Shai Agassi

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Shai Agassi (2006)

Shai Agassi ( Hebrew שי אגסי; * 19th April 1968 in Ramat Gan ) is an Israeli software - entrepreneurs .

He belonged to SAP AG from 2001 to 2007 and had been a member of the Executive Board there since 2002 .

Shai Agassi left the company in 2007 despite a contract that ran until 2010. Since then, he has been committed to alternative drive technologies for vehicles with the Better Place project , which is intended to provide a comprehensive infrastructure for the mass operation of electric cars , as well as in the field of environmental policy for the Future of Israel. On May 26, 2013, Better Place went to court in Israel to appoint a bankruptcy administrator to initiate an orderly liquidation after previous funding talks failed.

Life

Shai Agassi was born in 1968 in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv in Israel. He comes from a Jewish family who moved to Israel to establish the state . Agassi's father Reuven Agassi (* 1941) was a colonel in the Israeli army and later worked in telecommunications. Agassi's parents live in Raanana , he has a sister and a brother.

Shai Agassi began to be interested in computers as a child , collecting punch cards at the age of five and taking a computer course for children at Tel Aviv University at the age of seven , where he learned programming in Fortran . At the age of 18, he was hit by a car and broke his right leg. Chronic back pain is a long-term consequence of this accident .

In 1986 Agassi began his military service as a programmer in the military reconnaissance of the Israeli army. He then studied at the Technion , where he completed his bachelor's degree in computer science with distinction in 1990 .

Agassi has lived in Los Gatos , California, with his wife, the former managing director of QuickSoft Media, and his two sons (* 1996 and * 2000) since 1996 .

Before Agassi became a board member at SAP AG, he was CEO of SAP Portals, which was completely integrated into SAP AG in 2002.

SAP Portals, in turn, emerged from the SAP subsidiary e-SAP.de and the Israeli company TopTier Software. TopTier was taken over by SAP AG in 2001 for 400 million US dollars. TopTier was founded in 1992 by Shai Agassi. TopTier developed portal software based on Microsoft technologies. Agassi was in charge of technology development and later also managed the company. He campaigned for TopTier to move to California in 1996.

In addition to TopTier, Agassi founded three other companies in Israel together with his father:

  • 1992 Quicksoft Ltd, a multimedia software distributor for the Israeli market,
  • 1993 TopManage, a provider of enterprise software for medium-sized companies and
  • 1994 the multimedia software company Quicksoft Media.

TopManage was bought by SAP AG in 2002; the company's product formed the basis for SAP's medium-sized business solution, Business One.

When SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner left the board of directors of SAP AG in mid-2003, Agassi was already being treated by the media as his successor as chairman of the board. In 2003, Agassi was named one of the 20 Most Influential Business People of 2003 by TIME Magazine and CNN .

In 2006 Agassi announced that a new company would provide infrastructure for electric cars. On October 29, 2007, he founded Project Better Place . In May 2008 the company presented a prototype of the car. In early January 2009 he announced I am the end of oil . He wanted to get the big automakers to produce many new electric cars over the next 15 years. Renault and other government and private donors invested approximately $ 850 million in Better Place.

In 2011 he received the Bertha and Carl Benz Prize from the city of Mannheim.

Better Place was valued at 2.25 billion euros in 2011. In October 2012, Agassi resigned from his position on the board. The company had a total of 750 customers in Denmark and Israel. In 2013, Better Place filed for bankruptcy.

In 2014 it became known that Agassi had turned to a new project: the start-up Newrgy, which is located in the photovoltaic industry.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography on britannica.com, accessed March 1, 2015 (English)
  2. ^ "Executive Board Member Shai Agassi to Leave the Company" , SAP, March 28, 2007
  3. ↑ Betterplace “Press release on filing for insolvency” ( Memento of the original from August 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.betterplace.com
  4. ↑ "Shai Agassi. 1968– Chief technology developer, SAP “ , referenceforbusiness.com
  5. ^ "SAP veteran wants to reinvent the car" Spiegel Online
  6. ↑ www.spiegel.de - visionary Shai Agassi - I am the end of oil - from January 23, 2009
  7. ↑ a b "Replacement batteries no longer correspond to the trend". In: Focus. May 27, 2013, accessed January 26, 2018 .
  8. ↑ City of Mannheim: Shai Agassi receives Bertha and Carl Benz Prize , message from July 1, 2011, accessed on May 13, 2014.
  9. ^ Chief Steps Down at a Company Serving Electric Cars , New York Times
  10. ^ Shai Agassi Returns With New Company Newrgy , insideevs.com
personal data
SURNAME Agassi, Shai
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli software entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH April 19, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Ramat Gan