Mine's Bigger | David Kaplan | Talks at Google

David Kaplan is a senior editor at Newsweek. Besides his book Minds Bigger, which he's here to talk with us today about, he's also the author of the Silicon Boys, about the culture and history of Silicon Valley Valley. It was a national bestseller and was translated into six languages. Another one of his books, the Accidental President, was the definitive account of the Bush Gore post election drama of 2000. At Newsweek, Kaplan has written cover stories ranging from profiles of Clarence Thomas, George Steinbrenner and Rudy Giuliani to analyses of Silicon Valley's wealth creation and American capital punishment, to features on the selling of Star Wars. His cover story in 2006, the breaking of the Hewlett Packard Boardroom Spying Scandal, was a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Business Journalism. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wired, the Washington Post, Parenting, Food and Wine, and various op ed pages. Kaplan's a frequent guest on TV and radio. He's appeared on the Today, Today Show, Charlie Rose, Inside Politics, Book, TV, and other programs. An honors graduate of Cornell and the New York University School of Law, he lives with his wife and two sons in Westchester County, New York. So without further ado, I'm here to introduce David Kaplan.

Thank you. Thank you, Megan. I don't bring any gossip about the New York Giants or Super Tuesday, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. I don't even have any antitrust analysis about any current deals that have been in the news, though I am trained as a lawyer and if you have questions about antitrust, I'd be glad to not answer them afterward. But I do hope that I can still provide some lunchtime entertainment. And I'm really eager to have you ask questions about the boat or about Tom Perkins. Mind's Bigger is the biography of a revolutionary, amazing piece of high tech and the man who built it. The man is Tom Perkins, a larger than life figure in the history of Silicon Valley, who long before the HP scandal broke in 2006, was the man to see in Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist. He more so than individual entrepreneurs in the Valley. He was the person who was the hub of the various spokes in various areas of development and technology in the Valley. And more than a Steve Jobs, more than an Andy Grove, more, I would argue, than anyone in the history of the Valley. He was the person responsible for its modern creation. He came out in the 1950s and really over the course of now 50 years has seen it become what it's become. His venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, obviously was one of the Two main early venture backers of, of Google. And the 12 and a half million dollars that Kleiner Perkins invested in Google just a few years ago was worth 150 times over that on the date of the initial public offering and five times more. So that $12.5 million essentially has gone up 750 times since Kleiner Perkins invested. And that's in part why Tom has said that he thought of calling the boat not the Maltese Falcon, but the Maltese Google. The boat, the Maltese Falcon is a magnificent, absurd boat and I think is an interesting piece of technology unto itself. But I think, and this is the reason I wrote the book, it's a vessel, pun intended, through which to understand Perkins and in a larger sense, to understand Silicon Valley itself. Now, for those of you interested in writing books, let me just point out something at the outset. If you consider a biography, I would urge you to consider writing about a dead person rather than a living person because as I the other books I wrote were also heavily about living people. But in this case, when I'm writing about one individual in particular, you're going to get feedback or rushback or blowback from the individual. And with dead people, that's much less likely to occur. I wanted to show you though that Tom has a sense of humor. He emailed me a self portrait which is how he thought he was depicted in the book, which we can talk about. I'm not sure he's entirely right, but the reviews did think that he came across as a rather narcissistic, self involved individual. I think some of that was unfair. I think though, it has something to do with when you build $150 million sailboat, you're going to get accusations along those lines. Let me. What I want to do is talk a little bit about Perkins, who many of you may be familiar with as Google employees. And perhaps you heard Tom when he came here and spoke about his memoirs late last year. But I'll talk a little bit about him, a little bit about the boat, and I hope you come away with, if nothing else, some sense of why I think the boat is the ideal symbol for what makes Silicon Valley unique and how Perkins decision to take on the risk of building this boat and then to contain that risk if it didn't work is sort of representative for how he went about venture capital for 50 years in the Valley and how Kleiner Perkins, better than other firms in Silicon Valley, still goes about doing it. Also at the end, I have about 25 slides that I can show you more about some of the Features of the boat, which somebody described to me as high tech porn. It really is an amazing boat. I sailed on it on its maiden voyage across the Mediterranean in the summer of 2006. And I grew up sailing on Long Island Sound, but was not prepared for what this boat does and how it goes about doing it. Just to give you some sense of