that enables modern society
to function. If you don't let us do it our way we'll just walk away and watch
the world burn."

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nojvek
Building a plane is very costly. I believe Elon being a billionaire had a lot
to do with success of SpaceX and Tesla.

I'm still skeptical on how far boom will go before having a working sellable
plane.

~~~
valuearb
Elon wasn't anywhere near a billionaire when he started SpaceX or invested in
Tesla.

~~~
nether
I think Vern Raburn was when he started Eclipse Aviation. Company still lost a
billion.

