The Electric Stars 159
computer and electric engineering from the University of
Illinois, he had founded several companies.^209
In 1996, Eberhard co-founded NuvoMedia together with
Marc Tarpenning. He was born in 1964 in California and
earned a degree in computer science from the University
of California. After graduating, he spent the next five years
in the oil-rich nation of Saudi Arabia where he worked at
Textron - an American company involved in a wide range
of products, including electric golf carts.
It was when he was working in Saudi Arabia that
Tarpenning discovered the oil industry’s darker sides. “The
amount of treasure that is sent to the Middle East to supply
our oil addiction is astonishing,” he said. “And it doesn’t
necessarily do good things there and it doesn’t do good
things for us, and that got me thinking that oil is not so
great.”^453
In 2000, Eberhard and Tarpenning sold their company
to Gemstar for $187 million.^71 Now they wanted to create
a new company. “We knew we wanted to solve a real
problem,” Tarpenning said. “We just couldn’t do another
network widget.” They researched a wide range of major
problems, including water scarcity and income inequality.
“So we looked at these big problems, and there are a lot of
big problems out there, but the one that we took was oil,”
Tarpenning said.^453
The reason why they thought oil was the major prob-
lem is because oil causes several other problems, including
global warming, political problems, and economical prob-
lems. “If you can reduce your dependency on oil everything