size, which is hard to get from the book cover, these two little objects in the front of the boat are the tenders for the boat that take people from the boat to shore or to other boats. Each of them are 30ft long. The one on the left, which has a deck in front, contains under the deck two berths, a small kitchen and a head. So you can sleep on the boat. You can go out for a few days. Extrapolating from that, you can see that the whole boat is about 300ft long, about the size of a football field. And each of the three masts are roughly 20 stories tall. What makes the boat, and he calls it a modern clipper ship, which I think is fair in the sense that the boat is a square rigger. The boats are square as opposed to the triangular sails that you'd be used to seeing or sailing in yourself. What makes the boat unique is the old clipper ships which were, which so captured the imagination of the world in the 1850s and 1860s, and other square riggers going back to the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. And before all of Those boats took 10, 20, 50, 60 people to control. Because you, in order to trim the sails, you had lines, you had ropes attached to the sails which you used to let them in and out. You had people climb the mast to let the sails down from the spars, the horizontal pieces of the rigging. And then the spar is also rotated about the vertical mass. On this boat, you don't need 50 or 60 people. You need one. There's one person inside the cockpit. You don't sail it from outside. Right in there, there's one person who sits at a control panel and makes everything operate by push button. And the way that's done is the masts themselves. These 20 story tall 35 ton sticks of carbon fiber rotate hydraulically. They turn and in order to be able to do so, they have to be freestanding. The old square riggers, to support their wooden mass, had wires that would come down and which would secure the mass when it bent and the boat was healed over. These masts are totally freestanding, which, which allows them to rotate. Because they're carbon fiber, they can bend if they didn't bend and flex, obviously when the boat healed over, all that load, all that weight and all that pressure from the wind would cause them to break. The spars instead of turning about, the mast are attached to the mast so that entire assembly rotates and it can rotate from that position all the way around to, to the same position on the opposite tack. Takes about, takes less than a minute. And you can do all three masts at the same time if you have too much sail area at the end. There are five sails on each mast. It looks like one piece of sail. And aerodynamically it roughly functions as one sail because they have the same curvature. Those horizontal sparse are curved so it operates almost as a wing. But if there's too much sail area up, if you're heeled over too far, there's too much water coming into the boat or the boat is being slowed down, or you're putting too much load on the mast, you just take in one of the sails. So there are 50. Obviously there are many different combinations of all 15 sails. And the boat frequently, if it's in a squall or near hurricane force winds, can sail with just one sail up and go actually pretty fast. In those conditions you're just trying to stay comfortable. But all 15 sails are independently controlled. And the way the masts come out, they're not furled on those horizontal pieces. They emerge out of the vertical mast. The mast is hollow, the, there's a slot in it and then the sail pulls out along tracks on the top and the bottom and that takes 30, 40 seconds and rarely gets jammed. It's quite remarkable. And the 19 crew members that Perkins employs are certainly there to help. The sparmaster, an amazing 24 year old guy who was in Mastering Commander, who Russell Crowe, said you should give up sailing and come be a movie star. You're that good looking. And he said no, I'd rather work on the Maltese Falcon for a few years. Well, and his job is to climb the mast. If one of the sails gets stuck and you have a harness on, it's relatively safe. But imagine climbing up a 20 story building that's flexing five feet in each direction in a 50 or 60 mile an hour wind. And. And your job is to unjam whatever's jammed. The 19 crew members are not there primarily to sail the boat. They're in charge of running the hotel. The boat holds can take 12 guests and in order to serve gourmet meals and keep everything tidy as well as run all the generators and the desalination plant and the two diesel engines. That's what all the crew is there for. In theory, you could sail the boat yourself. And in fact, more than many of these super yachts that tycoons own around the globe, Perkins does sail it himself. Much of the time that he's on board the boat, which is both good and bad for the crew. It's good in the sense that they like an involved, knowledgeable owner. It's bad in the sense that he's a pretty assertive fellow. And if you're a crew member, you can't always behave in the way that you might behave if the owner was in the back of the boat drinking martinis. But I learned on the maiden voyage, and I wrote about this in the book, just how involved he is. I was in my stateroom during the maiden voyage. We were going across the Mediterranean from Istanbul, where the boat was built, westward toward Malta, where we were unloading about 10 tons of extra equipment, and then up to the Riviera, where I was getting off the boat and the boat was going to be serviced. And at