Signed up for @Starlink direct to cell with @TMobile today. For first time in my life I now want to go find a dead zone…

Been thinking about hardware business models and innovation lately. When a business is highly innovative and products are improving rapidly, business models are focused on selling products and upgrades. Think iPhone in the early years. Airplanes through the dawn of the jet age. But when a business runs out of ideas for how to make better products… then they turn to services. They can’t sell upgrades so they focus on milking the installed base. Think jet engines today, power turbines, airplanes… and today’s iPhone. For a hardware company, a services oriented business model implicitly says: I ran out of good ideas. For Overture, we will be running our service/support at cost. We’ll earn our next money selling future generation Overtures that are big upgrades to v1.

It’s Christmas in July @boomaero. Machine tools arriving daily. Pretty soon we’ll be turning big blocks of metal into the world’s most advanced jet engine…

Our mill turn weighs in at 65,000lbs, holds 160 tools in its magazine, and can precision machine large castings and forgings. A fully-assembled Symphony engine weighs as much as XB-1 at landing. These are big machines, folks.

We will organize an around-the-world supersonic brunch in which the most amazing breakfast from each culture is served in every city we land in. What should be on the menu?

At Mach 1.7, Overture outflies Earth’s rotation. So you can have breakfast in London… and fly to New York… for breakfast. And then to San Francisco just in time for breakfast. In fact if you just keep flying west you can keep having breakfast indefinitely.

Symphony machine tools are literally arriving daily this week. This giant lathe is one of the smaller units. Yesterday we took delivery of a 65,000lb machine—which just barely fit through the loading door. Hardware is just more fun.

Secret Overture feature. Wrong answers only. Go

Taking 12 y/o to first sleep away camp @CTYJohnsHopkins—for 3 weeks of astronomy. “Next year I want to do astrophysics.” CTY changed my life as a kid—my first experience that “school” could be exciting, challenging, interesting. So glad my kids are doing it a generation later!

Flashback to 2018 when Mike Bannister let me put the nose down on ⁦@ConcordeGBBDG⁩