I dropped out of high school…Now I’m building a $1T dollar company

look at the mirror and i'm like fat and dumb and i'm like if i had wanna have any chance of doing this i have to go to the startup ceo a equivalent of the gym i at that point i don't think i could have sold the dollar bill for fifty cents and i didn't know jack about airplanes and so i'm like okay like i need to become that person i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking bad so how does a guy who slammed coupons on the internet become the founder of a supersonic jet company which by the way the one liner of what you're making is a commercial jet that flies thirteen hundred miles an hour versus five hundred miles an hour right yeah what it takes you from it would take you from where to wear and how much time just take it yeah that that's what actually matters right it take you from new york to london in just over three and a half hours tokyo to seattle in four and a half la sydney about eight and a half and that that's version one we wanna go faster after that amazing so my my backstory was i've loved airplanes since i was a kid but because there was basically no innovation happening in in aerospace it never occurred to me to have a career there you know so i sort of fell in love with computers with the internet my my first job out of school was amazon in two thousand one my my parents didn't understand it because that was they're were like hey we got you a computer science degree why do you wanna work at a bookstore but it was an amazing time to be there after that i was part of a one of the very early mobile app companies and then i wanna do my own startup up and so i i looked at my resume and said i know commerce and i know mobile so i should work on mobile commerce and surely there'll be something there and and we we built this like barcode scanning game which like if you make a list of like the most important thing in the universe the least important you have to like dig a deeper hole to find for park scanning game goes and i would get up in the morning working that thing and i was just like i was super depressed and i would i'm gonna screw this thing up all the investors are gonna lose their money no one's ever gonna hire me again i was like really afraid of failure and i'm looking at what we're building and it's like wait a minute i'm building an app for people who shop in stores and i'm an e commerce nerd don't even like stores what am i doing and so when we had a chance to kinda go aqua hire the company to group on and you know investors got a return and you know i got a little money and i got to like get out you know i basically got my escape fantasy out of this business that i didn't love it was a huge win and i kinda spent my couple years at group on you had reflecting on that and thinking about what i learned and you know one thing i knew was you know i i definitely wanted to found again you know i i started my first company my parents basement in high school and there's you know the founder bug had bit me but i i hated that waking up in the morning thinking about you know what am i doing and wishing i'd never started i never wanted to do that again and a thing i i thing i knew about myself is no matter what i was doing is a founder i was gonna push myself to my personal red line and that that red line is the maximum i'm capable of and it's gonna feel the same no matter what i'm doing but what won't feel the same as what i'm doing and how motivated i am by it and i wanted to pick a startup up idea where i would never regret starting no matter how hard the day was and so it led me to sort organize all my ideas by how happy i would be if they worked and i had had such a passion for flight at this point i'd got my pilot's license i'd you know there's is kind of all i knew that airplane just to how to how to fly a single engine one for fun and i never understood why no one to picked up her concorde and left off and i felt like okay i gotta look at that and get it out of my system and then move on to the next thing so before we tell that the boom story what were the other ideas on that brainstorm of making a list of possible things to go do we we asked palmer lucky this question before he started andrew and he was talking about how who's gonna make like the food version of diet coke he's just gonna make like calories you could just like calories that the things that i tasted good to have no calories and he was working on like synthetic food he's like actually alright right now i'm gonna make weapons yeah his his his other idea was actually pretty amazing it was a prison i was with a private prison where you only get paid if the inmate gets out of prison and never comes back right and so it was like you know it's actually good idea i like that one it's so i on the cutting room floor is pretty good too yeah so like it was like three and then you know the third one was andrew but it was like three like pretty epic things and by the way his brainstorming process he said he had like a house where he created like a padded room where he could just like build things ahead like would like explode and he's like cool this is just walls that can take explosion so i'd love to hear you know your process might not be quite as crazy but what were the other ideas in the other you actually brainstorm them well the looking back i think the the alternate ideas i had then are not as good as the alternate ideas i have now like i think i had something that was like a rental car company that would pick you up like uber you know i still sort of aesthetic but but i don't you know but i don't i i don't think that thing has long legs right i don't think it's actually a good idea even though this small number of times i went a rental car i really wish i had that the you know i think the other one of my general premise especially i've reflected on the boom story is there are a lot of great unsolved problems that are hiding in plain sight that nobody is working on and i think it's i think it's artifact of the by effect and so if if for anybody doesn't know that term that the by effect is this fact that like let's say someone falls over having a heart attack on the street and you're the only one around you're highly likely they run over call nine one one take care of them make sure it's okay be there until the ambulance comes that's what people do but if the streets crowded everyone tends to think i'm sure the people who need to know already know then it gets ignored and and the paradox effect is there can be a hundred people and the guy having a heart attack is completely ignored and i think this plays out in in the business world like in the valley like we tend to get told if your ideas is any good there are already other several other good teams working on it and it and if there no else is working on it there's probably something wrong with the idea but if you if you really play that thinking out what it what it means is you unique things tend to get left hiding and plain sight and actually the more compelling they are the more likely they are to be ignored because the more everybody assumes somebody else would already be doing it if it were possible like supersonic flight is like this supersonic flight would obviously be good nobody's doing it it must be impossible or a bad idea you know and there are other things in that category like traffic i don't think i am unaware of anybody attacking traffic in the right way and it's a very sol problem it could be a trillion dollar company it's funny because the only other person the person who comes to mind who i think a attacks these problems had in play sight is elon yeah you know i was talking to investor who knows elon and he was like know the thing i always is admired about elon was that he he just saw the trillion dollar idea on the floor that the rest of us were walking by very similar to what you describe at the with the by he goes he goes any of us a lot of people who grew up like fascinated with space the idea of of rockets that go to mars was not secret it wasn't this is something nobody had ever thought of but we all just sort of were blind to it we assumed either must be somebody else supposed to be doing it you know nasa must be doing yet or it's too hard too expensive either can't be done he's like we all just ignored it and right elon also has a a sort of bone to pick with traffic with the i think he's doing he's trying to do with the boring company which sounds like you might disagree with the the approach there how would how would you approach the traffic problem i think boring company solves half the problem but there's other half the problem and so imagine for a second if grocery stores work like roads do meaning you pay for them with your taxes and once you've paid your taxes you feel you're entitled to use it whenever you want as much as you want so what would happen to grocery stores there'd always be a line out the door and the shelves would always be empty right that's what we've done with roads we pay for them once with our taxes and then we feel entitled to use them as much as we want whenever we want so they're always overs subscribed what you need for roads is a price system and you need a dynamic