Say you're a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist who wants a one-of-a-kind, show-stopping electric car. What do you do? If you're the very playful Satish Darmaraj, you build your own!

After selling his most recent company, Zimbra, to Yahoo for a cool $350 million, Darmaraj decided to splurge on something electric. He thought about a Tesla, but at the end of the day decided he loved his Toyota Prius too much to switch. And while plenty of people pay a few thousand dollars to turn their hybrid Priuses into electrics, Darmaraj took, well, a very Silicon Valley route instead.

A true tech geek, Darmaraj sought out George Barris, the creator of the original Batmobile and updated versions of the Knight Rider car, and convinced him to come out of retirement to make Darmaraj’s Prius something greener, cooler and of course more high-tech. The result is a one-of-a-kind car that wound up costing Darmaraj more than a Tesla Roadster, but boasts sunny colors and sporty lines, an all-carbon-fiber redone interior, and in-car wifi network. All this and it still gets a 105 miles per gallon.

This is the latest in our series on Valley luminaries who are investing in remaking the U.S. auto industry and breaking America's dependence on foreign oil:

• Elon Musk’s sporty Tesla, which changes the idea of what an electric car is 
• Vinod Khosla, who is betting big on smarter-ethanol
• Shai Agassi, whose ambitious plan is to build out a network of battery charging and replacement centers around the world

As their ventures make clear, everyone has a slightly different vision of exactly what that future should look like.

But here's Satish Darmaraj's vision of fun, starting right here today. Enjoy!

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Shai Agassi is doing his best to break the world of its gas addiction through his startup, Better Place. But he needs the car companies, consumers and most off all, the government, to pull it off. So far, Better Place has spent most of its time rolling out its network of charging and battery replacement stations in smaller countries like Denmark and Israel. But eventually Agassi's eyes are locked on the U.S. market.

He’s not necessarily looking for handouts or subsidies. He just wants an even playing field - something he says the U.S. doesn't have now, thanks to artificially low prices at the pump. He explains what he thinks the U.S. can learn from France, Germany and even China in the clip.

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Earlier:

• Why Shai Agassi quit his dream job to make the world "a Better Place"
• Better Place's breakthrough: changing a car battery in one minute
• Shai Agassi's plan to get the world off oil

Shai Agassi started programming when he was seven. He finished school early and started building companies with his dad in Israel. Finally he knew he’d hit on a winner when he sold TopTier Software to industry titan SAP in 2001. Only SAP wasn’t just interested in the software—they wanted Agassi.

People thought the brash 30-something would last six months inside the stodgy German giant. Six years later, he was poised to be the company’s next CEO. Well, co-CEO technically, but still, he was a role model for Israeli techies and about to be one of the most important men in the tech world.

That’s when he decided to quit. In the third segment of our sit-down with Agassi opens up about the life-changing decision to go from software executive to an entrepreneur, building a company so ambitious many people call it crazy.

Earlier:

• Better Place's breakthrough: changing a car battery in one minute
• Shai Agassi's plan to get the world off oil

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When I asked Better Place founder and CEO Shai Agassi what exactly he’d accomplished in the last two years, he smiled and demurred “cars take time.” Indeed, while he’s managed to convince two countries to let him roll out his network of charging stations and a major car maker to make as many cars as customers demand, he’s still two years away from widely opening the service up to customers in his test markets of Denmark and Israel.

But the challenge critics have seized on the most is his plan to offer not only battery charging at Better Place stations, but robots who can completely replace your battery in less than a minute. Better Place finally debuted the technology on May 13 in Japan, and Agassi says he ran the machine 1,000 times in one day— just to prove to naysayers it really worked.

In this segment, he talks about that breakthrough and why he claims this ambitious play will eventually have a better business model than the oil companies.

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Back in 2006 Shai Agassi was at the top of his game. A programmer since the age of seven, he’d worked his way up the high-tech food chain, and at just 39-years-old he was next in-line to be software giant SAP’s co-CEO. Then, he shocked everyone by quitting to start a cleantech company from scratch. 

And it’s not just any cleantech company. Better Place —as it’s called—is aiming to get the entire world off gasoline. As ambitious as Elon Musk’s plan to build a luxury electric car is, in some ways Agassi is aiming for even more. He’s working to create an entire ecosystem that's not about getting 100 or even 1,000 electric cars on the road—but millions. Last week, we brought you an interview with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla who argued electric cars couldn’t scale. Agassi begs to differ...

