Start-up Nation

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?”¹

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?”²

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.”

But now their second appointment was about to begin. Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault and Nissan, had a reputation in the business world as a premier turnaround artist. Born in Brazil to Lebanese parents, he is famous in Japan for taking charge of Nissan, which was suffering massive losses, and in two years turning a profit. The grateful Japanese reciprocated by basing a comic-book series on his life.

Peres began to speak so softly that Ghosn could barely hear him, but Agassi was astounded. After the pounding they had just received in the previous meeting, Agassi expected that Peres might say something like, “Shai has this crazy idea about building an electric grid. I’ll let him explain it, and you can tell him what you think.” But rather than pulling back, Peres grew even more energetic than before in making the pitch, and more forceful.

Oil is finished, he said; it may still be coming out of the ground, but the world doesn’t want it anymore. More importantly, Peres told Ghosn, it is financing international terrorism and instability. “We don’t need to defend against incoming Katyusha rockets,” he pointed out, “if we can figure out how to cut off the funding that launches them in the first place.”

Then Peres tried to preempt the argument that the technology alternative just didn’t exist yet. He knew that all the big car companies were flirting with a bizarre crop of electric mutations—hybrids, plug-in hybrids, tiny electric vehicles—but none of them heralded a new era in motor vehicle technology.

Just then, again about five minutes into Peres’s pitch, the visitor stopped him. “Look, Mr. Peres,” Ghosn said, “I read Shai’s paper”—Agassi and Peres tried not to wince, but they felt they knew where this meeting was heading—“and he is absolutely right. We are exactly on the same page. We think the future is electric. We have the car, and we think we have the battery.”

Peres was almost caught speechless. Just minutes ago they’d received an impassioned lecture on why the fully electric car would never work and why hybrids were the way to go. But Peres and Agassi knew that hybrids were a road to nowhere. What’s the point of a car with two separate power plants? Existing hybrids cost a fortune and increase fuel efficiency by only 20 percent. They wouldn’t get countries off oil. In Peres and Agassi’s view, hybrids were like treating a gunshot wound with a Band-aid.

But they had never heard all this from an actual carmaker. Peres couldn’t help blurting out, “So what do you think of hybrids?”