price system like i think there's a there's a technology element of this but you think it's about smart traffic lights and the ability to actually do smart routing such that you i imagine you open up your phone and you open you know the maps app and you put in your destination and not not only are the sort of different routes in different times there's basically different times in different prices and you could have fast and expensive or slow in cheap and i think what we've seen know new york did like a baby experiment with this and like the you the the simplest way where they put like a you know eight or nine dollar fee to go into manhattan are you are you familiar with that sean i heard about i heard they were doing this was recent right it's pretty recent was super controversial i'm here right now and so basically i think it's twelve dollars so i think it's between the streets of six on down and it actually shows you the map on google so if you type in like know if you're on seventy the street and you gotta get somewhere at to fiftieth street it would say here's the threshold and right when you cross through boom your build twelve dollars and i'm walking around here downtown right now it is so much quieter than it ever was it's so much quieter and there's so much less traffic like the other day like at the day after it happened i was downtown and i remember like standing in the middle of the street and i'm like where is right like it's better so i feel like this would be so effective but also i would have guessed this is really unpopular to implement but once implemented maybe people see the benefits of it was that who got that through that's kind of amazing to me be that nobody's talking about this really important experiment happening in new york not some fringe like tier five city was that unpopular oh it's it's it what's hugely controversial it's huge dude even trump was like you're not gonna do this it which is it was kinda like dude you're like the president you can you you don't really i don't know why you're getting involved new york city but like trump was like we're were yank this the governor gotten did involved in this yeah it's a huge ordeal that's right and i i think the i think the reason it's struggling is because they they kinda solved half the problem but not the other half and they also did a very like the most core grained way you could possibly do it meet meaning they they put in place a usage fee but they didn't rebate the other taxes and so there's a whole argument that says hang on i paid for the roads already why are you charging me twice this is a tax increase and you especially if the world kinda moves to evs and some roads are paid for with like licensing fees and some roads are paid for gas taxes like now is the perfect time to fix this to you know to go to go to usage based pricing but you gotta get rid of the other taxes otherwise you've given you know every populous in the world good reason to say no to it and the the other the other sort of mindset you know i did think a bit about how you would sell this i think the go to market challenges are way bigger than the the product challenges there there's some fun like ai things about how you build ai traffic lights and how you optimize a net don't need a bunch of traffic engineers to do it it should be fun i think it's way easier the self driving way more impactful but the i think the go to market matters you know because it's like you it's like there'll be this envy element of like oh all the rich people are passing me but i i think what you could do or is basically rebate money from the people who are paying for fast to the people who want cheap and so you know so think think think of it as like that asshole elon cut me off but every time he does it that he has to pay me right so so i i think there's a way to you know effectively there's like cash flow from the people who want who are willing to pay for the highest access to the roads to the people who actually value the cheapest access to the roads the and then there's a technology layer there's an operating layer on this and then the you know the the the whoever builds the system should get the ten percent off the top building and running it and that ends up being an enormous business but if somebody wants to start this i will like be your adviser will be your champion i will help raise money for it like i desperately want someone to build this so you so alright so boom has raised seven hundred million dollars you guys are i think you just had a a a flight you know in the past year where you built one your engines broke the sound very huge deal and so you know we we've had a few people like you but you're like a legend potentially in the making take take us take us back like what was the original question in your mind like why what why isn't there supersonic what what was the actual initial question in the first couple weeks so it was like why did concorde fail and what would you have to do for it not to have failed but were you on wikipedia and you just came across that or you're does a blind fan well if i was a flying fan and then yeah you know i go to wikipedia and i reached off and you know the extensively it's okay the the facts make it obvious here's here's a hundred seat airplane with a hundred uncomfortable seats and adjusted for inflation a twenty thousand dollar fare and you can't fill the seats you can't make any money okay that's obvious so but the next the next question was is this this turned out to be like the key question why was concorde so expensive they the answers is poor fuel economy and that kicked off a vicious cycle that led to high fares that led to the low utilization the lower utilization the higher of the fares have to be this whole vicious cycle to it but but the the root of it was was poor fuel economy and the next question was well how much would you have to be at concord nineteen sixties technology by in order to match the fuel economy of a flatbed and business class is that the thought was well eventually it'd be great to do this for everybody but as a starting point business class is huge and you don't need the bed if the flights not long you can have a better the one at home and so how much shit to be concorde by and it turned out the answers was like less than ten percent to to match the total economics of a flatbed in business class and i was like what like head explode emoji like i don't really know anything about airplanes but can we really not do ten percent better than nineteen sixties give people a point of reference how much did you know about planes at calculating the fuel economy and and all of that when you started this idea yeah it aren't aren't you a high school dropout yeah i'm a high school dropout i did actually graduate from college but my degree in computer science and the closest thing i had to an aviation credentials is a pilot's license but this is this stuff isn't actually that complicated at this level like the fuel burn data is all in wikipedia and you can calculate fuel burn per seat mile which turns out to be like the key metric and and says okay what was concord fuel burn per seat mile what's the fuel burn per seat mile of a flatbed in business class and again you can just go pull on seat guru you can see the map you can like measure on your screen how much of its business class how many seats are there how how much floor areas in their whole airplane allocate it out and then and then it's like great you'd have to you have to do about ten percent better than concorde to match the total economics if you wanted to match the fuel burn per seat mile it's a bit more than that but there are all these other you know utilization benefits from speed and and then the next question was well how much better is boeing latest airplane versus the one that came before it and the answer is something like twenty percent i might wait a minute you can't find you can't find ten percent over fifty years like i don't you know i don't know anything about the details of the technology at this point but it seemed it seemed plausible on the face of it and so at this point i was like okay hang on you said there's a there's a fact here that that has caught my attention that's right i'm i'm gonna spend a bunch of sleepless nights questioning this yeah well i or actually i'm gonna spend a lot of days trying to get smart on it and so i was like this this seems plausible on the face of it but i'm on the far left side of the dun kruger curve i don't even know what i don't know and and so i i sort of imagined myself i imagined in the future it's twenty fifty i i'm went retired i'm sitting in the beach i'm sipping my eyes i had nothing to do with supersonic flight but i'm just reading the aviation history books and what do i think they say you do they say you know we're still flying subs sonic i really hope not hopefully they say we're going supersonic now and they tell the story of how it happened and how do how do i think that story goes does it go after a hundred and fifty years of i'm not billy a supersonic jet boeing finally did like no business history never goes like that right like there's just a big big companies don't suddenly get enlightened and build disruptive