At midmorning and max ebb we hit the Race-the 7.5-mile eastern venturi of Long Island Sound through which nearly thirty million cubic feet of water flow back and forth every twelve hours-and left Valiant Rock to starboard. Only an hour earlier I'd learned that starboard meant "on your right as you're looking forward." There was little wind, but three-foot standing waves had built up as the water ran fast over boulders and complicated hard-rock topography hundreds of feet below us.
A summer Saturday, there were dozens of boats angling for a piece of the northeastward migration of striped bass. There were dark-skinned working-class men in the most modest of open aluminum-hulled skiffs, boats incapable of surviving a significant turn of the weather. There were fiberglass center-console fishing boats, some with sleek flush-mounted hardware designed to minimize the possibility of snagging a fishing line during a cast or a recovery. Their better-heeled and usually lighter-skinned owners were sometimes accompanied by a wife, a pretty girl, or a child. There were also full-cabined cruisers of forty or even fifty-five feet, with racks of well-maintained rods and reels leaning against a three-story scaffolding topped with an expensively instrumented perch I learned to call a "flying bridge." And there were commercial fishing boats, some with crowded decks of paying passengers, and some with decks piled high with nets and lobster traps; all showing rust and use and insufficient maintenance.
There were also sailboats of all sizes coming and going, some freighters, some ferries, larger commercial fishing boats, yachts, and the occasional super yacht en route to somewhere. The places and the names-Fisher's Island, Montauk, Stonington, Newport, Cuttyhunk, Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod-each had a unique appeal. For every vacationer or sailor or merchant seaman, there was a set of sounds or sights or circumstances evoking memories and feelings of discovery or awe. I, in the fresh air on the foredeck while everyone else was in the HVAC'd splendor of the Lucky Strike's enclosed quarters, was collecting these experiences for the first time and would never forget them.
We made it through the Race, not that there had been any doubt, and entered those not-quite-oceanic waters of Block Island Sound. The wind became light and the sea flattened out before us. Sailboats rocked but made no way, their sails flapping as we ran by them at twenty knots. Low-lying clouds moved in on us and we slowed, soon to a crawl, as we were enveloped in gray gloom. The cold upwelling ocean waters hit the warm and damp summer air, making wet murky haze all around. I'd learn eventually that the same thing happened in San Francisco, but on a much larger and more regular scale. When visibility shrank to a boat length, we stopped.
You could hear foghorns going off on the mainland and from the rocky or pointy corners of Block Island. There was nothing to see. The boat's radar would have sufficed, but Jay had something else in mind.
While Lucy watched TV below decks, and Jay's parents had a late breakfast in their stateroom, and the chef prepared tea and Portuguese soda bread with brandy, Jay and Vladik and I lounged and talked in the glass enclosure of the main deck. Jason had his feet up and half listened. If and when the weather cooperated, the sun would burn off the soupiness by the late morning, and then we'd go sit out on the aft sun deck and wait for the sight of Block Island emerging from the gray murk.
Among the seemingly unconnected things that Jay had had me working on all summer, I was tracking down the résumés of academic faculty from San Diego to St. Petersburg, Russia. They were thought leaders in genomics, of course, and agriculture, of course, but also in large-scale bioreactors, fast-cycle hybridization, micromachines, thermodynamics, economics of energy markets, and liquid fuels.
In each category, Jay had a set of questions he wanted me to answer and attributes he wanted me to characterize. Were they affiliated with the leading large companies, or the hottest small companies in their fields? Who were their students and where were they employed or when were they graduating? Did their networks of friends overlap with his, or with each other's? What patents had they filed, and who had licensed them? Instead of making a movie, in which case he'd have been both producer and director, he was producing, as financier, and then would direct, as ceo, a new venture of some kind.
Vladik said, "I'm looking forward to getting in the water. Lakshmi, do you dive?"
"Yes, but I haven't in more than a year."
"You can get some diving in later, but let me tell you about this idea I'm trying to shape," Jay said. It's not so much that Jay was all business, but he was all himself. His moods, his interests, drove every moment you spent with him. His agenda was in his head and was occasionally shared.
Looking back all these years and watching myself among the two men, I'm surprised I wasn't even more deferential. I was silent, waiting for the bristles on Vladik's back to flatten, and for Jay to begin.
"Energy, you know, is the mother of all markets. Look at the largest companies in the world. Look at the increasing demand coming from China and India, not to mention Korea, Brazil, and Russia. Imagine Africa someday. Energy is where we have to focus genomics. If we can own the ip that helps us grow our own fuel more efficiently than anyone else, we'll have the mother of all exits."
