How could such a seemingly desperate act be associated with Raburn? This is a guy who counts among his almost 200 private investors Bill Gates -- best man at Raburn's wedding, for goodness' sake -- Red Poling, former chairman of Ford; Bob Eaton, former cochairman of DaimlerChrysler; serial entrepreneurs like Al Mann, who sold two companies for $3.8 billion last year; and Sam Williams, whose Williams International makes the power plant for the Tomahawk cruise missile and whose startlingly efficient microjet engines are to exclusively supply the Eclipse 500. Raburn knows everyone who is anyone in the technoindustrial complex. Why get into bed with Ilia Lekach, whose Nimbus was only recently transmogrified from the steaming remains of a dot-com called Take to Auction? Answer: because no other putative air-taxi operator was giving Eclipse an order for 1,000 planes.
An investment banker might point to the state of the capital markets, where raising start-up money now is close to impossible. A classicist might be tempted to note the Greek myth of Icarus, whose ambition and heedless self-confidence caused him to fly too close to the sun, which melted the wax holding together the feathers of his fabricated wings. Somewhere between those poles is the truth: Raburn had entangled himself with Lekach in a flight of fancy formed of desire, promotion, ego, capital requirements -- and hope.
A Luminous Cloud
"In terms of raising money, this is the hardest thing I've ever done."
From his office window in the hangarlike building that Eclipse has spent $1.5 million refurbishing at Albuquerque international airport, Raburn stops in midthought to point out an F-18 fighter blasting heavenward and, moments later, a perfectly preserved 1930s-vintage DC-3, arguably the most beautiful aircraft ever made. "Look at that," he says with an expression that can be called nothing less than lust. "Polished to within an inch of its life."
In his own phrase, Raburn is an aviation nut. "It goes back to the days of going out to the airport when I was in knee pants to pick up my dad [an aeronautical engineer]. Airplanes were always the coolest," he says, giving the word a West Coastian third syllable -- coo-uhl-est -- suggesting the motivating urge of high-tech entrepreneurs everywhere. "How much luckier can you be to work at something you're passionate about?" he asks. "And get to use the skills and experience you've been involved in for 30 years?"
Among Raburn's personal aircraft is the tritailed Constellation he bought from John Travolta for $100,000 and then overhauled to the tune of $1 million. Though that suggests he is rich, Raburn won't discuss the extent of his wealth. But he was one of Microsoft's first employees -- it's there. He says he has "a lot less than $10 million" of his own money in Eclipse. "At this stage two years ago we would have done an IPO and got all the money we need," he says, wryly nostalgic for a time when all you needed was an idea, a track record, and the right phone numbers.
Raburn has all three, but times have changed. He has been compelled to pitch ... and pitch ... and pitch. His frustration is palpable. On the edge of creating a vehicle designed to destroy the airlines' monopoly on affordable air travel -- think of what hordes of decentralized personal computers did to the mainframe -- he was in April by his own count about $120 million short.
Little wonder that when Ilia Lekach had come with an offer for 1,000 planes -- at a time when Eclipse's order book held deposits for only something like 172 -- Raburn was receptive. Here was a fellow visionary. Nimbus was prepared to set up a nationwide air-taxi service, point to point, anywhere, anytime. Even a visionary might have done well to consider the common dictionary definition of nimbus -- "a luminous cloud."
"Nobody is going to take this away from me. I'm a hard man to take things away from."
--Ilia Lekach
But Raburn did not lose a beat. Someone -- just as he had predicted, it was someone from outside traditional aviation -- was going to take the planes he had not yet built and turn them into America's first national air-taxi service. By Raburn's reckoning, Nimbus would be merely the first of a series of operators to create a market for up to 200,000 planes over the next two decades. Of course, not all those planes would be Raburn's; Eclipse's success would spark competitors. "All I want," Raburn says in teasing reference to his Microsoft upbringing, "is my natural 75% of the market."
Though he bridles at the term, Eclipse may be Raburn's last hurrah. His track record is mixed. He has had some successes (the early days with Gates, a key position at Lotus, his stewardship of software pioneer Symantec), a so-so period in venture capital, and at least one outright flop as the force behind Slate, a developer of applications for pen-based computing. Raburn says Slate was simply 10 years too early. "In technology," he says, "if you don't fail once in a while, you're not trying hard enough." He is clearly respected in the computer industry, which seems to regard him with a kind of old-school fondness. Though he and Gates parted company at Microsoft, they remain close. Raburn grows nearly misty-eyed recalling his 50th birthday party, which Gates hosted. "He did a terribly nice thing," Raburn says.
How then to explain that Raburn has lost touch with the underlying cyclical event? Ask him how old he is, and he gets it wrong. He is not 52, as he says, but 51. For Raburn, this is just the kind of error you would expect: his personal life has been subordinated to the endless struggle to manage engineering, FAA certification, marketing, new methods of manufacturing, sales, and -- always, always, always -- finance.
Pointing Fingers
In his modest boardroom in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Ilia Lekach knows how old he is. He will tell you he will be 53 in three days. An apparent success at running Perfumania, a chain of 250 mall shops, along with a related fragrance business, Lekach makes his money licensing and selling designer scents. He knows how to sniff out an idea. Deliriously infected by James Fallows's 2001 book Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel, he has plunged into starting a national air-taxi service in precisely the same way he calls the book's author (whom he has never met) "Jimmy" -- he just does it. Nimbus's business plan is elegantly simple: (1) buy 1,000 Eclipse jets, (2) base them in small airfields close to underserved cities or travel-dependent corporations around the country, and (3) hire sufficient people to count the money.