things so what what what's the more plausible history more plausible history as it was a start that did it that the the startup founder would not have come from the entrenched industry where everybody believed it was impossible or a bad idea they have to be an outsider and what would that outsider have to look like in order to be successful they they they'd have to have built a dream team that to be really good at attracting great people they'd have to be able to be a great storyteller they'd be great at persuasion they'd have to be technically deep in order to be credible with all the audiences that would matter and i sort of look in the mirror and i'm like guess me so like i left the like outside the industry box but like the rest of it's no and so like you're like what would it take to attract this like ten out of ten like the smoke show like there probably need to be good looking probably you'd have a great personality it didn't be funny the publish gym like really nice team that's right it's me i could do that i i i mean so i i i i look at the mirror and i'm like fat and dumb and i'm like if i wanna have any chance of doing this i have to go to the startup ceo a equivalent of the gym i at that point i don't think i could've have sold the dollar bill for fifty cents and i didn't know jack about airplanes and so i'm like okay like i need to become that person i so my mental model for myself is you know we've probably seen there's like how it's made videos with pasta and are these like plastic treat and there's this like big mound of dough in this gigantic like press that's pushing the dough through this tiny little hole and there's like noodle it gets extruded out the other side of the hole i'm like okay i'm the dough there's this hole and i just like screwed myself into the right shape to actually be able to do this and and so i went back and i started taking remedial calculus in physics because i hadn't had any since high school and i and i didn't know how to get through an textbook without way more math in physics and then i read the already textbooks and i did the problem sets and if i couldn't figure them out i threw them out and i got a different book and did you were not working at this point is that right you had left group pun how how long was that not working and how much money were you able to save up in order to yeah kinda you like rich rich or you're like i got two years where i don't have to have a job i had one year where i didn't have to have a job okay so you had what like two hundred hundred and fifty thousand dollars it was a little bit better than that i i'd sort of in my mind i'd budgeted time for like two failed startups ups before i would have to go get a big company job i was let me get i i got two shots on goal before i'm working for the man again feel like cool so i'll definitely fail on the plain thing and then i'll try to do that that mobile app and then i'll gonna give that give up and go back in the chance so that was kind of the thought process but i budgeted like here's you know here's my salary replacement money and here's here's the the seed money that i put in the company myself and i had i had i had enough savings to do that twice before i needed a job and you know at the time i was married i had three young kids like three under eighteen months oh my god yeah i gotta just a math oh you some twins what do you do you do twins yeah okay and then do you what would you like kiss your kids go goodbye in the morning and you're like alright i gotta go read and you just go go to the other room you just you just go with them to school you just go to the library with them the lunch lunchbox funny no i mean you you you stay that tongue and cheek that's kinda how it went like you know i had a i had a office in the basement and i i'd i'd give them hugs and kisses and i go downstairs chairs and i sit at my desk and i and i'd read and do problem sets all day and and sure you were telling your friends for that year they're like are working you're like i'm kinda toy with this idea of launching a commercial jet company right and you could just watch the eye back yeah this is twenty fourteen my my wife said okay honey you've got a year to screw around with this and then i expect you to get a job okay but this is like before start up were cool like now if you say you're working on like that you could just go in twitter and post about it people are like oh that's awesome in twenty fourteen but it still was a little bit yeah start here cool then but but not hard tech startups ups like there were no there were no hard tech startups ups to a first order like there were spacex and that was it that was like the era of like airbnb for blank uber for this that's right that's right yeah and like the only the only thing that was out there is a reference point for or anything like this with spacex and it was still pretty early like spacex had gotten to orbit and they were working on the falcon nine and i remember thinking like wow you know that guy went from paypal to rockets rockets you know rockets sound harder than airplanes so this must be possible to turns out i i it turns out i think actually airplanes are harder than rockets because because of you you have to have guess as your safety is an issue from day one versus rockets you can blow them up and iterate and you can't you can't do that to an airplane with a person on board so but i i didn't i i was you know what what's that old phrase like i'm not doing this because it was easy but because i thought it would be easy when i started yeah and that's motivational poster at whole time right and i didn't actually think it was going to be easy but and people people often asked me like i knew how hard it was gonna be would i still start and they assume the answer is no the answer is definitely yes i still would've have started even knowing how hard it turned it out to be so how do you describe this way of thinking because you know you you talked about this the pasta dough and the hole you're like what kinda what noodle do i need to i need to show myself through that hole to make myself the noodle that i wanna be it is so there's you you have that and you talked about like i i just imagined i work backwards from the end i'm retired i'm reading a book about the history of flight and what does that say does it say no but even invented fast planes no does it say that boeing invented the fast plane after showing no evidence of wanting to do so no what do you call this like i i guess do you have a for a frame or a phrase way of thinking because i think that's very sound simple but it's very rare i don't do that and i wanna do more of that so i don't teach me about that it's it's first principle thinking and it's super super important and it's like the most i think there are two mental skills that are really viable one is first principle thinking and the other is knowing when you're confused versus when you're clear if you have if you have both of those you can do anything explain both of them yeah so first principles thinking is like looking to get you know it it let's take a analogy here you know are there a bunch of data points and i'm gonna like draw a line through the in extrapolate or am i gonna go understand the equation that led to this data points being where they are and my pattern matching or am i understanding causality and and going to causality is really important and most people don't do it they operate on rules of thumb and rules of thumb are fine so long as you're like doing things that have already been done before or not too far from them but if wanna do anything new or different or if you wanna break from conventional wisdom you have to understand what's really happening you know you know so for example the pattern matching is concorde failed people weren't willing to pay more for supersonic flight like on concorde therefore it doesn't work it was an economic failure you could find that in the zillion articles on the internet and but like hang on what was really going on what were the actual economics what's the actual passenger preference what you know what would be it's there's a whole like don't accept a qualitative answer to a quantitative question here and and and so along as i was call you say that quote by the way i actually think that that quote is kinda more profound than the time that you just gave it what what exactly does that mean people make all kinds of claims about issues that are measurable without measuring anything like it would to to pull on this example peep supersonic flight costs more passengers prefer cheaper flights you have to solve sonic boom to be able to fly over land in order for the market to be big enough therefore you can't do any of this and like every single thing in there is some qualitative claim about a thing that's actually measurable well okay supersonic flat costs more well how much what would the fares have to be how many people are already paying those fares i mean like obviously people have paid to save time well how much do they have to pay and how much time is saved and you know okay can is there a market without supersonic flight for land i don't know go get the traffic data build a freaking database and like it