three in the. I'm in a double bed. And at three in the morning, I was woken suddenly and was rolled out of the bed. I just went flying into the cabinetry. No one had told me that there were wooden boards under the bed, lee boards, which you put up when you're in the bed in case the boat suddenly heals. How would I know? And I went flying. I'm as scared as the next guy. Had no idea what was going on. The boat was healed way, way over. And so I put on my deluxe terry cloth Maltese Falcon bathrobe and maneuvered down the hallway, up the spiral staircase that runs through the middle of the boat that connects the various decks and into the wheelhouse, where I found Tom Perkins in his pajamas with his pork pie hat on, in all his glory. He had gotten up a few minutes before, unable to sleep, and the passage cabin where he sleeps is right behind the wheelhouse. And he had decided it was a nice breeze, the moon was out. He wanted to see how fast the boat could go. I believe there were five sails up at the time he got up. He told the crew, I'm going to put up whatever it was, three or four more. I don't think we had all 15 up. And that, of course, made the boat heel from wherever we were sailing comfortably at about 10 or 11 degrees over to 18 or 19 degrees. It's perfectly safe. Unless you get rolled out of bed, the boat's not going to Capsize, but it's jarring. And the other guests on the boat were lifelong friends of Tom's, ranging in age from 60 into their 80s. They never made it up to the. To the bridge, to the wheelhouse, but of course in the morning, wanted to know what the hell had happened. And I said, tom, your guests probably want to sleep. And he of course said, not anymore. And we had the boat up, I think, till to about 17 or 18 knots, more than 20 miles an hour. The boat went faster on this trip. And when I wasn't on the boat, he had it up to its maximum speed so far, about 25 knots, surfing down a wave in a mistral off the coast of France. I'll show you in one of the pictures, but when on the side of the boat where the rails are, when you go to about 15 or 16 degrees, those rails are underwater. And obviously if you want to walk to the back of the boat, except through the boat, you then have to go to the windward side, to the uphill side. When we were at 18 or 19 degrees, water was just pouring over the side and the moon was out. I went and looked and took some pictures. It was quite spectacular. But unlike your sunfish or 15 foot or 25 foot day sellers, what do Google employees sail these days? What size is in vogue? Unlike a relatively narrow sailboat, which when the boat heals, you can hold on. And on a Sunfish, of course, you can see both ends. On a very wide boat like this, which is. It's 42ft wide at its widest point, you've got nothing to hold on to. So if you're walking down the middle of the boat and the boat heals suddenly, you go flying. There are no handrails, there's furniture. There might be a crew member walking by, but other than that, you're on your own. At another point, I was on the boat when there was a problem with the autopilot, and the boat came up into the wind, closer to the wind, which causes the boat to heal, and we went over to 24 degrees. That was an accident in which, if there was a lot of wind, in theory, could have stressed out the mass. Although Perkins will tell you and the engineers who built the boat, the naval architect, that in order to make these masts snap, you have to subject it to ridiculous amounts of worse. I think it was tested in a wind tunnel and on a computer screen. What's that called, Finite element analysis. That at 122 knots of wind, the mass still didn't break. Other stuff Might have happened. But anyway, when this accident happened, I was walking down the middle of the boat and there's nothing. You just go flying. The concern is in me. It's the sculpture and artwork that Tom has on board. But when that happened, because I made it then out to the front and we were over for about a minute or two, this part of the superstructure, the silver part, was in the water, and it's pretty scary. Tom thought it was great. He thought, and this is. And you know, that's part of who he is. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley, on Wall street and elsewhere, who own these big boats as toys, as trophies. They have big planes, they have big houses, whatever it is. And Tom likes to sail. He doesn't have a jet. His house isn't so large that it has its own gift shop. He loves sailing. And unlike most owners, he built this thing primarily to sail and not to show off a word a bit about, and this is my point about Silicon Valley, a word about the risk involved in this. The notion of having freestanding masts that work this way wasn't entirely his. A German engineer had thought of this back in the 1960s and 70s, the notion being that you would put giant sails like this, almost kites, on oil tankers. This was during the energy crisis, so the notion wasn't new. But before the availability of carbon fiber and other technologies, the ability to build this was risky. Tom decided as he got ever larger boats that. And he likes his to be bigger, thus the title of the book. He decided he didn't want to build a sloop or a catch normal two or three sailboat, because he'd already done that. And he landed upon this design which could very well have not worked. There were all sorts of material science problems and design problems which I could describe if any engineers wanted me to, but a lot of it's in the book. There were