What do high-flying LinkedIn profiles and literal air travel have in common? They both want to show a smooth, seamless ascent, with no turbulence and definitely no bumpy landings. It’s true that on LinkedIn, you can often view someone’s career journey taking off and the twists and turns they take. A promotion here, a glossing over of a wrong turn there. But the best story I have ever seen is the LinkedIn journey of Blake Scholl.
Scholl worked through a series of solid, but not necessarily breathtaking tech jobs, until his firm was hired by Groupon, the online vouchers provider. After a stint in the exquisitely LinkedIn role of Sr Director of Product Management, (Point of Sale), he was promoted to the equally dry post of Sr Director, SmartDeals, Relevance, & Personalization. Instead of detailing what these SmartDeals were, however, Mr Scholl’s description on LinkedIn of this role says: ‘There is nothing like working on Internet coupons to make you yearn to build something you truly love.’ Intriguing, right?
And then his next role? Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, a company dedicated to bringing Concorde-like travel back to the skies. Far from this being a pie in the sky idea, Boom has already worked, making Mr Scholl the epitome of ‘you can just do things’.
In January of this year, Boom’s test model, the XB-1, achieved Mach 1.18, or nearly 780mph, over the United States. And the killer feature? No sonic boom. The Achilles heel for Concorde had been the ban on overland flights across the US, ruining the long-term economics and limiting her to transoceanic supersonic travel on a small number of routes.
But modern designs, advances in materials science and other clever innovations meant that the XB-1 broke the sound barrier without creating a boom audible at ground level. This breakthrough could be a game changer for the aviation industry. Boom is now trying to scale these developments for its Overture airliner, of which 130 have already been pre-sold. Imagine getting to Los Angeles from London in four hours, (the last hour of which is crossing the whole of America), or London to Sydney in just over eight hours. These are times that would revolutionise flying.
The best part for Boom’s marketing team is that eventually all other flights would start to be labelled as ‘subsonic’. Boom even claims that it will use 100% sustainable aviation fuel, which could cut carbon emissions by 80% per gallon versus jet fuel.
If this is starting to sound like a secret advert for these guys, it’s not. I am just in awe of a bloke who can wake up one morning from his job designing internet coupons and decide to bring back Concorde, but better. And then start to do it.
Maybe this fails, but how refreshing to hear a story about people building the future in real time. Meanwhile, in Britain we can’t build any infrastructure because of the fear of upsetting small newts, or keep pubs open in case some Nimbys hear punters having a nice time.
Given Britain’s desperate need to rearm, to reindustrialise and to regain some spark of our former confidence, I am so grateful to Blake Scholl and his dream coming true. It reminds me of the vaunting ambition of Hank Rearden in ‘Atlas Shrugged’, a work now treated more as a punchline than an inspiration.
A dry, qualified praise of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has been to say that while the heroes aren’t real, the villains are. But out there in the world there are industrialists catching spaceships with mechazilla arms, building planes that shrink the globe and quantum computers are being built out of a whole new form of matter. So, just maybe there are still heroes out there to inspire us with their creations. And as Rand says: ‘The sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others’.
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