starts start to make some assumptions about cost and time savings and and look at how big the market is that's what i did in twenty fourteen i had a spreadsheet some javascript code they went did all that and and it turned out the actual answers were not when anybody claimed they were because nobody else had done the math yeah it seems like my dad taught me this thing he goes is it indian dad he likes to ask for discounts and somebody would say no and he would ask again yeah and i'd be like they said no dad and he your dad didn't you say your dad just goes no you're going to give me this oh yeah yeah sometimes he'll just be like so we'll get a discount right now he'll do that type of thing instead of even asking for the discount but when he when somebody says no he would ask again or he'd ask somebody else and he would tell me he would say don't take no from a person who didn't have the power to say yes in the first place right this for she she couldn't have said yes so why do care if she said no like she didn't have the authority to say to give you the discount so i'm just gonna keep asking until i get to the person who at least could say yes let's start that and what you're saying is like don't accept a qualitative answer don't take a narrative when numbers would would be would be there i see this all the time in my companies it's like yeah those didn't perform well well how well how bad was it what is that how does i compare are we sure that you know and once you start to dig in you realize people are not operating from a place of fact and definitely a team is not operating from the same set of facts but how do you get people sean not to think like that though well i'll i'll tell you hi but i i'd like to hear maybe blake because it sounds like he's probably a a little further ahead on the curve there go go ahead i'm i just get very blunt about it if go ahead yeah i mean i ask a lot of questions like if it's a if it's an engineering thing someone's telling me if something's not possible and they can't explain it in terms of tony and mechanics i just don't believe it the the other the is that was sean's answers that was his the answer too i gotta see the physics by the way i to retake it during the summer at duke so i'll give you two little tips that have worked for me and i stole these from when i worked at twitch emmett the founder of twitch and now the ceo dan they both have these great ways of doing this so both of them i think wanted this they wanted people to give more subs substantial dug in detailed answers that were based on fact rather than either opinion or here hearsay or just narratives in the company whatever and so what they would do is they they would say things like hang on i just wanna make sure i understand this rather than saying i don't think you understand this what your make person feel of tax hang on wait sorry i need to ask you this question because i wanna make sure i understand this yeah you said this is that because bubble and and so then they would break it down that way they would yep take them off the defense and dan did this great thing he would say he say oh you said something interesting there when what he what he really meant was you said some bullshit and then he would say you said that this didn't work now explain this to me it could be that this didn't work because a or it could be that we measured this and we saw this and there it could be b is it a or b and then real that they were people would to have to walk through their logic and they would see where their own logic had potholes where there were take huge leaps of assumptions or they say we i'd have to go look it up and then he would he would either pause and be like let's see if we can get that data because you think could get that data in the next two minutes and he would he'd be like because if we just continue talking without that data then i guess the data didn't really matter or i'd say let's come back with that with that data and what i'd be really curious of is a b c d e it would be the logic chain that he wants them to go to go do and you do that two or three times you un address people sort of two or three times this way they start to anticipate it they come into the meeting now with that because they know he's always gonna pause me i can't just i can't get away with just saying some bullshit in here i can't just right say it well it doesn't matter if you say it well it's what are you actually saying that's right so i think that's brilliant and we built it into our interview process like my my favorite interview question is teach me something and it starts a conversation exactly like what you're describing so like hang on i i didn't understand what you said why is that can you walk me through that like like like a story about this at point i was interviewing for like a head air and like air air aerodynamics is like the super hard very math very tech end of aerospace it's the hardest you're technically the hardest part and this guy shows up and he's got this star studded resume any you know claims to be an expert in hypersonic engine intake and i'm like teach me something he's like like what like i don't know your resume says as you know about hypersonic intake like i barely know what hypersonic is teach me and he he launches into this thing and he's like oh yeah you really wanna use a stream trace design because that minimizes the cal lip angle and i'm like hang on slow down he went way over my head what's the cow what's the call what angle are you talking about what does any of that matter and and it and it it turned out the answer was i don't know right but he had a sound bite that turned out to be true and we had this whole conversation and by the end of it i felt like i had actually be able to reverse engineer some understanding it was very obvious he didn't have it and the the thing i love about that question is even if you know it's i don't mind share this on podcasts because you can't cheat on the question even if you know it's come and you have to actually understand something well you know what's funny is back when you were getting going in like a fourteen and sixteen and eighteen i don't know about sean but like i was definitely up and coming and i didn't have like a lot of money i didn't have like enough money to make angel investments and for some reason like i got sent your deal not like you know i wasn't in anybody it was just like you know this crazy guy has started this thing and it was almost as if i'm like well if i'm seeing this then that must mean that all like the cool guys have passed on this right and i remember like reading about this company boom and i'm like oh this got this person's insane like why on or how is this how is anyone taken this seriously and mh obviously that's how a lot of great idea start but it didn't seem like you had an easy going when it came just this fundraising if like a a guy like me was even able to come across the deck oh it was definitely not easy but by way notice you know unpack the thinking there that's that's an example of by thinking implied to to investing sure right that's why i'm not that's why i didn't invest in it and that's why which my police our friends did yeah no i mean the the fundraising piece of this has been extremely difficult the you know i think some people have said there's no venture in venture capital and it's it's kinda true and what didn't work for us is going to vcs and trying to raise money and think there are a bunch of reasons for that the superficial reasons are like oh that the timelines for this longer it does it's not a natural fit for kind fund life cycles where you wanna show mark quickly and then use that mark to raise the next fund you know anybody who's focused on that is gonna run from a a business like boom you know but i think the bigger dynamic is like a principal agent type dynamic and it took me a long time to realize this because like i i sort of naive thought vcs is are the people with money and their job is to invest it to make more money but that's actually not what vcs are vcs are money managers remember that thing that would go around the valley like ten years ago about facebook being free and people would say if the product is free then you're the product but by the way if the product gives you money then you are definitely the product right and the vcs are in the business of selling startups as an investment class to lps and but and who are the lps many times they're you some if you're lucky those are wealthy people who have their own money but many times it's like the endowment fund of harvard and it's like by by the time you trace that dollar back to anybody who actually owns it you have to go many many levels back and and the dynamics like the incentive dynamics in that money in that sort of like chain of money managers is to to be able to like raise the next fund and keep going relative you know and a relatively short time period relative to the investment payoff of of most startups and so what it does is it drives a there's an incentive to to to go invest in things that look to lps like smart investments quickly and boom might actually be an amazing investment i think you know knock they there's no guarantee of this we