all sorts of places along the way where this project was going to fail. But what Perkins did, and he analogized to what he did when Genentech was founded in the 1970s, or a tandem computer, less so for Google, I think, because he regarded the challenge for a company like Google or Amazon in the 1990s as more of a marketing issue, not so much a technical issue, what he decided to do is, as he puts it, contain the risk. And the experiments they design in a wind tunnel and a towing tank to see if this rig would work, cost only maybe 10 to 15 million dollars. Of that, 150 million dollars. And he was prepared to shut the project down if it didn't work. Now, $50 million is a lot of money, but it's far less than others might have spent as you ramp up to building the whole thing. And he had an advantage because the hull was in existence. The hull was sitting, rotting in Turkey. It had been built on spec. So that saved two years off the project. The main issue were the materials and to a certain extent, software. To make all of this stuff work required software that he and the Italian shipbuilder design. But he regards the boat as sort of a symbol of how, of what he did over the course of 40, 50 years in Silicon Valley. Just a story about the mine's bigger part. Don't mistake that. There's a lot of ego involved in this. And Jim Clark, who you've all heard of as, as one of the founders of Netscape and healtheon and Silicon Graphics, Jim Clark has another one of these huge sailboats. There are only three which are 250ft or longer. And there's a competition between the two. And when Clark, who was then building his current schooner called Athena, when he heard that Perkins was building his next boat, he asked Tom how long it was going to be. And Tom made sure to give him a number that was 10ft shorter than it actually was to make sure that if Clark had notions of adding a longer bowsprit to the front of the boat to make it longer, the problem would be solved. I asked Jim Clark about that, and he didn't. He denied it, but he smiled and then he didn't deny it. So they're all quite aware of how large each of them are. Let me just. I'm eager to hear, if you have any questions, but let me just show you, if I can, some slides of the boat. This will give you. This is obviously from the bow, from the front of the boat, you get some sense of scale of the people on the foredeck looking at just one sail, with obviously four above that, and behind that is the cockpit. And you can maybe make out some of the crew members and maybe Tom in there. Those are anchors up front. This is what one of the old famous clipper ships looks like. This is the Cutty Sarak. And you can see all those lines coming from the sails down to the deck, where on this boat, I think there were 70 to 80 people. This was a ship in the 19th century that for 10 or 20 years was on the front page of the London papers, the New York papers. It was known throughout the world. This is where you sail the boat from. This is Looking out, this is the sailing station. That, that gray piece is how you steer the boat. These are all navigational systems and the engine controls are forward. But when you're sailing the boat, you sit in this seat right here. That's the same view looking back. And these are all touch screens. The touch screens are how you raise the sails, lower the sails, rotate the mast. In back is the center mast. That piece of carbon fiber comes obviously right down into the center of the boat. And when the mast rotates, that piece of carbon fiber turns. You put your fingers in there and the boat's heeling, you've got trouble. That's the same center mass coming straight down through the main atrium of the boat. There are glass floors with these small bright lights so that when you're walking, when you're walking around this staircase, it's spectacular. And you can look straight up from the bottom of the atrium to the top of the atrium, 40ft to the top of the mast. So it's a 240 foot spectacular view. This was the first time that they had attempted very primitively to see if the rig would work. That's an old dory dink. This is out in Amsterdam where the naval architects were and they jury rigged this square sail to see if the boat would sail. Because it's not intuitive that a sail that shape is going to make the boat moves, particularly at low speed. This is the first model, about 12ft long that was used in a wind tunnel. And obviously all the gadgetry on the sails is just measuring forces. This is the shed in Istanbul, or outside of Istanbul, where the masts were constructed. This is one of the masts. You can see it's essentially hollow inside. The width of the carbon fiber laminate is different along the run of the mast. Obviously down by the bottom where it's subjected to the most forces, it's thicker and it was actually cooked within that building. This is the first test rig of the spars. The horizontal pieces of the sail with the sailcloth is garden variety sailcloth. There's nothing high tech about it. They wanted to do this to see how the spars held up and at what point they broke, because nobody had ever attempted to do this with carbon fiber. In fact, he is now the largest purchaser of carbon fiber in the world, he says, outside of the U.S. air Force. This is the boat as it's finally finished, as it's coming out of the shed where they were putting the superstructure on and building all of the innards, putting in the engines and so forth. The next shot is also a slide of the boat as it's inched out along