The Spectacular Failure Of Better Place | Hacker News Reader

The Spectacular Failure Of Better Place

fastcompany.com

172 pointsuladzislau45 comments

There is no doubt in my mind that the 'clean tech' investment bubble is as popped as the dotcom bubble, albeit for different reasons, but with the same refrain. Pets.com and better place will end up as poster children for speculative bubbles in which large amounts of money are thrown at business plans with little research and absolutely no product.

People seem to like comparing themslevs to Steve jobs, being on the worlds stage, releasing products to a stunned audience. But they just want to skip to that part and not go through the whole starting a company in the garage thing.

The comparisons between tesla and bp could not be more stark. One took investment carefully, consistently only enlarging scope when success was already seen with the team and the product. The other attempted to reinvent the world, seemingly with no real product and a vey vague, shifting plan.

Imagine how long that billion dollars could have lasted had it been invested sensibly. They might be a success in Israel now and accepting favorable offers from other car manufacturers and governments. Now it's just another cautionary tale in the long list of people who lost their shirts trying to sell electric cars.

I think the dressing-like-Steve-Jobs is a sure sign of failure. It evinces the belief that appearance and charisma is what drives people to build (and buy) a product. Well, yes, it's reportedly true that Jobs had that effect. But in his early stages, he also had Woz, someone as one-of-a-kind as he is, and in later years, attracted the kind of engineers and designers who could survive the Kool-Aid drinking. For someone to think that Jobs did it on pure gusto and dreams alone, and even worse, to assume such a thing is a formula that can be replicated and regurgitated...that's not a great sign of leadership.

And also, if you really were a visionary who an idea that, in many ways, is even bigger than Apple...why the f* would you settle for being the "Steve Jobs of electric cars?" The pop-psychologist in me wants to believe that such a visionary would rather make his/her own distinctive stylistic mark.

Also, Steve Jobs would go to the stage when his new idea had become a complete product! He would go on stage to show it, not pitch it!

He would spend a few years without telling no outsider what he and his team were up to, then when they proved for themselves that it works (including all the industrial capacity and logistics to deliver it in place), then he would use his charisma to sell it. He sold products, not ideas (or ideals).

I cant stop laughing at the Dressing-as-Steve antisignal. I wonder if there are any startups out there pitching vcs in black turtlenecks.

I think you're right. Whoever next builds a company with visionary products that change the world - well, they aren't going to look, talk or act like Steve Jobs. It's getting it all backwards to think that the personal traits of a successful person are what defines that success - instead of merely recognising the success is a megaphone that communicates the personal traits.

If only it were as easy as donning a black turtleneck and saying 'oh, and one more thing'.

After reading this article, I can't help but think that Better Place is the Newton, or maybe the Palm of electric cars. Nowadays, we see smartphones and tablets in their near-final form (or at least one that's been stable for a few years), but we forget the many handheld computing devices that were tried before, some that had traction and others that didn't.

Which leads to: as an investor or potential employee, how do you tell whether that hot startup is is a Hi5, a myspace, or a Facebook? Can you know whether your contribution will make a/the difference between the outcomes?

I suspect BP would have actually worked (rather, been made to "work") during the socialist lost decade(s) in Israel. The national security advantage of not needing oil probably would have led to a huge tax on either petrol cars or fuel, combined with subsidy. Consumers could have been forced to accept one model of kind of mediocre car instead of the full range of options today.

"... during the socialist lost decade(s) in Israel"

I wouldn't call them "lost decades". Many of us sorely miss those years; though, to be honest, it's hard to separate fact from nostalgia.

They got this even during Israel's capitalist era.

BP got a temporary exemption from the 90% car tax. Fuel is heavily taxed already which supposedly pays for road maintenance.

There are probably other areas where they may have gotten support: valuable land for stations, on-road taxes, electricity.

The trajectory of Better Place and the character of the founder Shai Agassi is almost analogous with another recent super failure of a promising Brazilian oil venture OGX Petróleo e Gás and its founder Eike Batista [1].

It is like a case of bubble cycle representation in a singe investment venture.

The pattern here is that the impressive early success of a charismatic founder is accepted as a promising billion dollar venture by some prominent investors. At this point the visionary founder gets lost in positive feedback loop and looses touch with reality. Eventually the the bubble bursts and the business goes under.

[1] Batista Loses $15 Billion as Brazil Awakes From Dream. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-12/batista-loses-15-bi...

Better Place failed because swappable batteries don't make sense. The technology is too complex and it would have required a massive leap of faith amongst automakers to adopt the standard from an startup, even one as well-funded as Better Place.

I worked in the electric vehicle industry for 4 years, and it was clear early on that the market was moving towards permanent battery storage (not unlike smartphones) with intermittent charging taking place at public locations. Today, the vast majority of EV charging takes place at home.

Better Place management did not to listen to the market and the company suffered greatly as a result. If they would have pivoted to building recharge stations or charging networks they just may have had a chance to succeed.