could totally you know in at this point we're big we we've done enough stuff that impact is guaranteed you know i just really don't want it to be a crater but you know in in success this is gonna be a trillion dollar company because like people are gonna fly more on flights are supersonic than subs sonic this has to be bigger than boeing if it works so it could be a great return but it will take a long time for it to be clear that it's going to be a great return which means any anybody whose career is based on raising the next fund from their lps isn't gonna like it and i wish somebody been in oracle and whispered that to my ear in twenty fourteen i could've have saved myself an enormous amount of pain you did end up raising money and i remember first time that i heard about you guys it was hey a yc demo day some guy got on stage and he waved a piece of paper and basically said we have a hundred million dollars or something of lois or pre orders for our supersonic airplanes that we're gonna build right from i think virgin and one other company yeah it was actually five billion in lois five billion five was five five billion dollars i i still remember like sam alt tweet that you boot boom had five billion dollars at lois at demo days a i record that probably won't be passed soon well exactly so how the handle how does that whole shit yeah no no i i mean so so i'll tell you the story it involves story about bullshit the so we we do yc see and like sam had been in our seed round and he had sort of like you know this is back when sam was running in nyc and he had sort of like been telling me i to do yc and i'm like isn't yc for like mobile social you know i don't know that it's for supersonic jeff they kept saying you have to do it you have to do it and eventually i was like okay my biggest risk is i never raised enough money to actually build anything yc see claims that they'll help with that i'd i'd rather try it and it wasn't useful then then not try it and fail and not haven't given at every chance to succeed so i did did y and early on the the group partners like well you just showed it with demo day at with sales and i'm like this is like a ten person company that just moved out of my basement like i'd be lucky to my customer pipeline is like lu tons united i'd be lucky to sell airplanes in eight years let alone eight weeks and what am i gonna do and so says okay there two things that are possibilities here one one possibility is a startup up airline but if i look an established airline the only one that could con conceivable do this quickly is and only if i get to richard and so i went i went after both of those paths and we actually got a startup airline to do it we got them to there was a startup called odyssey was gonna do an all business class service from new york to london city airport i was like this is great they're doing the you know flying to london city which is like the little airport the center of london that's the best thing you can do for of being supersonic these guys probably get speed and so i met with a guy and he was willing to like give me an lo on like actually a different corporate entity letterhead and i'm like woo hoo and now this this lo was for fifteen airplanes at two hundred million dollars each so it's a three billion dollar lo explain what it means in this context as lois can range from non binding hey sure sure i'm interested in taking a look to a binding lo with hard money right you there's there's a range why i was saying with you're trying lo i what what were you're talking at this time so this was a piece paper and you know he started asking questions about it it's from a startup up airline which by the way hasn't flown any airplanes yet like like this you know this was a pdf and it wasn't worth the paper for it was printed on this is the equivalent of i have a girlfriend she just goes to another school trust me it's it's you know basically and and so i'm i'm doing the practice demo pitches and like michael si bless heart that guy's got the i think one of the brilliant things about pg is he's built a culture at yc where people just tell you what they really think it's one of the best things about yc and so i'm doing practice demo day and michael si looks at my slides in my pitch and he's like blake do you have anything that's real because you sound like you're completely full of shit and you know it was better it's better tasting medicine but it's what i needed and and so i kept working every tooling the pitch to be focused and what hardware we really had at that point in time and also trying to figure out this customer thing because i knew that lo was flimsy and so we've been working on virgin and there's a whole other set of stories i could tell at length about how i got to branson but but i did get to branson well that's tell yeah we like the hustle stories give us one so so mark kelly who is now senator mark kelly shuttle commander and you know you human coordinator in a bunch of ways mark kelly astronaut mark kelly yes was on our advisory board and i he hung out with richard and i thought discovered i could go straight emails from mark kelly richard branson and he would send them and so i did and this was so this was like february march of twenty sixteen and so virgin galactic is about to roll out their second generation spaceship branson gonna be in the mojave desert for that event my chief engineer had actually got invited to go because he was connected to the circles i hadn't been invited and and so the the the pitch to branson and from mark was the hey the boom guys are gonna be in mojave for your spaceship rollout you should really meet with them while you're there and and he said okay and so we got a fifteen minute meeting and it was me and my chief engineer and richard and richard's mom i actually never got invited to the rollout i had to crash the rollout but i met i managed to talk my way into it and and i had this fifteen minutes was richard and he kinda you know he asked us if he want anything to drink and i said no i've already lots of coffee and i realized a couple minutes into the pitch he's drinking scotch it's very early in the morning i love you failed the cool guy test yeah apparently apparently i i maybe maybe the picture gotten better if i have worse scotch but but anyway he's like guys this is brilliant like i love what you're doing this all makes sense and then he kinda leans back at his chair and he's like but i'm already doing virgin galactic and that's a lot and i don't i don't know if i've got two of these things in me and i and i said richard we're not asking you for money we're asking if when this works if you'd like the first few airplanes to be for virgin if you want them because if you raise your hand and say i want these the product makes sense then i'll go get all the money elsewhere and that turned out to be the thing that worked how did you think to to say instead of saying you know invest in us or advise us or whatever just say do you want the first ones to say virgin on the tail or do you want them to say lu plaza because the world like places right really it was really virgin versus ba if you know him about the history of vi he hates ba right what is richard what richard cares about p r and he hates ba and when he tried to buy concord which he did he tried to buy ba as concord when they were shutting it down and they wouldn't sell it him because they wanna get embarrassed and so what is basically sean i don't know if you ever read his book or the listener ba in virgin british airlines they had a battle in the nineties in early two thou thousands where ba was trying to shut down virgin so he went on this whole campaign so i think he brought like is this when he brought a tank through london or any like rolled over like a fake model plant like it was like a whole p campaign of the little guy version versus the big guy ba oh it's great the stories are great right and he he very specifically tried to beat ba with supersonic and he lost right and so so he wants to do this and he cares about p and he cares about his brand and and so i'm like why don't i let you stick it to ba so it it turned out you know so but then the meeting ends and there's no deal and i'm sort of like working it through my friends at virgin galactic at this point trying to get something done at this point yc see the way yc see was structures demo day was spread across two days and the company might not exist if we hadn't been on day two because it's so like what happened what happened that week is so so wednesday is our demo day demo two monday we were like launching the company out of stealth mode and we've gotten ashley vance to write the launch article for bloomberg and if you don't know ashley he was like elon first biographer we'd let him and the bloomberg team come out to denver and interview me take all the pictures they wanted to take and in in my head this is brilliant because the story is gonna be boom as the spacex of airplanes but we i had no self awareness about how darn early we were and i let the photographers take a picture of me on an plastic orange chair climbing into a cardboard mock up of an airplane and ash ashley actually wrote a nice story but his editor picked the