greased wooden rollers. I think it took them, I don't know, I think about 15 hours to get it out. And again you get some sense of scale. That's humanoid. And then the pro. I don't. I think I took these slides out. The process of hoisting with a crane the mass into the boat because obviously it's a very small area that has to go through is nerve wracking. That's Mr. Perkins, hours after the first mass was put in, working at the top, because he's a hands on kind of guy. He's crazy. I was offered the chance to go up on the boat even when it was at anchor and made it to about 10ft before I said no more. This is looking up one of the masts. You can obviously see the curvature of the spars of the yard arms. But here you can see the sailor just comes out of the mast and it pulls out along rollers, which was one of the hardest mechanical things they had to do. Because if you think about it, it might be blowing 50 miles an hour now. And if there's. If the sail comes out, if there's not enough tension or if there's too much tension, it doesn't work. It jams or the sail rips. This sail now is fully unfurled and then the next one comes out. I think in the first year of the boat, they had had a total of about 10,000 opening and closings. Had to send up the crew member six times. It was pretty flawless. And if that hadn't worked, that's what would have halted the project. That's one of the staterooms with Tom's very peculiar art. I don't think that's a self portrait. And that's. This cabin, which is the master cabin, is the entire width of the boat. This is a pretty nice space. This is the main dining room. You usually eat outside. That's obviously the Maltese Falcon. But this is probably the most vain thing on the boat. That is a skylight that has six metal sheets a la James Bond. That at the press of a button, open up. And since this is the middle of the boat, the place the light comes from is on a center piece of a table on the top of the boat. It's quite clever. This is the back of the boat. This is the most aft, the furthest. The mast furthest to the back, which is held on with these spider legs because there's not enough depth to the boat. To secure it any lower. And this is just a place to hang out on the back of the boat. This is looking forward. That's what it looks like when we're being fed. This is the salon area. This is where there's a big tv. This is the bar area. And quite cleverly there are these four ton doors that slide out from either side to bisect the bar. And that obviously allows in heavy weather because this area will all get wet. This allows you to then go inside and stay wet. This is. Stay dry. This is one of the slides of the boat heeling at about 15, 16, 17 degrees. Obviously a wash at 24 degrees. The top part of the superstructure was in the water. And that's when we had the little accident. This is the captain of the boat who was looking at what had Tom done. This is Tom's other boat. This is a great old trawler. It's got mat. It's got sails just for decoration and stability. But this is actually the largest of what were called the little ships of Dunkirk that were used for the evacuation of Dunkirk in World War II. And because you can't only own one boat. That's. That's his other boat, the one he doesn't use. This is his crew member. This is his crew, that's Tom. And they're all sitting along the bottom. So again you get some sense of scale and you can see the sail inside that opening. And then I think there are a couple more. Perkins is the one on the right and this is. This is another piece of one of his odder pieces of architecture. And I actually this was shot in the middle of the Atlantic on a transatlantic crossing when the picture that I had didn't work and when we were just about to print the book and I wanted this one, this was sent by one of his crew members. That's a shot of the boat sailing. The skylight. That's the top of the skylight built into one of the little picnic tables. And you get a. And that's the cockpit area. That's where the, where the boats, where the tenders are. So that gives you. This is sailing off of I believe Sardinia. But it gives you a sense of. It's quite graceful for something that big. I think that's all of them. I'm happy to take. Any questions? How do they load the tenders off into the water? And there is a crane, an arm that attaches to the yard arm in front that lifts the boat up and then just puts it in the water. And with a remote control yeah, well, it's. Yeah, front and back, but it's two cables attached to a long crane like arm that gives you just a shot of the boat from the air. So, I mean, it's great for straight line, but you can't tack it, can you? Oh, no, absolutely. But with the, with this, with the structure of the, I mean, what you call them, the spars, you can't turn the boat through the wind. You got to go. You couldn't turn the boat through the wind. Assume I should have brought. Anybody got another pen? It would have to rotate 270 degrees. This is the mast. This is the bottom yard arm. You're the wind. We're now sailing that way, close to the wind. But I want attack and we're going that. We're going that way. When we want to tack, you head into the wind, you rotate the mast and the yard comes all the way over. The yard rotates around the level of difficulty. The reason it's hard is the sails, as they're directly facing the wind, are back winded. If the boat's only going 2 or 3 knots, the boat won't turn. That was one of the things that they worried about, that they were practicing