The Long Tailpipe - Shai Agassi's Blog

TED 2009

It has been a very long time since I posted here. In a sense, we tried to quiet down this voice so that BetterPlace.com will become the official voice of our efforts.

I decided to reopen this channel today, due to the exceptional event of the posting on TED.com of my TEDtalk from February this year. For those of you who get to this blog or to BetterPlace.com after hearing about our project for the first time (where have you been hiding people??) there is a ton of extra material on the site’s video section. One of my all time favorites is still the one from Kennedy school at Harvard late last year.

TED this year was a very different experience for me than my first TED in 2007. I was still at SAP, had resigned twice already, and was on somewhat of a mental break for a couple of weeks. TED’07 was my first chance to experience TED after so many of my YPO friends raved about their experience at the conference. I spent the 72 hours in Monterey drinking from the fire hose. What an experience. Not only the smarts of the people, but what most impressed me was the general sense that the smartest people in the world are now dedicating themselves to solve the biggest problem in the world. My reaction was that Gates changed the rules of the game, when he decided to move into philanthropy and now all the silicon valley geeks found themselves in a new race. The race was defined by not who can give the most, rather by who can generate the biggest impact per buck spent.

I was anonymous, sitting next to giants. I could see myself in my imagination’s eye on that stage telling the story of BetterPlace, before I knew how there was a story, a company, or how it will be calles. Indeed I was so anonymous, that a young Google employee told me at one of the dinner events after a conversation on the world of software that “You are pretty good. Would probably make a good manager at Google, maybe even a VP” and offered to put in a good word for me. Given that I was the president of products at SAP at that time, I guess she meant it as a compliment, somehow.

Roll the clock forward by exactly two years, and TED ‘09 is a very different scene. The wired article by Dan Roth, published by the “other Chris Anderson” has probably 100% circulation within the TED community. Most people had ideas to share with me in person (that’s what TED is all about, Ideas worth sharing). No longer anonymous, we had some pretty amazing experiences at this year’s TED. A night with Robin Williams, Ben Zander and Daphne Zuniga (how do you know you are surrounded by geeks? everyone recognized her as princess Vespa of Spaceballs, not as the star of Melrose place...) was quite remarkable experience off the TED limelight. Still the talks were amazing. And as they start streaming in over TED.com, one can see how much Chris Anderson and company had outdone themselves this year.

As to my talk, well, 18 minutes are never enough. Chris almost pulled me off stage at the last minute, and then was gracious enough to pull me back on stage to take an ovation. What a class act he is!

I will probably publish some follow up presentations over our web sites. Think of them as mini-TEDtalks. They should complete the picture as to why the science, the economics, the social contract, and the execution aspects of our company and effort are so compelling. I just didn’t have enough time to wrap it all up on stage at TED. I will make sure though to keep every one of them mini talks to less than 18 minutes. I promise...

Tom Friedman's Column

In May, I sat down with Tom Friedman of NY Times and flat world fame. It wasn't our first time to huddle together. We go back to a number of interesting touch points all of which share the same pattern - I have some thought which bugs me and Tom puts it in perspective to clarify my own thoughts even to me.

Tom and I first interacted meaningfully at the Saban Forum in 2005. Haim Saban invited me to take part in a panel where Tom was undoubtedly the marquee performance and I came in to put an Israeli-American perspective after his flat world. Tom gave everyone a taste of his usual flat-world performance and I was thrown in for the lions - in other words - no one wanted to speak after Tom so they let the young guy from SAP take the fall.

The next year at Saban '06, I was thrown in after Daniel Yergin, author of "The Prize". That year I detailed my very crude plan for ending Israel's oil addiction and President Peres picked up on it to push me onto this journey. Tom was sitting to my left and asked for the microphone for 5 minutes - which is unusual because you only get 3 minutes for comments. He gave a fantastic summary and perspective on how Israel, if it did what I proposed, will serve as a trial state for the US. He added a few more words of broader perspective, which I will keep private to protect the forum rules. 

Since then, Tom and I keep meeting in every possible forum on energy, climate and geo-politics (I suspect that he is in more of them than I go to...). He has been tracking our path, and I finally got him to sit in our proto-1 car and take it for a spin. The result you can read in today's NY Times column titled "From Texas to Tel-Aviv".

I was called various different things regarding my sales skills. I must admit, some of them were not as nice as "selling Camels to Saudi-Arabia". The more I thought of that metaphor the more I like it. Camels are a mode of transportation that is extremely efficient in using a scarce resource. We will make sure our car though will not be designed by committee.

