Eberhard challenges audience to embrace innovation

Unless you've been living in seclusion without electricity or human interaction, you know that as a planet, energy is a problem.

While some people just sit back, relax, or fill their H3's with 30 gallons of gasoline, others, like Martin Eberhard, are dedicating their lives to doing something about it.

Eberhard is an entrepreneur who has started three businesses and has plenty of advice for those who wish to do the same. Those he has advised were in attendance for his speech for this semester's Allan P. Kirby Lecture at the Dorothy Dickson Darte Center on October 1. His lecture, entitled "Building a Culture of Innovation: From E-books to Electric Cars to...?" was about his entrepreneurial experience. He offered his story as an inspiration to others to make their life stories just as interesting.

One of the bits of advice he gave the crowd was, "A key element to being a successful entrepreneur is a certain amount of naivete, because if you actually know how hard the problem is when you set out, you don't do it."

Eberhard is also a fervent believer in starting something that you find interesting and worthwhile, not something that you do just to make money. People should like what they do, he argued, because it gives them more drive to go through with it and do it well.

He started his entrepreneurial endeavors making network terminals for his first start-up company, Network Computing Devices, Inc. before quickly moving to an idea for optimizing electronic books -- known as Rocket Ebooks -- with his second start-up NuvoMedia.

Eberhard said, "The right time to come in as an entrepreneur is right when [the new idea] is barely feasible."

After he became concerned about the country's dependence on, what he called, "people who don't like us very much" for our main source of fuel oil, Eberhard began looking into the alternative fuels business. More specifically, he wanted to lower the emissions that cars were releasing at the time.

After he decided what his next project would be, Eberhard went to work. The first thing that he did was get a sponsor. The sponsor's name was Elon Musk and he became the co-founder of his and Eberhard's newest start-up Tesla Motors in 2003.

Musk had the means and the confidence in Eberhard to get the project up and running. Thus, the team started looking into fuel cells--known as hybrids--and ethanol before concluding that actually, the best alternative fuel for vehicles was electricity.

Based on emission releases and resources available, ethanol and fuel cells do not live up to the standards that electric cars do. They release zero emissions and--unlike ethanol--do not take up miles of farm land as a means of getting what the fuel they need to run.

Eberhard then concluded that the most important and defining factor that would make a difference in the way that an electric car would run, would be the battery. After much research on the efficiency of different battery types, he decided that lithium batteries would be the best way to go. It takes the equivalent of many thousands of AA lithium batteries to keep a car running, but it's completely worth it because they get over 400 miles to every charge.

Now that he had a full-on idea, Eberhard needed a design for the look of the car. He hired four different designers and hosted a party at which he provided his guests with green and red sticky notes for what they liked and what they didn't like.

He hung the pictures of the models in four different rooms in his house and as the guests walked around, they posted sticky notes to the wall, indicating like or dislike. Once he had a winner, Tesla began building prototypes.

However, Eberhard ran into a slight problem. Lithium batteries were starting to catch fire in things like laptops because they were being over-worked due to their efficiency. Luckily for Eberhard this did not cause too much of a setback. He and his team just took a bit of time to work out the kinks of cooling down the power supply. All was still well and the project was a go. In the summer of 2008, the cars started being built. Now that he has one of his own, he acknowledged, "You start thinking about how you're using every energy source."

"Just think more about what you're using and ways to save energy," stated Eberhard.

MBA student Annie McAndrew said that she was impressed by the fact that Eberhard's address last week "...didn't jump into everything. He broke down the big picture."

Fellow MBA student Tom Smith said he appreciated Eberhard's experience.

"He's gone through the reality. It's not like he's the model of what a perfect experience is. He's had trials and tribulations," said Smith.

Eberhard has since left Tesla, but as a part of his contract with the company, has the rights to his ideas for one year. For this reason, Eberhard will not say where he's going next until after November 26 of this year.