on that little dinghy. About 5 knots is what it takes to make the boat go at 5 knots. There's enough forward momentum to bring the boat through the tack without the boat being blown backwards. I mean, in theory you could sail the boat backward, but it's quite easy. We did experiments on the maiden voyage to see if it would be quicker in light air not to tack around that way, but to go in the reverse direction. What sailors called wearing around to jive the boat around. And it was not faster. It just took too long to get around. It's still a big object to turn, but you're rotating the mast 270 degrees to attack it from here to. That's right. But it goes fast. And he's raced the boat. There's obviously nothing like it to race. No other boat has been built with this rig. There may be one coming out in a few years, somebody else who wants something cool and new. But when he was out racing against other 200 foot yachts, which of course is just among friends, but they all hire Olympic racers to make their boat go faster. Tom doesn't, but the naval architect, the builder, they all come to advise him at the helm because he wants to win. This is off the coast of Italy. They spent a few months at the end of the summer of 2006, redoing the software. So whereas it took about a minute to go to make the tack of 270 degrees, they had it down to 15 seconds where it really whipped around. It's pretty. It's far faster than you would think it would be, given how big the whole thing is. And what surprised me is when you're on the boat, especially in the boat, you know, these masts are turning. You know, when you're sleeping, there's this kind of loud, jarring hydraulic noise. It's not a big deal, but it's less pleasant than the water rushing, you know, by your port. Thanks. You mentioned Tom and Jim Clark. What about Larry Elizon? Larry doesn't have one of these boats. Maybe it's because he's busy acquiring every enterprise software company in the world, but I think he's a person I'd have in mind as an example of somebody who's not fundamentally a sailor. He's a toy guy. And he has a racing sailboat named Sayonara. That's what's called a Maxia. Really fast, really high performance, which has won a lot of big races. And he's got the boat that he helped fund for the America's Cup. But the boats that he likes to use as a hotel are big power boats, just like Paul Allen. Paul Allen has several large boats. He does, but if you talk to his crew members, they indulge him. I mean, he knows more about sailing than Hillary Clinton. But he's not the kind of sailor that Tom Perkins is. And he will come aboard 15 minutes before the start of the race and leave 15 minutes afterward. One of the charms of Tom Perkins is he's really into it. I mean, when you're a control freak, you're a control freak in all aspects of your life. And the thing that made him successful as a venture capitalist, made him and Gene Kleiner successful early on, was that they were engineers. They weren't marketing or advertising guys. They understood the science of many of the companies they were backing. But also, my guess is even Larry and Sergey and Eric will tell you, venture capitalists are very hands on. Until Kleiner Perkins came along, most venture capital was sort of done by the sidelines and they weren't involved akin to what angel investors are, say today. What Perkins and Kleiner did was be hands on. And he is as hands on with this boat as one could imagine. The crew loves it and it drives the crew crazy at the same time. Any other questions? Why didn't they use carbon fiber sails or some more high tech for the sails? I've never heard of carbon fiber sails. There are sails made out of Kevlar and other more space age materials. Perkins View. When the naval architect out of Holland, who's one of the world's great naval architects, also designed Jim Clark's schooner, decided it was totally unnecessary. It was a way to save some money, but also it wouldn't improve performance. The. Skill's the wrong word. The beauty of the rig and the facility of the rig has to do with the shape of the spars, the shape of the mast. There's far less drag in the corners of these sails than on a traditional sail. And the spars don't interfere with airflow the way they do on other boats. The actual material in the sale doesn't make much difference. He would have spent the extra money on something more high tech, but totally unnecessary. The other thing that's interesting about these sales, as you go up them, they become thinner and thinner. And the reason for that is as a fail safe maneuver, if you couldn't get the sales down if everything went haywire in a squall, the sails are designed up top to just blow out if the wind gets strong enough to just rip. In olden days in the old clipper ships, they had shotguns on the boat so that if they were being blown over, if they were being overpowered, you would just shoot the sail. You poke a hole in the sail and tear it to shreds. But I had the same question you did. But they felt no need. I don't think it was being cheap. Thanks. Being a software engineer, I have a question about the software. So can you give some estimates or indications about how big the software is, how many people wrote it and how long it took? I think if there's any technical defect in the book, it's that I didn't spend a whole lot of time discussing the software. Mostly because each between not being a software engineer myself, I'm trained as a lawyer once upon a time. And between most of the software engineers