Founder Stories: Blake Scholl of Boom (YC W16)

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.

This should be the top comment.

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

I've always suspected that half the people that praise Atlas Shrugged have read the plot synopsis rather than the book[1], and Scholl talking about everyone in the book being a pilot makes me wonder if he's one of them[2]. I mean, there is a sequence where one of the protagonists pilots a plane, but there's an awful lot more assumptions the survival of society is dependent on capitalists building enough miles of train track. If I liked the book and was running an aerospace startup I'd probably be more stoked about all the heroes being mechanical engineers...

[1]Seriously, the premise of Atlas Shrugged is the great entrepreneurial capitalist novel, but if I passionately believed that the government was so restrictive towards the activities of private enterprises that they actually were on the verge of scaring all the entrepreneurs away, the last thing I'd want people to read to persuade them of this peril would be a tome populated with playboy hereditary billionaire geniuses and philosopher pirates to the point where the whole idea seemed a bit ridiculous

[2]Looks like he's in the thread to correct me on this :-)

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."

I came here to say exactly this ... perhaps this book should be on a classics list but I have no desire to reread it every few years. Books like that are in a completely different category and even within that category there are only a few I'd call my favorite.

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