Better Place Plus Ten: Some Personal Reflections
Ten years ago today in Jerusalem, with the participation of both the Prime Minister and President of Israel, entrepreneur Shai Agassi, and several investors, myself included, gathered to launch something we then called “Project Better Place.” After failing to find a more suitable name, we dropped the “project” and, foreshadowing the hubris that would doom us, became simply “Better Place”.
This short reflection does not come to offer explanations or make excuses for our epic crash and burn, incinerating the nearly billion dollars we had been entrusted with and ourselves invested. Since the 2013 bankruptcy, many people have attempted to offer comfort by saying that we were ahead of our time. And one could be forgiven for coming to that conclusion. After all, the all-electric carmaker Tesla now boasts a market capitalization of more than $50 billion and has hundreds of thousands of deposit-backed orders to fulfill. Carmakers, including Volvo, have announced that within just a few years they will no longer sell cars without batteries. Large cities, including London, have gone on record saying that emission-producing vehicles will be banned completely in their city-limits within a few decades, and entire countries, including China, have expressed similar aspirations.
Indeed, despite unusually stable oil prices (amidst technology-driven American production levels unthinkable a decade ago), the folly of infinitely perpetuating the oil monopoly on global transportation is apparent to all. The same might be said of the other alternatives — be they “alternative fuels” such as ethanol, or the “always-just-a-decade-away” favorite, hydrogen. As David Kirsch described in his 2000 book, “Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History,” in the first decade of the 20th-century, conventional wisdom held that a plethora of drivetrains would proliferate — and yet the oil-burning internal combustion engine became transportation’s “silver bullet” for over a century. In the first decade of the 21st, conventional wisdom similarly predicted “all-of-the-above.” On this count, those of us who argued for electric-only (including Shai, Elon Musk, and myself), are being proven correct.
However, there is one thing that none of us appreciated a decade ago. That is the fact that it increasingly seems as if the coming transition from gas-driven cars to electric ones may prove to be a historical footnote to a much larger transformation. Indeed, after a remarkably static “post-horse” century, the entire foundations of the way people (and goods) get around are poised to shift — to a platform that is electric, connected — and autonomous!
Three things are driving this new revolution. One is technology — specifically machine vision, artificial intelligence and computing power to enable full autonomous drive. The second is the smashing success of mobility-as-a-service business models exemplified by Uber, Lyft, Via, Didi and the other companies that have emerged in this decade. And the third is demographic. As has been widely documented, those coming of age today have been connected virtually to their social networks from their earliest days — and don’t long see the driver’s license and the keys to the old jalopy as their only lifeline to friends, as their parents and grandparents did.
Despite not having envisioned the greater changes that lay ahead, I still regard Better Place, and the conception Agassi birthed (with some help of many, including Andrey Zarur, Dimitri Dadiomov, Idan Ofer ) as nothing less than brilliant. The failing was not in the (almost universally misunderstood) business model, but rather in the cavalier attitude with which we approached the diverse array of partnerships that were critical to our success (including automakers, utilities, governments and more). The 2008 period, punctuated by the most dramatic volatility of oil prices in history, was precisely the right moment, in spite of what many believe. Had we survived, I have no doubt we would have successfully evolved to the changing realities, and been well-positioned to thrive in the age of on-demand, automated mobility. People also often ask if I regret the years and dollars (my own, and those of trusted friends) which were evaporated with Better Place’s failure. While I naturally do wish I could make the investors who placed their trust in us whole, I cannot say that I have any regrets over having been a part of this swing for the fences. In spite of the outcome, we helped catalyze long-overdue change in the industry, as well as Israel’s booming mobility-innovation sector. And, on a personal level, I cannot count how many good friends, great experiences and life lessons were gleaned from those years.
Today Better Place alums can be found in multiples at Uber in California, at GM in Israel, and at many other companies in the global mobility ecosystem. Two (Quin Garcia and myself) have launched mobility-specific venture capital funds dedicated specifically to new-mobility startups.
Even a decade ago, Better Place had a recipe to bring clean, cheap and convenient electric transportation to mainstream consumers parallel to the iPhone. Though it did not work out that way, those of us who never wavered in our conviction about electric-drive can feel a measure of vindication.
Today, the public is just starting to understand the true consequences of transportation’s grand, new age in which clean, cheap and convenient are just the beginning. This age will bring mobility that is also safe, affordable, accessible to all (including the very young, very old and physically challenged), and which grants us back hours every week to be more productive or enjoy more leisure.
No one could have predicted where the adventure launched a decade ago would have led. And while it was not the straight-line those of us in Jerusalem that afternoon had hoped and expected, neither is it something any one of us should look back upon with regret.
(For more on the history of Better Place, read the recently published book, “Totaled” by Brian Blum.)
