{"product_id":"books-mine-s-bigger-tom-perkins-and-the-making-of-the-greatest-sailing-machineever-built-by-david-a-kaplan","title":"Mine's Bigger Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing MachineEver Built","description":"\u003cp\u003eTom Perkins had a dream. It wasn't to get rich, acquire power, or marry into fame. As the man most responsible for creating Silicon Valley, he had done all that. His venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield \u0026amp; Byers, remains the most celebrated money machine since the Medicis. He'd helped found Genentech and fund Google. And in 2006 his resignation from the Hewlett-Packard board triggered the revelation of a spying scandal that dominated the front pages. Along the way, he also managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France and become Danielle Steel's Husband No. 5.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eNo, as he hit his seventies, Perkins wanted to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever--the \"perfect yacht.\" His fantasy would be a modern clipper ship--as long as a football field, forty-two feet wide, with three masts each rising twenty stories toward the heavens. This $130 million square-rigger--The Maltese Falcon--would evoke the era of magnificent vessels that raced across the oceans in the nineteenth century. But the Falcon is more than a tribute to the past. Gone are all the deckhands to climb the yardarms. Gone is the intricate rigging that helped give the square-riggers of yore their impressive look. Instead, the Falcon's giant carbon-fiber masts are entirely freestanding and rotate by computer. The bridge looks like something out of Star Trek. And the fifteen huge sails unfurl at the touch of a screen. In short, this is a revolutionary machine--the most significant advance in sailing in 150 years.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWith keen storytelling and biting wit, Newsweek's David A. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of an extraordinary project and inside the mind of a larger-than-life character. We discover why any sane man would gamble a sizeable chunk of his net worth on a boat; we meet the cast of engineers who conspired with him; and we learn about the other two monumental yachts just built by gazillionaires that Perkins is ever eyeing. In a battle of egos on the high seas, Perkins loves to preen, \"Mine's better! Mine's Bigger!\" On the Falcon's climactic maiden voyage across the Mediterranean--sixteen hundred nautical miles from Istanbul to Malta to the Riviera--we revel with Perkins as his creation surges along at record-breaking speeds.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis is the biography of a remarkable boat and the man who built it. More than a tale of technology, Mine's Bigger is a profile of ambition, hubris, and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"World of Books ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53673526329617,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780061227943.jpg?v=1781526428","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/books-mine-s-bigger-tom-perkins-and-the-making-of-the-greatest-sailing-machineever-built-by-david-a-kaplan","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}