The yacht also contained some of the most remarkable modern art ever seen aboard a sailing superyacht. The Maltese Falcon was launched by Perini in 2005, a ground-breaking 88m, square-rigged sailing yacht equipped with three free-standing carbon fibre masts from which 15 squaresails could be set at the press of a button. Despite Perkins’s devotion to Mariette, the seed of an idea for a new and technically advanced yacht had already been sewn. Six years later in 2001, Mariette won the Yachting World Concours d’Elegance Trophy at the America’s Cup Jubilee Regatta in Cowes competing against some of the world’s finest yachts. It re-emerged as Les Voiles de St Tropez. Perkins was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and the controversial incident led to a complete overhaul of the regatta’s structure. He raced Mariette hard, but in 1995 tragedy struck when a collision between the 42m schooner and the 6-Metre Taos Brett IV during a regatta in St Tropez, then known as La Nioulargue, resulted in the drowning of one of Taos Brett’s crew. He was later married for four years to the author Danielle Steel. His meticulous restoration of the famous yacht in the 1990s, using original drawings from the MIT library, was an achievement in itself and helped him cope with the death of his first wife, Gerd Thune-Ellefsen, a Norwegian he’d met more than 30 years earlier while skiing near Lake Tahoe. His thirst for competition was demonstrated when he campaigned with considerable vigour the magnificent Nat Herreshoff-designed schooner Mariette of 1915. Both yachts were built by Fabio Perini, whose inventive brilliance attracted the like-minded Perkins. His large yachts included the 43m Andromeda la Dea and then a 47m ketch of the same name aboard which he completed an eventful circumnavigation including a grounding on a shale bank in Alaska. Perkins was a passionate and highly knowledgeable sailor whose earliest experiences were in Lightning dinghies on Long Island Sound. Netscape, AOL, Sun Microsystems and later Amazon, Google and a host of other household names were all KPBC investments. The firm’s science-based instincts and close involvement in fledgling companies helped develop the likes of bio-tech pioneer Genentech, whose cancer and insulin drugs helped turn the company into a giant. In his spare time he started a laser technology company to fund other projects before co-founding his venture capital business Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) which ignited the tech boom in California. As an electrical engineering and computer science graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Perkins joined Hewlett Packard in the 1960s launching and running its mini-computer division.
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