NEW YORK — When Shai Agassi, long the heir apparent at SAP, was told in March 2007 that he would not become chief executive for at least another two years, he quit. And when the German software giant then tried to change his mind by offering to make him boss right away, he realised he was ‘much more excited’ about the new chance that his unexpected freedom would grant him. In January Mr Agassi’s new start-up, Better Place, announced its first deal, in partnership with Renault, a carmaker, and the government of Israel: to ‘get an entire country off its addiction to gasoline’ by switching to electric cars. Though Mr Agassi is the most senior executive so far to quit a mainstream information-technology firm for clean tech, he is far from alone. Mr Agassi (pictured right, above) joins Elon Musk (pictured left), a co-founder of PayPal who is now chairman of Tesla Motors, an electric-car start-up, and Vinod Khosla (pictured centre), a legendary venture capitalist who has switched his focus from dotcommery to greenery, among many others. ‘There is an unbelievable migration of talent from traditional technology to clean technology,’ says Adam Grosser, a partner at Foundation Capital, a […]