Israel 2.0: Land of Milk, Honey and VC-Backed Start-Ups (EXCERPT)

Agassi believed that if just one country was able to become completely oil-independent, the world would follow. The first step was to find a way to run cars without oil.

This alone was not a revolutionary insight.

He explored some exotic technologies for powering cars, such as hydrogen fuel cells, but they all seemed like they would forever be ten years away. So Agassi decided to focus on the simplest system of all: battery-powered electric vehicles. The concept was one that had been rejected in the past as too limiting and expensive, but Agassi thought he had a solution to make the electric car not just viable for consumers but preferable. If electric cars could be as cheap, convenient, and powerful as gas cars, who wouldn’t want one?

“We don’t need to defend against incoming Katyusha rockets if we can figure out how to cut off the funding that launches them in the first place.”

Something about coming from an embattled sliver of a country—home to just one one-thousandth of the world’s population—makes Israelis skeptical of conventional explanations about what is possible. If the essence of the Israeli condition, as Peres later told us, was to be “dissatisfied,” then Agassi typified Israel’s national ethos.

But if not for Peres, even Agassi might not have dared to pursue his own idea. After hearing Agassi make his pitch for oil independence, Peres called him and said, “Nice speech, but what are you going to do?”

Until that point, Agassi says, he “was merely solving a puzzle”—the problem was still just a thought experiment. But Peres put the challenge before him in clear terms: “Can you really do it? Is there anything more important than getting the world off oil? Who will do it if you don’t?” And finally, Peres added, “What can I do to help?”

Peres was serious about helping. Just after Christmas 2006 and into the first few days of 2007, he orchestrated for Agassi a whirlwind of more than fifty meetings with Israel’s top industry and government leaders, including the prime minister. “Each morning, we would meet at his office and I would debrief him on the previous day’s meetings, and he’d get on the phone and begin scheduling the next day’s meetings,” Agassi told us. “These are appointments I could never have gotten without Peres.”

Peres also sent letters to the five biggest automakers, along with Agassi’s concept paper, which was how they found themselves in a Swiss hotel room, waiting on what was likely to be their last chance. “Up until that first meeting,” Agassi said, “Peres had only heard about the concept from me, a software guy. What did I know? But he took a risk on me.” The Davos meetings were the first time Peres had personally tested the idea on people who actually worked in the auto industry. And the first industry executive they’d met had not only shot down the idea but spent most of the meeting trying to talk Peres out of pursuing it. Agassi was mortified. “I had completely embarrassed this international statesman,” he said. “I made him look like he did not know what he was talking about.”

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