Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Shai Agassi

Israeli Entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of Better Place, Green Auto Pioneer

"After the Enterprise Services Architecture, your applications world will be made from apps by us based on these services, apps from ISVs...and apps you build yourself."

"500 million car charging stations in the U.S. by 2015 -- drivers will need one at work and one at home"

"At $1,000 per station, car charging is a $500 billion industry"

"For me selling a company is not an exit: it is a financing event."

"I have a lot of respect for the auto manufacturers. They make a product people live inside - and can die inside - so they are held to very high standards."

"Better Place battery swapping station in 2009, growing to 10 in 2010, 100 in 2011, 1,000 in 2012, and, assuming China and/or the U.S. push electric car standards, 100,000 battery swapping stations in 2013"

"I started digging and found that Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates after the country had diversified their economy, instead of being solely oil-based. This diversification had brought about modernization. I realized that if you land the price of oil, countries will diversify their economies and as a result, modernize."

"I don't know what happens 5 or 10 years down the road."

"I get to shift multiple markets. I get to shift economies. It's extremely liberating. I breathe differently."

"If an engineer says something is impossible, it means he doesn?t know how to do it."

"If there were four Better Places and we split the market, we would still be the largest companies on earth."

"Israel is my past. My two boys are my future."

"It looks great on PowerPoint, but on planet Earth, it won't fly. Salesforce.com is a CRM company. Marc is trying to make noise and buzz about something bigger, but that's all it is."

"Instead of spending money on technical integration, you'll spend money on business innovation."

"My passions were an intersection between peace in the Middle East and climate change. I know how to understand a technology problem, break it into its components and solve it. I also knew I couldn't make peace solely through technological inventions."

"Organizations have started to create road maps that will enable their transition to a service-oriented architecture. As such, the SAP TechEd events create a community for success by allowing customers, partners and developers to share and accelerate knowledge surrounding SAP NetWeaver while they discover how existing processes and IT landscapes can be transformed into enablers of business innovation and change."

"Once you have a mission, you can't go back to having a job."

"One billion [affordable electric] cars would be on the road by 2015, and that the "beauty of this industry is that we're starting where the consumer has already bought in."

"Our goal was to have a same-day deployment model. You sign up in the morning, and you're up and running by the afternoon."

"The electric car industry is pivotal for three reasons. First, the auto industry was the foundation for America?s manufacturing middle class. Second, the country that replaces gasoline-powered vehicles with electric-powered vehicles ? in an age of steadily rising oil prices and steadily falling battery prices ? will have a huge cost advantage and independence from imported oil. Third, electric cars are full of power electronics and software. Think of the applications industry that will be spun out from electric cars. It will be the iPhone on steroids"

"This isn't about assembling Lego blocks but rather about building a backbone that can scale and that can allow others to build on top of it."

"There will be multiple waves of scenarios."

"People will take more risk with edge process than core processes."

"The Coda, 14,000 of which will be on the road in California over the next year and can travel 100 miles on one overnight charge, is a combination of Chinese-made batteries and complex American-system electronics ? all final-assembled in Oakland (price: $37,000). It is a win-win start-up for both countries."

"They didn't want to say up front, 'You're going to have to migrate from your software,' because those words would have created a tremor. Now it's been a year, and what they're saying is, We're not going to take that code, we're just going to take some of the ideas. You can't do automatic migrations because it's rewritten. If I'm looking at a whole new implementation, why is it going to Oracle?"

"We have the potential ability to grow fourfold by looking at the number of employees in a corporation versus the number of users that are professional users of SAP."

"We have four exponential curves working for us. Energy density of the battery is about at 10 to 15 percent improvement every year, and has been like that for the past 35 years. It?s pretty predictable, given the amount of money that?s invested. The longevity of the battery is a similar 10 to 15 percent improvement every year. You know it because the cell phone, ten years ago, would last for about a year until you have to replace the battery. Today, you don?t have to think about it. They make them without replaceable batteries. The third is the battery cost per kWh goes down by 8 to 10 percent every year. The fourth is the price of oil."

"We will come out with a product when we come up with a product that meets the needs of small businesses. We have plans that will be clarified when we are ready to clarify them."

"We will not push customers from on-demand to on-premises. We don't see this as a trick or ploy to bring them in."

"We all talk about how great Linux is... But if you look at the most innovative desktop today, Microsoft's Vista is not copying Linux, it is copying Apple."

"When I?m competing against gasoline, I have to be better than gasoline. No gas station in the world will stay in business if it offered a half-hour fill-up. It doesn?t exist. Nobody advertises: ?We do fill-ups in a half hour.? So we don?t see that as competition. My competition is a three-minute fill-up at a ubiquitous gas station across the country. And we can beat that. Now, if somebody thinks they can do better than that, with any technology, they?re my friend. Because they also end oil."

"When you translate a dream into reality, it's never a full implementation. It is easier to dream than to do."

"When I sold my first company at 30, I could have done whatever I wanted to do."

"With this new wave of partner alignment around enterprise services, we expect to bring thousands of enterprise services to life for our mutual customers through community collaboration, ... Customers win when the ecosystem collaborates on a timely delivery of innovative technologies that solve deployment and integration issues. This architectural shift is happening now, and SAP is the only solution provider to bring together an enterprise-scale blueprint with ESA, an enabling platform in SAP NetWeaver, an available repository of more than 500 enterprise services, and now with Enterprise Services Community Process, a foundation of a collaborative process for building enterprise services."

"Work for yourself; control your destiny; [and] stop writing software for other people."

"You have to define competition from the perspective of the consumer. If I have a plug-in hybrid that?s priced at $42,000, that?s not competing against a $15,000 Corolla. That?s a different category, price-wise and segment-wise. If I can afford a $42,000 car, I?m looking at a very different type of car. If I?m driving a car that requires a half-hour stop on the side of the road, fast charge, that?s also not competition for a three-minute switch. One is a car, and the other one is a vehicle."

"You can't have thousands of cars without good computers on the electric grid."

"You need to begin by analyzing your business first. You have to assume you're on a treadmill and you have to integrate whatever comes your way."

"You don't need to go out and buy every company out there. You need an ecosystem for co-innovation."