being Italian, the chance of me learning how this stuff worked was small. But it's a small team. Tom did some of the writing of the software, but Perini Navi, which you could look at their website, which is a famous Italian shipyard, has a small band of software engineers who for whom this was their crowning achievement. But other simpler boats they do also big boats, 200, 150ft. Rupert Mur, they built a sailboat for Prince Rainier Monaco, Rupert Murdoch, others, they still require software to make that automation work. The guy who built it, the Perini is a fascinating study. He made his fortune in Italy automating the production of toilet paper, of tissue paper on giant rolls. What initially was done more by hand, he figured out as a self trained engineer in his teens how to make this stuff work. He grew up sailing and when he saw how many people it required to command 100 foot sailboat, he said, the secret here to getting rid of those people so that I have more space for my guests is to have automatic furling and unfurling of the sails. You can think, I mean, he, he wouldn't say it quite this way, but you could think of the taking in and out of sails as akin to what a toilet paper roll does. Some of that was a software issue as well, and he helps in that as well. But Jim Clark, when he, if you read New New Thing by Michael Lewis, he had a small brigade of people who founded a company called Seascape. Netscape. Seascape. He took them from Netscape, who designed a lot of the automation, a lot of the software for his boats. But this, as it's described to me by both Clark and Perkins, is a higher degree of difficulty given all the different things that have to work. And there also was a software issue. The boat will tell you how many sails it thinks you should have up. You can override it. It's not automated. Jim Clark's boat, he liked to brag with hyperbole that he could sail it from his desk in San Francisco, that it did everything itself. Perkins never lets computers sail this boat. You always have to tell it what to do. Because of course, as he says, given how Microsoft runs the computer, would you possibly let them run your sailboat? He's being facetious. It's obviously all, none of it's off the shelf software, but that's probably the best answer I can give. Yeah, you partially answered my question. So it doesn't run autopilot. Well, there is an autopilot the way any boat has, but there is not. There are no automatic decision makers who, with respect to taking in sails or putting up more sails like an airplane. Correct? No. If you tell it you want to sail in the direction of 10 degrees, it will do so. And it will also avoid a rock along the path or another boat. But beyond that, the rig, the revolutionary part, the way the sails work, you're controlling everything and there has to be somebody present at all times. I understand it also has an engine. It's two big diesel engines. So they kick in automatically. Well, you have to turn them on when there's no Wind, you turn them on. But when on the maiden voyage, the Mediterranean doesn't get a lot of wind. In the summer, we were under sail power about 80% of the time. It's quite remarkable that we'd have to use the engines. And it's obviously more fun sailing. And it's a lot cheaper. As I learned when we left Istanbul, the boat pulls up to a tanker to fill up takes about four hours. We put in, I think, 25,000 gallons of diesel. It takes a while because you put it into different locations because you don't want to sink the boat at one side. But after we took the 25,000 gallons, Perkins, of course, brought me the bill says they take American Express. Ha ha ha. But it's. It's among the things that are so expensive about the boat is obviously fuel. You figure it's probably a few million dollars a year just to operate. Forget about debt service, if there is such a thing. But between the crew, insurance and fuel, it's pretty expensive. Which is why, for this boat, not that you know, Tom Perkins was worrying about how to pay for it. This is the first of his boats that he charters out, that he rents out. He rents it out for about 10 weeks a year. These are typically Russian, Asian tycoons, people you've never heard of. Occasionally celebrities will rent out boats in this class. Tom hasn't had any, but it costs about a million dollars a week to charter. It's. Not so hot, I think. I don't remember, but I don't remember. It's many gallons a minute. And you also need. There are four generators on board which are always going to. You need the generators for lights, air conditioning for the rig, for turning salt water into water. The engines aren't. There are four generators. I think they often only had one generator going. How much power those use relative to the engines? I don't know. The diesels. There are two 1800 horsepower diesels, which it was explained to me in the world of sailboats is not that much. It'll cruise at about under engine power, maybe go. It can go up to 19 knots. Although cruising we usually did about 14 or 15. The boat didn't shake as much, wasn't as noisy, and you save a little bit on fuel. Sailing. I mean, I grew up on a 30 foot sailboat where five or six knots, maybe you get to seven or eight. This thing in a seven or eight knot breeze, you might be going five knots. You almost were going the wind speed. And when it was blowing 15 or 20 knots, we'd routinely be going 12, 13 knots. It was spectacular. And then the hull speed of the boat, which isn't really the hull speed, but it's an approximation. Hull