"Better Place failed because swappable batteries don't make sense." Did we read the same article? It seemed pretty clear there were incredible management missteps like burning $500k/day with only a few hundred cars being sold or the CEO going excommunicado for months that destroyed the company. Even with the right tech it sounds like they were setup for failure.

This is a product flaw. It's one amongst the comedy of errors that Better Place did when it came to running a business. Product flaws can be remedied through good leadership. Bad leadership is not something that can be remedied as easily.

this is just not true. I built a battery exchange vehicle in what amounted to my backyard. range was 180mi. It's not that hard. BP was never a competent tech company but a business guy who latched on to an already existent tech idea.

And they say that hardware startups are hard. Hardware startups that require hundreds of custom, million dollar station installs, AND cooperation from a significant fraction of car manufacturers... are the hardest.

The Tesla Superchargers cost about $20k each to install, which is low enough that they didn't need anyone else's cooperation to cover the US.

Even if Telsa covers the earth in superchargers... it doesn't matter unless other cars are using the same tech... which they are not.

And if every 200 miles I have to sit for 30 mins... what? What if the stall are all full? I have to sit for an hour? No even on its best day was that a good idea...

If you aren't taking a 30 minute break every 3-4 hours then I really don't want to be on the same road as you.

You might want to reconsider driving in the USA. b^)

Or LA...

Your definition of "cover" is rather loose.

where did u get that figure for Tesla super chargers?

Hm, it looks like that must have been an older number. More recent estimates are in the $100k-$200k range: http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/26/inside-teslas-supercharger-...

These articles are missing the "Better Place Super Yacht"

http://www.superyachts.com/sail-yacht-8657/better-place.htm

Maybe not the most efficient marketing dollars...

The yacht is mentioned in the article.

Wow, do a lot of luxury yachts have sails? I was under the impression the term "yacht" wasn't really applicable, but this thing seems like a real sail boat.

All that luxury glassware wouldn't hold up too well if you catch a bit too much wind on a tack.

Sure, yacht pretty much just means a fancy recreational boat, and has existed as a word since when most of them were wind-powered, some still are.

I actually saw a sort of showroom of theirs in Israel a few years ago, complete with a track where they'd take you around in one of the cars. It all sounded good, but at one point they put us in this very fancy video auditorium and showed us a 10- or 15-minute marketing film that I distinctly remember was totally devoid of content.

Did you see the Shai Agassi hologram?

Ha, I don't think I did.

i saw shai agassi speak for about 30 minutes in a TED talk and at the end of it, i still had absolutely no idea what his company actually did.

the crazy thing is most people who heard that talk seemed quite taken -- despite the outrageousness of the whole thing (for instance, the comparison to EVs and the end of slavery)

Better Place Failed.

We have a tendency to look at success and failure stories and pick out some storyline that suits us. Here we have a lot to choose from: boiling oceans, CEO god complexes, too much money, wrong business model, the charging stations business model, etc. etc.

I think its useful to read accounts of success and failure analyze them and such. But extracting too many lessons might be as bad as too few.

I don't think there was anything inevitable about Better Place's failure. I don't think there was (is?) anything inevitable about Tesla's success. I do think that it is inevitable that some of these will fail.

Lets learn, but not to much.

>The GM executives were nonplussed. "If it's free, why don't you just swap the car instead of the battery?" one asked.

Burn. It seems like this guy was more delusional than Jobs at his worst.

Why did they spend so much time and money addressing the limited range of electric cars... in Israel. A country smaller than New Jersey.

It seems like his initial market had little need for his one differentiating feature.

I can't help but wonder if this Onion Talk was modeled after Better Place after reading the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

Focusing on the Israeli market made a certain amount of sense. They positioned this as a sort of a patriotic project that would be transformative for a small country and they had the country's top leadership involved from the beginning. They were probably in a much better position to get what they wanted from government and local businesses than they would have been in the US. It's also a lot easier to build enough charging stations to cover any place a customer wants to go if your target country is very small.

Focusing on the Israeli market probably makes a lot of business sense, for the reasons you say. Parent commenter's point is that once you've made that (sensible) choice, there's no need, for that market, to focus on increasing the range between charges, because that market doesn't need increased range, that's not what will help you succeed in that market.

FTA:

>Step 3: Think locally and globally--all at once

>[...]

Completely delusional futurist zealotry attempting to solve all problems at once, from what I gather.

I think there are two many lessons that can be learnt from this story.

1. Stay focussed. 2. Keep your team as small as possible.

3. Ship

They did ship. It's not that rare to see their cars driving around Israel. From what I've heard, owners loved them - less so now, obviously.

I think BP burnt through their money too quickly, and ran out of resources (and investor patience) just as they were starting to get some traction.

"The one group of people Agassi seemed in no hurry to hire were actual managers with car-industry or infrastructure-building expertise. 'We had no automotive experts,' explains one person familiar with the inner workings of the company. 'Nobody who'd done a car in their life.'"

That's quite an oversight.

Too much too early. Sad.

Car startups are so hard - more respect for Tesla.

not if they work...

The real reason is because Shai Agassi, a 0.001 percentile guy, was beaten by Elon Musk, a 0.0000001 percentile guy.

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