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Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla may have the largest cleantech portfolio in Silicon Valley, but he made his fame and fortune as an IT guy. So does the about-face mean IT growth is officially dead? Not if you pick and chose wisely. Khosla cites his investment in Aliph, the company that makes the Jawbone Bluetooth headsets. It did $500,000 in revenues in 2006 and a whopping $140 million last year. Guess what? It’s still growing even in the recession.

In the final segment of our rare sit-down interview with one of Silicon Valley’s most renowned investors, Khosla talks about what he likes in IT these days and what kind of companies he’s avoiding. The former Sun-founder also gives his thoughts on the Sun-Oracle deal.

But it’s not just IT that’s changed. The venture business itself has grown and matured during Khosla’s multi-decade career as an investor, and not all for the better. His thoughts on why venture capitalists need to focus more on the “venture part” and less on the “capital” on the clip.

See also:

• Can Cleantech Produce "Ten Googles"?
• Why Ethanol--Not Electric Cars and Hybrids--Is the Answer

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Vinod Khosla, of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, is an optimist. You show him a huge problem, and he sees only a huge opportunity. And, since he’s a VC, he sees lots of dollar signs around it too.

As a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and investor in companies like Juniper Networks, Khosla had a stake in the earliest days of the Internet build-out when it seemed like an impossibly hard task. Now, he sees the same—if not greater—opportunity in cleantech.

He says it’s less about individual technologies like ethanol and solar cells and more about “re-inventing the infrastructure of society.” He includes in that everything from light bulbs to cement. The opportunity is so vast that Khosla says “clearly” at least 10 “Googles” will be built...

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Times are tough for the biofuel movement. Concerns have been rampant about how much gas it takes to produce a gallon of ethanol and about how much farmland and corn would be needed to produce enough fuel to make a dent in our gasoline addiction. Combine that with the popularity of the Prius and the sex appeal of Tesla’s sporty all-electric cars, and biofuels like ethanol are looking like something only Willie Nelson could love.

Not so fast, says famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. In a rare sit down interview with the cleantech bull, Khosla explained why most of the concerns about ethanol are either based on myths or don’t take into account the rapidly changing science in the field. It’s not that electric cars and hybrids won’t help, but when you consider the billions of cars coming on the market from fast-growing economies like India and China, electric cars on a mass scale just aren’t realistic, he says.

But, increasingly, ethanol is. Khosla argues it’s cheap and plentiful enough to make 80% of new cars coming onto the roads in the next 10 years low-carbon emitters. He doesn’t just mean ethanol made from corn...

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Now that there’s at least talk of a recovery, the letters “IPO” are being whispered around the Valley again. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson went further this week saying the end of the IPO drought is at hand. And the biggest candidate in tech-dom is eBay’s proposed spin-off of Skype.

As fashionable as it is to blast eBay for overpaying for Skype, it's now one of the largest long distance phone companies and nearing $600 million a year in revenues. That’s a real business, says my guest Om Malik, of the popular tech blog GigaOm who’s covered Skype closely through much of its life.

But as bullish as he is, Malik doesn’t expect that IPO until 2010 at the latest. The big question is whether eBay believes in the company enough to wait that long, or if it sells to another bidder. And the big question for Skype? Can it stop the decline in average-revenue-per-user in the meantime?

Plus: Malik notes other hot Valley IPOs to look for in 2010.

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If you haven’t heard the words “broadband metering” odds are you don’t live in scattered towns in Texas, Rochester, New York or a handful of other cities that are lucky enough to be the test cases for a controversial new way of pricing Internet access. The euphemism is “consumption-based Internet access,” and the idea is you pay more the more broadband you use. The way Time Warner explains it, it’s like going to a restaurant and ordering a salad while your friend orders a steak. You don’t want to split the bill; you just want to pay for your salad, right?

But there’s a problem with that analogy. There’s no evidence that it actually costs the big ISPs more money to deliver more broadband, according to studies by several publications including the New York Times and GigaOm. Many people see broadband metering as nothing more than a way to hike up fees, and a ploy that could never work in a market with true competition.

In fact, New York representative Eric Massa was so angry about the plan he’s tried to block it, saying metered broadband would kill jobs and may violate the First Amendment. And Massa isn’t alone. Politicians from all the affected states have come out against the plan, and even Time Warner investors have wondered whether the insistence in such an obviously anti-consumer strategy is a sign that their business is in trouble.

Such an outcry has caused Time Warner—the biggest proponent of the plan—to back off or slow its roll out. But not for long, says my guest Om Malik, whose blog, GigaOm, has been all over this important story. In this clip Malik explains why cable companies are so intent and why only the government can stop them.

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