Shai Agassi had just accepted the top job at software giant SAP when he did a U-turn, deciding to return to his entrepreneurial roots and start a venture capital–backed project to end the world’s dependence on oil as a transportation fuel. Agassi, 40, has attracted substantial interest in his global vision: His company, Better Place, has raised more than $200 million and has agreements with governments in Israel, Denmark, Australia, Hawaii, California, and Ontario to build an infrastructure of battery-exchange and recharging stations to support the mass deployment of electric vehicles. Full-scale production of electric cars by Renault-Nissan is planned for 2011. How did you go from global corporate executive to energy entrepreneur? I had a sliding-doors moment in 2006—a moment when if you turned one way, your life and career would go in one direction, and if you turned another way, you would go off on a completely different track. I was in Paris, and I was pondering whether to continue on and become co-CEO at SAP. It was a job I had been groomed for, and I was ready to lead. But I was also fascinated by the idea of powering vehicles with wind- and solar-charged batteries. At that point, Better Place didn’t even have a business plan—it was just an idea. And the moment could have passed me by quite easily. I remember walking down the Champs-Élysées, so that I could think. I paced it one way, imagining myself at 50 years old having decided to stay at SAP. I imagined not only that SAP had succeeded under my leadership but that we had beaten Microsoft—we were number one. Then I walked the other way, picturing myself at 50 but having left SAP and pursued my dream. I pictured the worst-case scenario—that Better Place had been a failure. At five o’clock in the morning, after walking all night, I said to myself: “This is the sliding-doors moment, and there’s no question which path I should take. I’d rather fail at Better Place than succeed at SAP because no other job could compare to trying to save the world.” When did you come up with this business model? At a 2005 meeting of the WEF’s Forum of Young Global Leaders, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, asked participants, “How do you make the world a better place by 2020?” It was intended as a conversation starter, but I took it seriously. Every night I went to Wikipedia, picked a term like “ethanol” or “natural gas,” and studied for hours. Eventually I wrote a white paper proposing a plan that relies on existing technology: cars that run on lithium-ion batteries recharged by renewable energy. Customers buy the cars and the miles, but Better Place owns the batteries (I took the idea from mobile phone companies, which charge for minutes). Battery-exchange stations would allow drivers to drop off spent batteries and get fully charged replacements in less time than it takes to fill up at the pump. They’d also be able to plug in at home and in parking lots. In places like Israel and Hawaii, which have pressing political or economic motives for ending their oil dependence, this makes perfect sense now, but in the long run, the whole world will need to switch to electric, for all the reasons we hear about so often: cost, energy security, limited oil resources, and carbon emissions reduction. Once you had the idea, what did you do with it? I presented my plan at a few conferences and won support from the Israeli government, which has a stated goal of being oil-free by 2020. Then I went to petroleum companies, car companies—anybody who would listen—and handed them the plan. They all said the same thing: “If it’s such a great idea, why don’t you do it yourself?” I accepted that challenge, but I continue to hope that other companies will get involved. I want Better Place to attract not only investors but also imitators. If the world is to end its oil addiction, hundreds of millions of electric cars must be put on the road in the next five to eight years—if it’s just 10 million, 20 million, 30 million cars, we’re dead. Cars are not a niche market, and climate change will not wait for us to invent the perfect car, battery, or business model. For us, that means a global vision of people driving electric cars across not only Israel, Hawaii, Australia, and Denmark but also the rest of the United States and China. Change of that magnitude will require the efforts of many people and many companies, but we will all benefit from turning the vision of oil-free transportation into reality.
