Christoph Ballin is a very smart guy. I realized this as I stood in my hotel room with him in Cannes, France, staring at two pairs of tuxedo pants strewn across the bed.
Hear me out.
Ballin is the founder of Tyde, a Munich-based electric boat startup that partnered with BMW to produce a 43-foot foiling vessel called The Icon. Thanks to BMW’s considerable influence, The Icon was making its world debut, not at a boat show, but rather the evergla-morous Cannes Film Festival. I had met Ballin for dinner the evening after our sea trial, where he had mentioned that he had come into two tickets to a film premiere the next evening. We could attend, but we’d need to find tuxedos on extremely short notice.
Luckily, I had a guy. A girl actually—an old friend who was working events for the festival. She was able to procure us two gratis tuxedos the next morning, with the
