Electric-car evangelist sees battery-powered future

San Jose Mercury News (MCT) - Shai Agassi didn't grow up dreaming of revolutionizing the auto industry by replacing gasoline-burning cars with electric ones.

"I wasn't a greenie. I didn't do cars," he said. "None of these things happened from thoughts I had when I was 6 years old."

Nonetheless, Agassi, the 40-year-old founder and chief executive of Better Place, has emerged as a driving force in the effort to move beyond gasoline-burning automobiles. His Palo Alto, Calif., company has global plans to build the recharging infrastructure needed for electric cars to go mainstream.

After launching in 2007, Better Place spent 2008 inking deals in the Bay Area, Israel, Denmark, Australia and Hawaii. In short order, the intense Agassi has forged relationships with governments and partnered with big utilities and the world's No. 4 automaker, Renault-Nissan.

Influential politicos such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom hope Agassi will soon have the ear of President-elect Barack Obama, who has pledged to create tens of thousands of green jobs and to promote cars that use less gasoline or none at all.

Agassi's transformation to electric-car evangelist began just four years ago. As the hard-charging CEO-in-waiting for global software powerhouse SAP and its point man in Silicon Valley, he found himself with other young leaders in Switzerland at a World Economic Forum event in 2005.

A question was put to the participants: What can you do to make the world a better place by 2020? That served as both an inspiration for Agassi and the source of the name of his project.

His answer was to cut the world's addiction to oil by fueling vehicles with electricity rather than gasoline. The benefits, he concluded, would be huge: The shift would slow climate change, reduce dependence on unfriendly oil-producing countries and save trillions of dollars to boot.

He began to form a plan, filling his computer and his brain with notes during the many long flights he endured.

"When you get a question in your head and you're an engineer, you want to solve the engineering problem," Agassi said.

Still, his focus remained on SAP. Indeed, he says now, he was already thinking as if he were the next CEO of SAP, which he was told he would become in 2007. Instead, when SAP extended the contract of its CEO and told him he'd have to wait, Agassi's thoughts turned to what Israeli President Shimon Peres had once told him.

"If you think it can be done, you have to do it," Peres had said.

Agassi quit SAP and took on the mission of electrifying the world's cars as his own.

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Agassi's leadership skills and his ability to spin Better Place's story in an engaging way are crucial to its success, observers say.

"That's not the kind of thing they teach you in business school," said Alan Salzman, managing partner of VantagePoint Venture Partners in San Bruno, Calif., one of Better Place's backers. "What's overlooked in Shai's long list of capabilities is his ability to get diverse groups in diverse countries to coalesce over changing the auto industry."

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Agassi had worked hard to hone the skills he would need. He entered college at 15 and founded four companies in his 20s. He once told the San Jose Mercury News he had accumulated 900,000 frequent-flier miles in 2˝ years.

In 2001, he sold TopTier Software to SAP, pocketing millions and joining that company.

That move elevated him to a lofty position that few reach. He didn't have to think about making money, and he began meeting people such as Peres and other global business and political leaders.

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One of them is Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy and nephew of the late President John Kennedy. He's an environment lawyer, talk-show host and adviser to VantagePoint.

"Shai's genius is not really the technology, it's the business model," Kennedy told the San Jose Mercury News in a long conversation about oil and the world's problems.

Kennedy favors a government-backed program that promotes electric cars and batteries as a way to rebuild the American auto industry and create jobs. And he believes Agassi has a viable plan to make it happen.

"This is really a noble life's work to try to do this,'' Kennedy said. ''It's so simple, so elegant."

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Agassi maintains that cars can be as ubiquitous as cell phones. Indeed, he compares Better Place to Sprint and Verizon. "Only our equipment doesn't talk, our equipment drives," he said.

In the Better Place model, it will own the car batteries and charging stations, and drivers will pay a fee based on miles driven. The company will build a network of charging spots and battery-switch stations. The pilot phase of his model launches early this year in Israel.

Agassi's family ties help define him. He started several software companies with his father, Reuven. At Better Place, brother Tal Agassi runs the Israeli operations, while sister Dafna Barazovsky does marketing in Israel. Others at Better Place followed him from his companies and from SAP.

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"Tons of people, friends, have been with me on my road for 20 years now," he said.

Most roads these days are clogged with gas-burning cars. Agassi talks about China, India and Russia adding millions of cars, and about the United States and others spending more and more money on oil. To Agassi, it's a repetitive and destructive cycle.

The only solution is to move beyond gasoline-burning cars, he said.

"I get it. That's what I see,'' he said. "I ended up needing to apply my life to it.''

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© 2009, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).