He went on to explain in detail how the Exxons of the world had had to invest billions upon billions, and harness governments to fight their wars, in order to get control of production of a commodity. Sure, there were differences between the sweet crude of Maracaibo and sulfur-rich barrels from Canada, and the extraction costs varied enormously between Bahrain and Bakersfield, but at root, the products were the same. He followed with a lesson in the history of exploration and refinement and distribution.
He did not say, as Nobel Prize-winning chemist and discoverer of C60-buckminsterfullerene, aka the buckyball-Rick Smalley had said in a talk I heard at Princeton, his alma mater, during my freshman year, "Cheap, clean energy is the world's most important problem amenable to a technical solution." Jay cared about the fact that there was an insatiable hunger for liquid fuels. His work might be good for mankind, but that was incidental.
"The problem with energy as a startup market, though, is that it takes too much money. You'll see the venture guys go running after it in the next few years, but I think most of them will fail because of the capital. They'll exhaust the capacity of their own investors. There will be new investment models, and maybe they'll find a way to pull later-stage investors into the deals."
My head was swimming with all the new terms, but Jay was magnetic. Every few sentences he'd insert a comment like, "Isn't that fantastic?" into his soliloquy, and with his boyish smile, even if you didn't really understand what he was talking about, you felt you had to say yes, or project some flat but not too flat affect back at him, to get him to release you from his gaze.
"I think we can be huge, but without requiring all that money. Intel owns a $30 or $40 billion business in microprocessors, not because other companies can't make them, or can't make them better." Jay threw a look at Vladik, a coded compressed message that hinted at the lessons the two had shared over the years, and one that carried more content than the words he took time to say out loud. "If you look at all the elements that go into a computing solution, microprocessors are just one layer in a tall stack of layers. There's the operating system, there are compute boxes, there's hardware that goes in boxes or connects to other boxes, there are applications, there's purchasing, there's training. Intel gets their billions because they own one of the layers of one of the most widely used computing solutions. Their ip, awarded patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office and protected by the US judicial system, and by parallel structures in other jurisdictions, connects layers in the stack in a way no one else is allowed to do without Intel's permission. They do really have a great solution, even if it's not exactly Pangloss's solution. There's so much inertia to change in the other layers of the stack that they're almost impossible to displace.
"Intel's position would be even better if they didn't actually have to build the factories, which cost billions, and make the processors themselves. If they could just license the ip to someone else and collect a royalty, yes, that would be better. Then they'd be almost like a software company whose marginal costs of production are nearly zero. A software company that controls a layer in the stack might be even more profitable than Intel. That would be Microsoft. Are there going to be software layers of the energy solution stack? Can there be proprietary products that every energy producer or every energy consumer has to use, so we get huge volume and monopoly pricing?" He laughed and then continued, "I mean proprietary pricing? Lakshmi's been my research librarian, and Vladik, I want you to help me put a team together."
"Let me guess," Vladik said. "You mean to pull together a team to make new genes, insert them in your GMO corn, and get best-in-class conversion efficiency into biofuels. And you'll call it CornFuelIx, right?"
"No, we'll call it Orrigeneometrix. Isn't that great?" He waited for all of us to say, "Yeah, Jay, that's great!" but none of us did, because it was too awful. First, the name was all about Jay and not the enterprise. Second, it could have been the world record holder in the category "Most Uninformative Suffix."
"Jay, why not truncate at Orrigen?" I said.
"Even Darwin would have liked it," Vladik said.
"You're right. You're right! That's great! I'm glad you like the name I thought of."
Still, we weren't thinking that much about the name, anyway, much as when I someday receive a proposal of marriage, I don't expect the first thing I'm going to reflect on will be the cake.
Jay moved ahead, asking Vladik, "Can you work on this now? Think of Lakshmi as your assistant for," and he paused to look at me, "Lakshmi, how many more weeks will you be working with us?"
"Six."
"So, Vladik, you two can get a lot started in the next six weeks. I'm not expecting you to play an operating role here, just to help me set things in motion, interview some people, set up some systems. You know I don't like doing that."
Vladik later told me that he had wanted to ask Jay about equity, rather than just nod as if there was nothing more to discuss. He had been about to do it when another memory overwhelmed him and he decided to wait. Once upon a time, when he was only a green teenage consultant, he had spent most of a day trying to get a hiring manager's attention about payment for his first week's work, and the guy kept avoiding him. Having failed with subtlety, he tried a direct approach. "Heh, Mike, can we have a few minutes to talk about this?" Mike, the manager, had been uncharacteristically formal that day, even wearing a suit. "Vladik. We're trying to get out of here at 4 o'clock today, so we can make it to Nassim's funeral." Nassim, one of the staff, had been fatally electrocuted while working late and alone a few days earlier, a fact known to everyone but Vladik. The embarrassment he felt always came rushing back to him whenever he had to open a conversation about his comp.