Guest: Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic

“Passion and drive trumps knowledge and experience,” says Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl. Long before he was running Boom — which earlier this year successfully tested the world’s first privately-developed supersonic jet — he was enabling “the world’s most obnoxious spam cannon” at Groupon, or designing a barcode-scanning game for retail shoppers.

But eventually, Blake found the courage to be more audacious and do something closer to his lifelong love of aviation. He began educating himself about things he had never thought to learn, and tapping his LinkedIn network to get intros to the smartest people in the industry.

“If you imagine yourself on like the day of IPO, 99 percent of what you needed to know to get to that day, you didn't know on day one,” he says. “So, why not take 99 percent to 99.5 percent, and work on the thing you really want to exist, even if you don't know anything about it yet?”

Chapters:

• (01:07) - Blake on Boom’s beginnings
• (01:52) - Breaking the sound barrier
• (05:23) - Concorde’s legacy
• (09:36) - Navigating regulations
• (12:08) - Boomless supersonic flight
• (16:48) - The test flight
• (20:11) - Day-of nervousness
• (24:26) - Carrying passengers
• (26:55) - Cost & wi-fi
• (30:19) - “No middle seats”
• (32:35) - Hard tech
• (36:48) - What if Apple made a plane?
• (39:08) - Blake’s career journey
• (43:29) - The risk of failure
• (49:12) - Finding the courage
• (52:49) - Balancing life with Boom
• (56:42) - Learning how to build a jet
• (01:00:20) - The power of LinkedIn
• (01:02:38) - Y Combinator Demo Day
• (01:08:24) - Richard Branson
• (01:11:38) - Dividing yourself
• (01:14:19) - Being a focused dad
• (01:20:05) - Exuberance vs. fear
• (01:24:15) - Hiring slowly
• (01:27:17) - What “grit” means to Blake

Mentioned in this episode: Chuck Yeager, ChatGPT, the Apollo program, Elon Musk, SpaceX and Falcon 1, Boom Overture, Starlink, Boeing, Airbus, iPhone, Jony Ive, Uber, Airbnb, Anduril, United Airlines, American Airlines, Eclipse Aviation, Tesla, Scott Kirby, Mike Leskinen, Inktomi, Yahoo!, Amazon, Pelago, Google Ads, Kima Labs, Barcode Hero, Groupon, iPad, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, Khan Academy, Sam Altman, Loopt, Virgin Atlantic, Paul Graham, Michael Seibel, Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg, Hacker News, Jared Friedman, Sen. Mark Kelly, SV Angel, Ron Conway, Virgin Galactic, Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Holden, and How It’s Made.

Links:

Connect with Blake

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: George Kurian, CEO of NetApp

For almost 10 years, George Kurian has been CEO of the data infrastructure firm NetApp, overseeing its pivot to cloud services. After he took the job — a surprise promotion dropped on him just days before it was announced — he had to learn on the job how the job could be.

“ There are a lot more stakeholders that a CEO has to deal with than a chief product officer,” George says, referring to his previous role. “There's also a lot more external commitment ... It was a really all-consuming effort to get the company turned around.”

He said the CEO job can be “fairly lonely” because you may want to be peers or friends with your team and your board — but in fact, they are sometimes your subordinates and your superiors, respectively.

“ We wouldn't be here without others having contributed significantly on the journey,” George says. “[But] there are times when you have to step back and say, ‘I see a pattern that my team is not seeing,’ or ‘Do I think that we can do a better job than we are doing?’”

Chapters:

• (01:10) - Commuting to Sunnyvale
• (04:49) - Growing up in India
• (08:04) - Protect the child
• (09:33) - Raising kids in Silicon Valley
• (12:44) - Money motivation
• (15:04) - NetApp’s renaissance
• (21:39) - Writing new chapters
• (23:15) - Culture shifts
• (26:38) - Coming to NetApp
• (29:41) - Surprise! You’re the CEO
• (32:41) - Making sacrifices
• (35:04) - Work vs. family tension
• (37:18) - Doubt & lonely decisions
• (42:38) - The data wave
• (45:27) - Enterprise AI
• (51:36) - Starting your own company
• (53:33) - Navigating difficulty
• (56:28) - Who NetApp is hiring
• (57:11) - What “grit” means to George

Mentioned in this episode: EMC, OpenAI, DeepSeek, CalTrain, the San Francisco 49ers, Princeton University, Subway, Vons, Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud, Stanford University, Brian Cox, Oliver Jay, the Quakers, Jay Chaudhry, zScaler, Manmohan Singh, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Amazon, Microsoft, Glean, Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry, McKinsey, Akamai, Cisco, Gwen McDonald, and the San Francisco Friends School.

Links:

Connect with George

• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guests: Winston Weinberg, CEO & co-founder of Harvey; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins

“If you think about pretty much any job out there in the world, we will have some sort of [AI] copilot,” says Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman. “The question is, who are the right folks to build it, and what’s their vision?”

For Harvey CEO & co-founder Winston Weinberg, the vision is clear: Silicon Valley cannot and should not try to disrupt the legal profession by automating the job of lawyers. Instead, he says, they need to have “respect for the industry” before designing AI solutions that speed up specific tasks.

“These industries are incredibly complex,” Winston says. “Legal is one of the oldest professions known to man. There are firms that are over a hundred years old. There are firms that are hundreds of years old, and having a brand that says, ‘We are partnering with the industry to transform it’ versus ‘We are just going to steamroll the industry’ is really important for us.”

Chapters:

• (01:16) - The zeitgeist switch
• (02:58) - What is Harvey?
• (06:10) - Chief Law Officers
• (07:58) - Agentic workflows
• (09:43) - Ilya’s investment thesis
• (12:48) - Collaborating with AI
• (16:05) - Task automation
• (20:52) - Why is it called Harvey?
• (23:14) - Respecting the legal industry
• (26:43) - Winston’s past jobs
• (28:47) - First steps
• (32:13) - Scaling the company
• (35:02) - Scaling yourself
• (37:19) - Who works for Harvey
• (40:50) - Making mistakes
• (43:15) - Making sacrifices
• (45:51) - Growing too fast
• (50:50) - Setting priorities
• (54:54) - Harvey’s competitors
• (57:38) - Internal virality
• (01:00:46) - Testing Harvey’s limits
• (01:03:29) - Who Harvey is hiring
• (01:04:01) - What “grit” means to Winston

Mentioned in this episode: ChatGPT, the Fortune 500, Microsoft Copilot, Gabe Pereyra, Activision, Excel, Counsel AI Corporation, Suits, Harvard University, Netflix, Dell, O'Melveny & Myers, Hueston Hennigan, Meta, Reddit, Jason Kwon, Anthropic, Marissa Mayer, Eric Schmidt, Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Glean.

Links:

Connect with Winston

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connect with Ilya

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connect with Joubin

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm