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Israeli-American entrepreneur Shai Agassi is Founder and CEO of Project Better Place, a company focusing on a green transportation infrastructure based on electric cars as an alternative to the current fossil fuel technology. Previously President of Products and Technology Group at SAP, he was next in line for the position of CEO and left to pursue his interests in alternative energy and climate change.

What does spirituality mean to you?
Doing the right thing. Which of course means something different for every person. But I mean doing the right thing in the general sense.
One day I heard that the meaning of the whole Jewish religion could be explained into one sentence: do onto others what you would like them to do onto you. The rest of the Bible is just an interpretation of that one sentence. And to me, the summary of that sentence is ‘do the right thing’.

Do you believe you have a special mission or purpose in this life?
When I was a kid, I was just young and stupid. In my early twenties, I went on record saying that my goal in life is to retire at 30. I think that each generation tries to fix the failings of the previous ones. I saw my dad work at 40, 50, then start a new career and so on. So I always wanted to be in a position to retire at 30 and do whatever I want. Interestingly enough, I sold my company for the first time the day after my 30th birthday.
And I keep telling people that I just meandered from that point on. I somehow grabbed on to a stream and went along with it.
I did not have a plan of what one does after. So I stayed with the company that had purchased mine, became the CEO and three years later sold it again, this time to [world largest business software company] SAP. And I stayed at SAP, once more because I had no other plan. There was no other mission that called out to me and said "come do this". And thus somehow, I got from a job to a career. The traps of a career are really evil. You get bigger and bigger wingspan but you always know that the wings are stamped with someone else's logo. Then it is really, really hard, scary, frightening to let go of those wings. A lot of people forget that they had their own wings before they put on someone else's wings on. They do not use them and end up like the Galapagos birds who cannot fly anymore because they found food on the ground and forgot how to fly. I actually got to such a point, but then got really lucky.
Basically, I ran the Jim Collins exercise, and in the cross section of passion, skills and economic drive, I found a question that became my mission in life. From that moment on, in the middle of 2005, the career path was trumped intellectually and emotionally --- regardless of the fact that it was leading me to a point way beyond my wildest imagination when I had first started at SAP. Compared to embracing my mission, it was just not a fair competition or a fair fight.
I keep saying that it is as if the question had found me, more than me finding the question. And my sense is that everybody has got their question out there. But very few are lucky enough to have their question find them. From that point on you are on a mission, you are on a calling.

What is the Question?
It all started with Klaus Schwabb's question to the Young Global Leaders --- "what are you doing to make the world a better place by 2020?”. At the YGL, you get drawn out from your micro world and given a macro perspective of what is happening in the world, of the very tight yet not obvious links between energy, governance, poverty, health, climate and so on. They are so deeply interlinked, yet on a daily basis we get drawn into the micro-aspects of one of them, whether in a business, an NGO or anywhere else. So for instance we go out there trying to deal with poverty in Africa, forgetting that here somebody else is generating fuel out of corn, therefore jeopardizing all the work that we do. We deal with governance and discuss the pros and cons of democracy coming first, without realizing that the annual $4 trillion wealth transfer through oil makes a mockery of that discussion.
So first we got a macro perspective and then we could understand that whatever we do at the micro level may actually not have a significant impact on the macro. From that point on, we could find our question.
And my question is "how to run a country without oil?".
Indeed, I saw oil as the root cause of a lot of different processes and transformations affecting the world.
I then started researching the issue, asking many questions to a lot of people, and when it reverted back to a solution, I met President Peres who asked me: "why would you do anything else, rather than solving this problem, as it is your mission in life?”. I was still at SAP, waiting to become its CEO, but this question triggered the final step, and I jumped into the unknown.
Actually, from the minute I had found my question and the solution was in place, every single person on the way was a significant gravity centre that pushed me into making the right decision. From that moment on, there were no doubts, just growing conviction every day.

So watching this chain of events, would you say it is all about randomness? why did the Question find you?
Is everything happening just by chance? I can't tell you. I asked one day a great physicist about what happened in the universe before the Big Bang. He said “nothing”. I told him he sounded like the people who believe the earth stands on the back of an elephant, itself standing on a turtle, which also stands on another turtle and so on. He agreed that it was pretty much the same thing.
When we try and explain those occurrences, we get too close to looking for a trend in randomness. And I am very careful not to get down that path. Otherwise it would mean I am someone special and I do not believe so. Had I not found that question and gone on that mission, the question would have found somebody else.
Basically, I work really hard in life, I did a lot of things at a very young age. I got educated through a path that could not have been predicted. I sold companies that could have just as well gone bankrupt. The distance between failure and success is so minuscule you probably can't even see it with a magnifying microscope. The same story could have ended up in so many other alternative endings and solutions. So I cannot tell you there is a predetermined path or divine intervention in this.

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