speed is about 24 knots. But if you get it on a wave, if you're perpendicular to. To the wind or a little off the wind, and you surf down a wave, that's when he got it up to close to 30 miles an hour. I wasn't on for that, but I was on it when we had it. I think the fastest one I was on was about 22 knots. And even though it's big and even though you're up off the ground, it's pretty exhilarating. You still know you're in a sailboat and not the Staten Island Ferry. You can do anything you want. I mean, most of these boats, given the generators and the fuel they carry, can be at sea for months and months. There's no reason to be. Because they want fresh fruit and fresh lettuce. That's the limiting factor. You can freeze sushi, you can't freeze fruit. And actually the chef, the two chefs on the boat would tell me that they were the limiting factor to how far they would be away. The boats typically, all of these boats typically spend the summer in the Mediterranean and the winter in the Caribbean. They don't. And they try not to cross during hurricane season. So most of them come west in November. And to the extent that they do, a lot stay in the Mediterranean and then they go back in March or April. This boat is actually heading for the Panama Canal as we speak because he's going to take it to the Pacific for this year. I don't know if it's going to be the year, year and a half, but he intends to at least sail it to the Pacific. I don't know if he's planning to go around the world. Around the world is tricky because if you want to, if you're in the Pacific and want to get to the Mediterranean, your two choices, or around Africa, which is long, or the Suez Canal. And they don't like sailing through the Suez Canal because it's the Wild west, or east, as the case may be. A lot of piracy and craziness going through safety issues. And along the African coast, there are countries which you wouldn't go near because of risk. It was interesting. I mean, listening to Perkins and the crew talk, they had running debates about whether to have guns on the boat. I mean, there are a lot of these issues. Again, I was writing the book's a biography of a boat And a man, the two of them together. If Perkins hadn't been the owner of the boat, I wouldn't have written this book. And if Perkins had built the train or a plane, I doubt I would have been interested in it. Was the two things going hand in hand. But there was stuff about the world of super yachts and transoceanic, you know, boating, yachting, that would never have occurred to me. And the issue of guns on boats is a running concern when you go to the big boat shows, Fort Lauderdale, Monaco, wherever. Security is one of the issues, in part because these are rich people who a have legitimate concerns or think they have legitimate concerns. And they don't carry guns on this boat figuring they're going to do more harm than good. But I think they do carry one of these devices that was in the news a year ago, I think was used off the coast of Somalia, which, when you turn it on, sends out this deafening noise that essentially paralyzes, functionally paralyzes anybody in its path. So if you're approached by pirates, you can ward them off that way. It was a 30 or $50,000 toy being sold next to granite countertops. But it's a real issue. But that's one of the reasons people sometimes go back and forth between the Pacific and the Atlantic rather than go all the way around the world. He went around the world on a prior boat and said he had the time of his life. The thing that he talks about doing with this, but so far its talk is bring you to Antarctica. A prior boat he had brought to Antarctica. But it's a long trip and it's a hellish trip. You got to sail all the way down South America. I think he might do that if he ever attempted to break the great old clipper ship records from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn. But now he's going through the Panama Canal. And I don't. I mean, he. Listen, he's 76 years old. He's an adventurer. I think one of his disappointments and I. Tom, if you're listening to this, I don't know the answer. I think he's been a little disappointed that it doesn't go faster than it does. But part of his concern about trying to break this record, which is 70 or 80 days, if you have one engineering issue, one or some bad days of no wind, you're not allowed to turn your engines on, or if you get to the Cape of Good Horn and there's a hurricane which you're not going to sail through, you lose the record. To break the record, everything has to go right. It was fun for me going back into the 19th century and seeing all of these competitions being written about in the world press. It captivated the world. The records from New York to San Francisco, London to Shanghai, New York to Shanghai, people were really into this stuff. And when the boats came in to port, people wanted their tea shipments, but they also wanted to see if the record had been broken. And that's part of. I mean, that was part of what was fun writing about this because that lore of the 19th century is partly of what he was trying to bring back with a modern clipper ship. It has not been to the United States yet because there are tax and import issues where if he brings it in, he might have to. It might cost millions of dollars. But I think it'll be in New York harbor or San Francisco someday because he wants people to see it. Why do you think he cooperated with the book?

Thank you very much everyone for joining us.

Thank.