picture and wrote the headline and the headline said something like this colorado company thinks it can build a supersonic jet and then there's my like fat ass climbing into a cardboard mock up and so that's monday i know it's so bad so bad and it's and then then it's the top of hacker news and the comment and the like shop like a helmet on your head oh i mean it was so it was so awful the the comments are like you know what an idiot idiotic company don't think no airplanes aren't made out of cardboard and you know what what idiot runs marketing at that company because who would name a supersonic jet company boom and it's brutal it's just and i'm like we are so screwed like we're just we're we're gonna be the laughing stock at demo day and so that's monday tuesday i'm sitting at my desk working on the slides and up pops this email from virgin that says we're in for the first ten air plans you can announce it tomorrow and i like read the email like three times because i'm like there is there's like no way there's there's like no way that says what i think it says so we're like where like in san jose and an airbnb b prepping for demo day right and and so i'm like i think i think i just went from the biggest loser to the biggest winner and i called up the team at yc and i'm like i need to relaunch my startup how do i do this and so i think i said it's at midnight that night redoing press pitches under embargo we relaunch the morning of demo day with a two billion dollar lo from virgin done on an email and and and then we're back the top of hacker news again and the comments are like monday my my favorite comments for like one what genius runs marketing at boom that the one two punch that's how you launch a company and if there was another one that was like monday cole wednesday cole shit and you know but but by the grace of richard branson we would have died that week you seem to have a lot of these stories that are what our buddy george mack likes to call high agency so you were a high school dropout yeah you got into college and you i think you high agency your way in into college as i understand that you didn't just work at amazon i think you like kicked ass at amazon in some you got the job in a interesting way and i think you kicked ass in an interesting way this whole idea of like i didn't take a face value why the conquered failed and i kind of like taught myself the physics and calculus i needed to like diligently the idea initially it seems like you have a lot of these what's your favorite version of those stories that you think you know it's that i think your meter might be like you don't have the what's it called like the like the thing that stop a car from going at a certain speed like an artist artificial governor or governor a governor yeah yeah you removed your governor and so you're willing to go further than the average person would when it looks like the default answer is no no no for you yeah well i wanna under i guess a couple things what is i wanna understand things for myself and and maybe that's the most important thing like i don't fun funny sides story as as i was like going through a divorce and like fighting with my ex wife over like custody and had to go through this weird psychological exam and i'm going through you know these like multi choice questions where they ask you you know this random thing and like i could tell there were questions like i i think the experts are wrong and i know better and i'm like i think there's testing for delusions of grander so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna answer this one honestly but that that's actually what i think i think the experts are wrong all the time and anybody who bothers to think about it can figure out differently and and so so i have that premise but i i also i don't know i like i have a complicated relationship with my own ego it was a really weird decision for me psychologically to start this company is like i i look in the mirror and i am like totally don't look like the guy to do this and it was very bizarre to tell my friends i'm gonna go build supersonic jets it's like i didn't look like the person to do it and i didn't actually believe on the inside i was gonna succeed i just didn't wanna not try and i and i really struggled with that i remember thinking about know who my business here i was were and i thought of you know i i especially i thought of a lot but i especially thought of bill gates because gates had said i think during the seventies that his goal for microsoft was to put a personal computer in every home and on every desk running microsoft software and he said that in the seventies right and then he actually went and did it and then some and and what was what was it like to be bill when bill said that like he didn't have a resume for it either he could've have flame out and like because he didn't flame out we know who bill gates is and we have those computers but if you know so i'm like okay there must be a couple categories of entrepreneurs so the people who like go after these big missions and they succeed and we all know their names because it is bill and it's steve and fact of the day it's thomas edison and you know you're the great are the great right and and then there's probably like the dark matter of founders and the dark matter of founders are the people who go for big things you set big goals but it doesn't work and would i rather be in the dark matter of founders or when i rather be in the like i didn't try it and i just had a job or i started another mobile apps company and i i made the conscious decision that rather be a dark matter founder that's pretty badass basically you were willing to lose i i had to be willing to lose i make another another turn of phrase here is oh boy i'll tell this through my story of my daughter she was when she turned ten which a few years ago now i took her out to ice cream and it was it was one of these like low moments right rick i didn't know how the company was gonna survive and and by the way we have one of those like every year like with like regular there's was like a life and death crisis every year and i i didn't know i didn't know how we're gonna get through this particular one and i was feeling pretty down about it and like you know in my i had the self talk that was like man my daughter for her entire conscious life all her dad has been doing is and saying he's gonna build supersonic chats and you know and it could totally the the first prototype might never fly and you know what the hell is my identity to my children and it's just not really a great question but i had that question and you know so she's in the back of the car we've just had ice cream and i said ada like what what you think if i failed at boom and i'm gonna tear up us i say this she didn't miss a beat and and she said i'd be proud of you for trying and that speaks to me very deeply and that's the view i try to have for my myself you know do do things i'd be proud to try but do things i'd be proud to fail at and i've always told the team like there's no guarantee of success here we might fail but if we fail we're gonna fail honestly and we're gonna feel haven't given it our all and we're not gonna give up and when the when when x b one which is that's our prototype airplane the you know the first start up to ever break the sound barrier with that airplane you when it landed earlier this year for the last time and i was standing outside the airplane with it the team of fifty people that had built and flown it and i i said to the team the reason the reason we get to be here today is we didn't give up we got here because we're the team that did not give up took a whole lot of not giving up other reasonable people would have given up a bunch of reasonable people did give up and to get to get over to our airline flying and that's gonna require a lot more and not given up so pick something you'd be proud to fail at don't give up that's a great story i also think that you know i'm not in your industry at all sean's and i make internet stuff and i remember seeing this elon musk video where his there were the the rocket i don't i don't remember what it did but it was some threshold that they had never accomplished before where it got to space something like that and you see him i'm looking up and you hear the launch control like freaking out and he actually i think he like cries it looks like he's about the cry yeah he's like looking up and he's like it it it almost felt like he was even in awe or impressed where he was like i can't believe it it worked yeah and the whole crew you know a thousand employees are just freaking out yeah and i remember thinking like you know i don't wanna something like that seems so challenging man i couldn't do it it took fifteen years twenty years to get there and then you see that video and you're like wow that's totally worth it and i and i'm a little envy it's it's sort of like someone like running a marathon and at the end of the marathon their families is there and they're freaking out or doing some type of like crazy physical task where it takes decades or years to work towards and then you have this like a moment where it's like you know there's a very beginning in the