As to T Boone Pickens - well, I never met him, but I am now very intrigued by thethought of seeing what happens when the two of us get together and think. I suspect one day you will find someone who writes the story of that meeting. Tom will get the bragging rights for being the matchmaker.

I've seen the future

Next time you say something cannot be done - check this out...

I am amazed by these robots - one of the most amazing display of integrated mechanics/ingenuity.

The Better story in 7 minutes

I was invited to speak on a panel at the Brookings institute in DC last week. The event was coordinated by David Sandalow, who is simply brilliant in all that relates to policy about energy. His book "Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States' Oil Addiction" is a masterpiece, and you should read and send to your favorite candidate. Just add a small note saying - "go full electric if you can, don't stop at plug-in hybrids". Kidding aside, we are all on the same page, first let's put an electric conduit into the car, then disrupt the pricing model so that consumers use electrons to drive. And please generate the new electrons through clean renewable sources.

I was on a panel moderated by Zoom's author's Vijay Vaitheeswaran, who was very gentle with me given I broke the time rules. I was asked to go for 3 minutes, and unfortunately gone a bit overboard - but the segment is probably the shortest explanation of PBP on video right now... so here goes

you can also see the entire panel here

President's conference

Israel has been blessed with a unique leader in the form of President Shimon Peres. Most people know President Peres for his relentless work for peace in the middle east for which he received the Nobel in 1994. Those who have read his biography know that President Peres has been working for the last 60 years on a single mission - the independence of the state of Israel. That mission takes a different form with every generation, yet he has never stopped working, and I suspect he also never stopped worrying.

President Peres was blessed by working with and for a unique leader in the form of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. Ben-Gurion never stopped worrying, even at the best moments of the state he saw the disaster looming around the corner. A friend of Ben-Gurion metaphorically said that the founders of the state would stroll around discussing the establishment of the future state. Suddenly, Ben-Gurion would wander off for a few moments and shoot a rocket into the horizon and then rush back to join them. Three years later they would all come to a flattened mountain and recognize it was that rocket, shot three years back, that got them over the hurdle.

So, when I was asked by the President to come speak at his conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the independence of Israel, I was honored beyond words. When I learned that the President himself will moderate the session - on pathbreaking leadership - I got a bit apprehensive. How do you speak of pathbreaking leadership in front of the giant on whose shoulders you are standing?

If there is one hero in the Project Better Place saga it is President Shimon Peres. Until the moment I met the President I was merely solving a puzzle - more out of mental curiosity than out of a real belief I can get anything done. I put pieces together in my mind and wrote papers about the state of the puzzle. The President took that theoretical paper and put me to the test - he asked me the tough questions:

1. can you really do it?
2. Is there anything more important than getting the world off oil
3. Can you raise the money for it?

Then he asked two more questions - why do you think any other person will do this project if you don’t commit yourself? and the one question he has asked me ever since our first meeting “what can I do to help you?”. You see that is what leadership is all about - you inspire your people to do something bigger than themselves, and then you do everything in your power to help them achieve their goal.

For those who want to hear my presentation, it can be found on this web link - I am the last speaker (roughly 3/4 of the way to the end of the video - It is a bit slow to load, so click and be patient). I go after Itshak Tshuva who picked up the mission of building the red sea - dead sea channel after years of evangelism by President Peres. After him, speaks Leslie Wexner, Founder and CEO of Victoria Secret and many other companies, who is codifying leadership, and got hundreds of Israel’s future leaders educated at the Kennedy school in Harvard.

Leslie gave me the topic for my presentation an hour before we got on stage. He told me leadership is a collection of crucibles - events where your life is changed forever. You don’t know it at the time but in hindsight there is no doubt your life’s direction was defined by those moments. I thought of how blessed I have been during the last 40 months. It is as if my life bounced from one of these crucibles to another at faster and faster pace only to set course on a mission I could have never imagined for myself 3 years ago. I recognized that every one of these course corrections happened because I got close to the gravitational field of a giant, from Klaus Schwab of the WEF to my current chairman, Idan Ofer. So, in the short time I had in front of the conference in Jerusalem last week I shared some of the moments in the presence of those giants.

There is no doubt, the one gravitational field that we are all at awe from is the one of our host that day - President Peres - who may just be the last of the giants. I was blessed to pick leadership lessons from him for the last 18 months.