Five Slices #12: Supersonic Decade
Bolt, Boom Supersonic, Blood Hackers, Google vs Yahoo, Blowing Up
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Idea to website in 2 hours
Risk is personal, and risk decides how you handle your money. John Grable and Ruth Lytton wrote a paper in 1999 on how to measure the risk tolerance of investors. What’s cool about the paper is that they included a 20 question quiz that anybody could take to understand if they were an aggressive or conservative investor. The paper isn’t exactly a page-turner – so you can just click on this link to take the three minute version of the quiz.1
At the end of this quiz:
You’ll get to know your risk tolerance and
Three articles will be recommended based on your style
Now, let me tell you about the cooler part. My friend Noble built that quiz website and deployed it in 2 hours without any coding, using an app called Bolt. Like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and many other tools, Bolt lets you write programs by just describing what you want the program to do. It also lets you edit and modify on the fly, if it’s not making exactly what you want. In this case, it built the website, the backend logic, the database, and the hosting all on its own. It stores the results in a table like this that we can check:
Noble says the subscription for Bolt is the fastest 20 dollars he ever paid, and other users seem to feel the same, because Bolt went from 0 to $4 million in Annual Recurring Revenue in just four weeks after launch. They claim to reduce software development costs by 99%. It’s the most fascinating thing I’ve seen in action this week, and if you’re into tech, you should probably check it out.
Oh, and you should subscribe to Market Sentiment if you want to read Noble’s article this week about risk management.
Going supersonic
I’m a big believer in the idea that it’s never too late to start over and build anything you want to. Anything. Some people take that idea to an extreme, like Blake Scholl, who went from building software to building supersonic airplanes. He had a pilot’s license, but he had no experience with aeronautics engineering. He still thought it was a good idea to try.
So at 35, after buying some aerospace books and running some experiments, Blake drew up some plans and raised $2.1 million to start Boom Supersonic. He wanted to make the journey from New York to London in under 3 hours 24 minutes (2.6 times faster than existing options) and he said round-trip tickets would cost $5,000.
“I want to live in a world where you can get anywhere in five hours for $100,” he says. “That will take decades, but I think we’ll get there.”
This was in 2016, when Ben realized that new material and software had opened up possibilities for a Concorde replacement.
Almost a decade later, Blake ran his first tests for the Boom XB-1 in the Mojave desert. He had assembled a team of expert engineers, raising nearly $700 million over ten years, and successfully launched prototypes that achieved everything they would. What people are capable of never ceases to amaze me.2 Ashlee Vance has covered this achievement. Here’s an interview of Blake Scholl if you want to learn more:
Blood hackers
Now here’s another story about a slightly scarier aspect of science: In 2013, Avi Rubin gave a Ted Talk on how cybersecurity isn’t actually that secure. Some vital devices have zero security – like the pacemakers in patient’s hearts or even cars with bluetooth. They could theoretically be hacked and hijacked.
In 2010, a researcher demonstrated this is actually possible by hacking into a car.
The same researcher, Tadayoshi Kohno, led a team along with Luis Ceze and got even more imaginative. In 2017 they hacked computers using DNA. They encoded a malicious computer code as a DNA sequence and got it synthesized from a DNA vendor for just $89. They then fed this DNA to a sequencing machine. When the DNA was analyzed by the machine, it caused the machine to malfunction and gave up control of the main computer in which important data was stored. So by messing with blood samples, hackers could theoretically take over computers in laboratories.
All of this was just a demonstration by the scientists that something like this is possible… But you never know.
Google’s way, Yahoo’s way… and a new way?
When you regret missed opportunities in life, remember that Yahoo passed on the chance to buy Google – twice. Google’s founders offered to sell it to Yahoo for $1 million in 1998, and Yahoo rejected them. In 2002, Google again came up for sale, and Yahoo fumbled it by quoting a low price. The rest is history. (Fun fact: Out of the 131 people subscribing to Five Slices, 7 have yahoo.com email ids)
But marketing guru Seth Godin thinks that Google and Yahoo saw the world in fundamentally different ways and could never have co-existed.3 Yahoo portrayed the Internet as a dark, scary place where it was the only safe harbor. It wanted people to come to its site and never leave4, pushing 183 different links into their face and selling them stuff. Google’s philosophy was to give users exactly what they wanted so they could find it and leave. Marissa Mayer, the head of product, made the conscious decision to have an empty home page – a design that still remains and works.
Because Google was so useful to people, they kept coming back to it – and then Google could sell ads in its search results. But now, a new model could upend Google’s dominance – people are turning to LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude to get direct answers to their questions and this could eat into Google’s traffic.
By the way, Yahoo also missed out on Netflix, Microsoft, and Facebook. No comments.
Famous for the wrong things
In 2016, Nicholas Perry started uploading videos online wanting to pursue his hobbies in public, like learning to play the violin. When nobody seemed to notice, he abandoned his hobbies in favor of mukbang videos. Mukbangs are self-recorded videos where a person overeats in front of the camera (like eating eight bowls of fire noodles in 42 minutes). People found this intriguing and views spiked.
Nicholas, under the name Nikocado Avocado blew up in not only in subscriber numbers, but also in body weight.5
Going famous is useless if you go famous for the wrong reasons. YouTuber Tom Scott spoke about this before in his video, “Why you don’t want to go viral,” which is a classic that I recommend everyone watch. But I recently came across this video where a young guy who went viral on TikTok very early in his life talks about his experience while making clay pots and proposes a healthier alternative for creators:
If you’ve ever considered building a community or making money through creative activities (there’s nothing wrong with that), you should watch this. It has only 14,000 views and I discovered it through
’s substack.Also, Nikocado Avocado lost weight two years ago, and he’s fine now, in case you were worried.
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This quiz is an abridged version (13 questions long) which is equivalent to the original quiz.
Thanks to Noble for sharing this story.
He was Yahoo’s VP of direct marketing during the second attempt and says he pushed to buy Google
Hotel Yahoo-fornia? Sorry not sorry
I lifted a lot of this from Gurwinder’s article “The perils of audience capture” which you should read if you want to learn more.