The Supersonic Moat: Why Hardware Innovation Requires Thinking in Bits

In this conversation, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, explains that the 50-year delay in supersonic travel is not a technological limit. Instead, it is a failure of systems architecture. By moving hardware development away from siloed, manual spreadsheet engineering and toward modular, software-defined iteration, Boom broke the sound barrier and forced a regulatory shift. The core insight is that hardware startups must apply the same continuous integration and automated testing principles used in software to physical development. For founders and investors, this creates a high-leverage advantage: the ability to iterate faster than legacy incumbents who are trapped by their own manual, bureaucratic processes. This analysis provides a blueprint for using vertical integration to bypass regulatory and competitive inertia.

The Hidden Cost of Spreadsheet Engineering

The primary reason hardware innovation has stalled, according to Scholl, is that it is still managed through fragmented, manual processes. Legacy aerospace firms rely on spreadsheet engineering, where specialists work in isolation and hand off results through slow, non-integrated channels. This creates a system where every design change triggers a cascade of manual re-calculations, making iteration expensive and slow.

Scholl used a systems-thinking approach to move this engineering into software. By creating Make Boom, a system that treats airplane designs as configuration files, the team can run full-aircraft simulations in minutes. This allows them to evaluate the art of the possible digitally before committing to the high-cost, high-risk world of atoms.

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 at 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.

-- Blake Scholl

How Immediate Pain Creates Lasting Moats

Most startups view vertical integration as a burden, but Scholl argues it is the only way to escape the lazy interest of entrenched suppliers. By building their own machine shop and test facilities, Boom removed the dependency on external vendors who were neither incentivized nor capable of moving at startup speeds.

This decision created a structural advantage. While incumbents wait for external test cells, Boom iterates in hours. Furthermore, by adapting their supersonic turbine technology into a ground-based power generator, they created a revenue stream that funds their long-term R&D. This is a classic systems-thinking maneuver: the pain of building an engine from scratch becomes the advantage of a secondary market that provides both capital and real-world reliability data.

Regulatory Capture as a Competitive Opportunity

Conventional wisdom suggests that building in a regulated industry is a death sentence for a startup. Scholl’s experience proves the opposite: regulations are often maintained by incumbents who are too lazy to compete. By engaging regulators early and treating them as partners in the problem-solving process, Boom turned a potential barrier into a legal moat.

I think if Uber had tried to befriend the regulators first, it just wouldn't have worked. And one of those reasons is that there was an active opponent, right? Like the entrenched taxi industry was using the regulators to block their competition. By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation.

-- Blake Scholl

When Boom demonstrated that Mock Cutoff made sonic booms disappear, they did not just solve a technical problem. They shifted the incentive structure of the entire industry. The result was a unanimous legislative push to legalize supersonic flight, proving that demonstrating a superior reality is often more effective than lobbying against an existing one.

The Fallacy of Expertise

Scholl rejects the notion that hardware startups require deep industry veterans. He identifies the experience trap, where hiring from big aerospace firms imports the very cultural rot that causes their stagnation. Instead, he prioritizes early career talent who are unburdened by legacy thinking and possess the hands-on drive to build. The lesson here is that deep expertise in a failing system is a liability, not an asset.

The moment you become an expert, what you're steeped in is the past and then you're completely useless.

-- Blake Scholl

Key Action Items

• Audit your iteration loops: Identify where your team is using manual hand-offs like spreadsheets or emails instead of automated, integrated systems. Move these into software-defined workflows. (Immediate)
• Verticalize your bottlenecks: If an external supplier is slowing your development, stop trying to manage the relationship and bring the capability in-house. This creates a long-term moat. (12-18 months)
• Engage regulators as partners: Do not wait for permission. Build your prototype, demonstrate safety, and invite regulators into the process to solve the problem with you, rather than against you. (Over the next quarter)
• Build a Confusion List: Adopt Scholl’s practice of tracking what you do not actually understand, rather than just what you can pass a test on. Dedicate weekly time to clearing items from this list to build true first-principles knowledge. (Ongoing)
• Create secondary revenue streams: If you are building high-cost R&D, find a way to spin off a component of your technology to generate capital and test data. (12-18 months)
• Hire for passion, not resumes: When building, prioritize candidates who have side projects and a track record of extraordinary initiative over those with traditional aerospace credentials. (Ongoing)