middle of an end to the journey and i'm very en of that and it's really cool that you have that you know recently it happened like six months ago i forget that you guys like had your first flight yeah it was three it was like three months ago i was recent it yeah three three months ago and i remember having i'm like i have nothing to do with you but i have this sense of pride just for you and i remember seeing paul graham who isn't like a very paul graham doesn't seem like a very ex person and he's seemed very excited about this and i was like this is amazing and it almost felt it it felt very patriotic you know that had nothing that i don't know if that there was no like team ambition instead of team america right it's yes i think there's a part of all of us that wonders what's the version of me if i did the most ambitious thing if i did my version of supersonic jets right and when i was a little i wasn't in a flight ent i didn't have my pilot justice i your thing is your thing by i think everybody has a little version of that in them there's some version of that and you the most ambitious thing the most you thing you could possibly do and you probably fail and it'd probably be super hard and you could probably if you're smart you you have a lot of easier options if you decided to choose that it could be small even like that's right be a stand up comedian or do a show right only way to go to space it it's it's the biggest ambition relative to someone's actual frame when their actual values like imagine going back to your five year old self and saying let me tell you gonna tell you what you're gonna get to do here it is and like like what makes that five year old self just like tickle pink like wait a minute i to do that blake have you ever read the pixar rules of storytelling they have this thing called the twenty two rules and the twenty two rules rule number one the most rule this is pixar pixar who if anybody knows how to move people they know how to move people emotionally rule number one is you admire the character more for trying than for their successes and so you know the the the hallmark of every pixar movie is not the happy ending right it's how the character approach the obstacles and this sounds super super obvious but the reality is like that's also what you know moves founders is also what what inspires people is not the success because yes it's amazing that they're like elon story with the rockets landing wow that's so cool the rockets landing on their synchronized at the middle of dealership that is amazing but it's like ten times more amazing when you know that the first three rockets blew up and then he went all and and that you know and then nobody was gonna do this if he didn't that's really he didn't push hoarding and continue on in the face of like almost certain failure right so i think that's like one of the most important rules for founders because it's what will inspire your team it'll inspire you know customers it'll inspire the audience it'll inspire investors i if in in the end is the yeah you'd admire the character how the character tries rather i think that's right one of our og boom people has a metaphor for this that i found really useful you it it calls with the emotional piggy bank and is like every time you're struggling with a problem and you push through you're putting a quarter in the piggy bank and when you finally succeed you get to break open the emotional piggy bank right and the harder it was to get there the more joyous the victory right and i think i think he used the this guy's been a boom for nine years he's one of the few early people that stuck it out now he runs our engine program and and i think he i think he was using that with himself a lot but i've know i've tried to broadcast it to the team so i think it's really i think it's really true when you think you guys are gonna be mainstream when are you gonna be when are people to be flying because right now you're at this point in the company where it's like are you raised seven hundred million so obviously you're a big deal but you're not to the point where it's like this is a thing this is going to work when do you think that it's gonna cross this or and i guess it's been fifteen years or twelve years yeah eleven we'll turn eleven on paper in september yeah eleven eleven years ago i was in my basement reading textbooks wow so not that long ago and now when what's the next chapter of the story so you got through yeah a bunch of chapters you got through the crazy guy his bed bedroom two oh okay this is kind of interesting too oh my god he made a prototype this is actually mh this is actually potentially serious now the next chapter what's that going to be and when is it gonna be when are we gonna read it you know one way to look at this is like you know progressive overturn of the the skeptics that's not how i see it on the inside but that's one way to look at it you know the skeptics said a a startup up can never sell airplanes to airlines oh we did united bought them made deposit american did japan airlines did a pre order okay that happened a startup can never build a supersonic chat oh we did that okay the next thing skeptics say is we're never gonna succeed at building our own jet engine like there's as a whole class of people who are just like convinced that only big companies can build jet engines and we're gonna find out pretty soon who's right as the end of this year our full scale jet engine prototype you know should be running and then next year we'll start building the first airplane and our our goal is to roll the first one off the line in twenty seven fly it in twenty eight and be ready for passengers in twenty nine and there's a good chance that like it could take longer than that but those those are the goals and i and i i believe in we've got a lot got gotten a lot of learnings along the way about how you set goals and how you set schedules which i can talk about but by my conclusion is ambitious schedules result in the fastest actual execution and so that's those where our targets you know it's a cliche that i say this then end in the podcast is you know because this a point where someone says something amazing i go man you're you're the man and so i've overused that phrase but i think that of the people who i look up to where it's almost you you're potentially going to be an american hero and i and i think that like we're honored to talk to you and i think that i i hope that you are because it would be really fun to have you win it would be it would give us all a huge sense of pride to watch you win and and and i think the the jet thing is cool the but the cooler thing is that you've had you had a crazy vision and it it it might actually come to fruition you know i appreciate you're saying that it's a weird again i have weird religious for my ego on this but i think back to like my day in college and i was reading my favorite book which is atlas la shrugged and my my favorite character in atlas shrugged is this guy hank rear who is you this sort of combination business technology hero who like invented a new kind of metal and and i but i remember cry thinking like man i don't have it to be somebody like him and you know i always wanted to but i think i could be and along the way someone someone told me that this the things we admire in other people are actually our own strengths and at first that made no sense to me but as i start to pattern match about it like like my own weaknesses are the things that annoy me the most than other people and my own strengths are the things i admire most than other people so it's very paradox but it seems to actually be true and and so there's this like weird thing where i think we could actually become our heroes yeah and and my well of all the various random things that were said about me after we broke this sound barrier the one that spoke to me the most was where someone who i'd never met never heard of compared me to hank root oh that's awesome yeah that's amazing i i always say if you spot it you got it both from the good and bad if something bothers you about some other people it's because it's a part of you that recognizes that behavior and same thing for something inspires there's a part of you that identifies with that behavior right you are what you admire and and i think that once you realize that you start to get actually you start to pay some attention to what you choose what you're choosing to admire because you're actually pointing your little compass in that direction and you know then there's just a question of are you gonna remove the governor or you gonna leave it in and not got chase it all the way i love that's the that's the happy side of it and then the unhappy side of it is the things that drive me crazy and other people holy shit i to have a z of myself because i'm probably doing it too right i like this quote that you have you said if every founder worked on the most ambitious thing they could get their head around everyone would be happier and more great things would get built you know there's probably gonna be some between half a million and a million people who listen to this episode like i guess like how if you were gonna leave here making your case