My First Million · Episode Brief
The insane story of Blake Scholl: the high school dropout who’s building supersonic jets
Blake Scholl is building commercial supersonic flight without a physics PhD, a defense contract, or much deference to the people who say it can't be done — and that combination is either insane or the only way it gets done.
Boom Supersonic is attempting to bring commercial supersonic flight back after the Concorde's retirement in 2003. Blake Scholl, the founder, is a software entrepreneur who decided to build jets — not because of a lifetime in aerospace, but because he identified supersonic commercial travel as a problem that could be solved with current technology and decided to be the person who solved it. The story Sam and Shaan tell here is about founder agency: the gap between 'this should exist' and 'I will make this exist' is where most people stop, and Blake didn't stop.
The Nick Mowbray segment is the episode's hidden gem. Mowbray is the co-founder of Zuru, a New Zealand toy company that went from a father's garage to a multi-billion dollar operation selling toys across 120 countries. Sam apparently considers him the most impressive founder he's ever encountered, which is a high bar given the MFM guest list. The reasons relate to Mowbray's combination of manufacturing discipline, distribution savvy, and willingness to operate in unsexy categories with no venture capital and no media presence.
The Moped King closer is a classic MFM format — a short, self-contained story about someone who built a real business in an unexpected niche. The pattern these three segments share is founder agency operating in domains where the conventional wisdom says the window is closed: supersonic travel, plastic toys, moped rental. The episode's implicit argument is that domain cynicism (the 'that's already been tried' reflex) is consistently more wrong than it appears.
Key Ideas
- →Blake Scholl's approach to Boom Supersonic is to treat aerospace like a software problem — identify what's technically feasible with current materials and engineering, then work backward from the business case.
- →Nick Mowbray built Zuru without VC funding by mastering the unsexy fundamentals: manufacturing efficiency, retail distribution, and margin discipline across categories that tech investors ignore.
- →The Concorde failed commercially because the economics were wrong, not because supersonic travel was impossible — Boom's thesis is that the cost curve has moved enough to make the math work.
- →Founder agency in domains labeled 'too hard' or 'already failed' consistently outperforms domain expertise because domain experts have internalized the reasons it won't work.
- →The Moped King pattern — building a real cash-flowing business in a niche that sounds too small or too boring to attract competition — is one of the most reliable paths to a profitable local monopoly.
Worth Remembering
Sam declaring Nick Mowbray the most impressive founder he's ever met — and then explaining why in terms specific enough to make the claim land.
The Boom Supersonic origin story: a software entrepreneur deciding to build jets because he ran the numbers and concluded it was feasible, with no aerospace background and no obvious reason to believe he'd succeed.
The Moped King story — the specific moment where a niche rental business reveals itself to have a moat that larger competitors can't easily replicate.