If you've been curious about why Better Place went under, have we got the 8,000-word profile for you. For your weekend reading, check out a detailed history of the company's downfall over in Fast Company. Max Chafkin writes an engaging tale of the ups and downs that Better Place went through, and the personalities involved, foremost among them founder Shai Agassi, are also described in honest detail.
Hindsight is always 20-20, but Chafkin does a good job of showing how the $900-million Better Place project managed to be a beautiful dream, for a while. The public excitement over Better Place really started with Agassi's 2009 TED talk, which he describes this way:
Hindsight is always 20-20, but Chafkin does a good job of showing how the $900-million Better Place project managed to be a beautiful dream, for a while. The public excitement over Better Place really started with Agassi's 2009 TED talk, which he describes this way:
Read the whole thing here. For good measure, we've included a video of the TED talk below, so you can get a feel of how big the original concept was. Enjoy.This was science fiction, but Agassi presented it as fact, as if just by announcing his company he had already built it. It was "Shai math," as his employees would come to call it. And it was intoxicating. The TED crowd gave Agassi a long standing ovation.