for that for why why founders should work on the most ambitious thing what's your case can't lose if you win obviously it's great but i i think the i think of it's a mistake to start from your resume and it's a mistake to start from what you think you can do is i think the only way to find out what you can do it is to pick the most motivating thing in the world and and run at it something that's so motivating that the goal matters more than your own insecurities that you could do that thing where you ex sc yourself into the noodle of the right shape that's the only way you find your limits by the way you were really young and i think i read that you reported directly to jeff bezos i can't let you leave with that house do you have any good bezos stories oh i've had a bunch i did not report directly at to bezos the what one of the most annoying things that happens as the you as you go through these journeys is like little bits of bio get turned into better sound bites and and then i feel embarrassed because like like people claim i was an executive at amazon and i was not like someone was like what actually oh he he worked at amazon oh so he works for jeff bezos yeah he you works with up bezos oh we worked with jeff bezos right listen put every hour worker or the warehouse no i did get i did get able to do something that jeff cared about so i got to work with him a bit but that meant that like i was updating him once a quarter and you know and if i screwed up really badly like jeff had him my ass to me and and by the way there's no no better early career experience to be like twenty two working on something that jeff happens to care about and when i screw it up he tells me and so i i found out later that i was the youngest ever manager at i don't think i knew that at the time but i got to build the the thing i got to do was basically do amazon's first ad buy from google and this you know and and build the system that was i think the first automated ad buy system on the internet this was before the like we're buying adwords before there was an adwords api with like screen scraper that were like automatically clicking buttons in the background with pearl scripts and it would my experience of it was it's like standing next to a rocket and then the rocket took off and like my like jacket got caught on the rocket and my kinda was along for the ride but at some at some point this thing was was driving seven percent of amazon sales and seven percent of google sales all at the same time and and somehow i just you know i i my experience was i was like on the pre of failing and they're about to fire me and a replacement with somebody who actually knew what they were doing and and i was like right at that line and never quite crossed it but it was a it was a great first go build something from scratch gig and i got to learn a lot for that experience and i got i got to know jeff a little bit but like i didn't work directly graham i was like what what's he like what'd did you pick up from them oh i really admire jeff the stories they get told about ceos tend to be the ones about how they lose their cool and yell at people and fire people and the elevators and whatnot and one of my favorite things and i i would watch jeff lose it from people a cup a couple times but what i found is he never lost it with me so long as i took accountability and i remember the very first time i was presenting to jeff we just launched like the mvp of this thing i was describing and i'm like telling jeff how we built it and why and i'm like nervous a because i'm like twenty two or twenty three presenting to like this god and we get part through the presentation and it's going well and then he says well why didn't you do x and he's got this idea and i said well we didn't think of that and and and he starts laugh reason right he starts laughing the big famous jeff bezos laugh and he says that's a great answer it's true all the time but nobody's willing to say it and and so what i found was like you know whenever i just told jeff the truth and took accountability i think there's another time i in front of the old executive team and that the temperatures going up in the room and i was why did we do this when this other thing was a higher priority and you could get everyone's get progressively more pissed off that we've mis prioritized and i just spoke up and said that was my call i got it wrong i mis prioritized i won't do it again and and the toilet was okay when the conversation moved on and and obviously i couldn't do that every single time on every single thing but jeff jeff rewarded straight shooters jeff rewarded accountability jeff rewarded knowing knowing your own business like the back of your hand and he was he was tremendously forgiving for learning on the job and i i i have huge respect the other thing is like i've go to talk him once a quarter and he would like have you know and i felt like i knew my shit and he would hand me like a novel insight in five minutes on the thing that i did every day and i think that goes to like being really smart but also that first principles thing you go to first principles you could actually get to novel insights that's exactly what emmett said amazon bought twitch for like a billion dollars or whatever so he reported to jeff and so he would go i think twice a year or three times a year go meet him and he he's did the same thing he's like he wants you to know your business he's like but then within five minutes of sort of reading the document he's like without fail he would give me one thing that i thought was kind of impossible i think about this business twenty four seven and he gives me an idea or an angle or perspective like at a novel perspective or a novel idea that i didn't have and he's like that's amazing that is a you know that shows kind of the level that that guy's at mh he's super smart and he's very first principles and and but the if you put those two things together that's what i i think what that's what makes my experience and immense experience possible and it's the thing that enables other leaders to do the same thing a thing i try to challenge myself to do is it any given like management review or working with the team i try to ask myself what's the most important question and in many many times what i find is no one's asked the most important question it's not hard to find it and not hard to ask it that's pretty brilliant what's it could you just give us an example of that like a situation where you you asked that question and it shifted the the combo i i got one from yesterday that's sort of an example we we i called the overt leadership team together on a sunday my my spidey sense was firing that we weren't aligned about development philosophy and we've start talking about when to in source and when to vertically integrate and you know the conversation in the rooms started out i was like oh vertical integrations this as a goal so we'll eventually do all these things and and i t the conversation to like no it's not like what we what we need is the winning strategy what we need to decide is when do we want suppliers and when do we wanna do things ourselves if one of the principles which we make those decisions and then as i went to the whiteboard and the room sort like try to answer those questions like how do we know whether we should do something hit ourselves or outsource it and i don't think we've completely crack the nut on that but we at least brought the team's focus not to like what are the answers but how are the principles by which we make those decisions and i think if we pull i i think we'll keep pulling on that thread and and ultimately the answer to that question will be part of our success stories as a company because we'll understood how to think about it and we've got the team on a set of principles that will then if they won't need to make every bring every supplier decision to me they'll like they'll they'll like look understand the principles and make great independent decisions they blake you're awesome man and you're you're a very unique founder met a lot of founders you're a very unique guy and what you're doing is awesome i really appreciate you coming on and i i hope i hope my keyboard wasn't making too much noise and i kept writing down these little quota bowls that i thought pretty pretty great for me the best blake the best as episodes you'll either you'll see shot and i do two things you'll see us do this and we like are gazing or the other thing that i that we do is we just you see us do this you see us just lean back at across our arms and like classes in session well thank you i i had a lot of fun yeah where should people follow you or follow the drink wait where you wanna direct people who wanna kinda stay in touch here i'm pretty active on x so i'm at b s bs s c h o l l that's the that's probably the best place to follow along i i try to get people like an inside view and what's going on boom and then i i mouth off about other random things in the world so alright manuel well i look forward to flying everywhere in half the time thank you for for coming on thank you for doing it and alright that's it that's the pun i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back