For Tech Pioneer, Sailing Is Simplified

Philippe Kahn’s Pegasus Racing was once a globe-trotting sailing team, but today, the good stuff is right at home in Santa Cruz. Story by Kimball Livingston for Sailing World:

Philippe Kahn started late, but in a few short years of going hard he won more races than most people manage in a lifetime. Then he declared, “I have to learn how to sail before I die.”

If someone told you the man now sails only small boats—after 15 big-boat races from California to Hawaii, three of them doublehanded, two with doublehanded records—you might wonder if a spark had burned out. The way Kahn sees it, no. A light flashed on.

But before we get to that, let’s make sure we know who we’re talking about. The short course on Kahn is that he invented the camera phone—and it wasn’t his only score in tech—and it’s been a journey, and now he does his sailing out of the tiny harbor at Santa Cruz, an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. Solid and fully fit, but heavy-set, and lately with a COVID beard, these days he’s focused on biosensing. “I don’t need to work anymore,” he says, “but I love what I do. I can’t help it.” And even the biosensing has ties to sailing. So, how did Philippe Kahn become Philippe Kahn?

It started with being French, and that should tell us a lot. His single mother was an Auschwitz survivor, a concert violinist and, at one time, an officer in the French Resistance. There is nothing one-dimensional in that, and Kahn’s education included a master’s in mathematics and a master’s in musicology and flute performance. By that time, he was already dreaming of crossing oceans under blue skies. – Full report