Words matter. These are the best Vinod Khosla Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m very excited by biomass and biofuels. We have a company, KiOR, that turns biomass – for instance, wood chips – into gasoline. The potential value of this company is huge. It could compete with regular crude oil without subsidies.
Nobody who comes in once every six weeks while you’re working 80 or 90 hours a week is qualified to make a decision.
The combination of brilliant ideas and entrepreneurial spirit should lead us to a safer and more secure future.
Venture-capital firms invest in trends by projecting returns. But most projections are pretty much bogus, and research shows that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing monkeys.
I challenge anybody to claim that clean tech done right is a disaster.
Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology.
One thing about technology is that there’s always a win, place, and show, and everyone else goes under.
Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.
Everybody else is afraid to fail. I do not really care because when I fail, I try something new.
New industries are created by entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily have subject matter expertise when they get started, yet they are still responsible for most of the innovation we see in society.
Hopefully, I can advise entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes. But you can never be sure if you’re trying something new and unreasonable.
There are parts of the country in America, in the Midwest, where wind is a big resource, and we should absolutely use it. But to try and apply it nationally doesn’t make sense. There are technologies that will work that are appropriate to certain regions.
The U.S. has fallen well behind Europe in recognizing climate change and the implications of climate change.
When I started doing things on my own, I was figuring – remember, it was a very nascent market. And there was a lot that was unknown about the renewable marketplace in 2004, early 2003, when I was planning on it.
First, you should take money and have plenty of money fueling your tank. But money becomes dangerous if you assume it’s going to keep coming. Make sure you can get your burn rate to a sustainable level if you hit the brakes hard, within 90 days.
We like to say at Khosla Ventures, and this is one of the reasons to do what we do, we’ll take technical risks that nobody else will.
Photovoltaics are a great technology for certain applications, and, in fact, we invest in photovoltaic technologies. But they’re not good substitutes for grid electricity.
The bulk of the utility industry today believes that coal and nuclear are the only solutions we have. Nuclear is greener but has the other issues. Coal, they think, can be transformed into the so-called clean coal technologies.
I generally disagree with most of the very high margin opportunities. Why? Because it’s a business strategy tradeoff: the lower the margin you take, the faster you grow.
I don’t believe – till something radical changes that we are not on track to do – that hybrids are material to climate change. They’re fashionable, everybody loves them, the Prius is selling well, but so are Gucci bags. But they don’t impact the way the world carries stuff. You know it’s a fashion statement.
If everyone played it safe, we wouldn’t get anywhere.
I believe a board in a small startup company should never vote on anything.
Your willingness to fail is what will let you succeed.
Startups allow technologists and scientists to take risks and change plans in a way that would be frowned upon in a big company. Having said that, big companies will play a key role in certain areas and in partnerships with little companies. Each has its strengths.
The probability of failure doesn’t matter to me.
Will biofuel usage require land? Absolutely, but we think the ability to use winter cover crops, degraded land, as well as using sources such as organic waste, sewage, and forest waste means that actual land usage will be limited. Just these sources can replace most of our imported oil by 2030 without touching new land.
Our focus is not on exit. In fact if you talk to any of my entrepreneurs, I’m generally saying, ‘Don’t sell the company,’ when other investors want to sell. I’d much rather focus on building long-term value in building companies rather than worrying about exits.
If I collected all the diamonds in the world, I’d have no ‘income’ but I’d have a lot of ‘assets’. Would my company be worth nothing because I have no income? A lot of Net companies are collecting assets. They have to be measured with a new set of metrics.
I’m not a political person. I’m a techie nerd, and I enjoy the techie part. I mean, all my life, I’ve loved great technology.
I’ve probably failed more often than anybody else in Silicon Valley. Those don’t matter. I don’t remember the failures. You remember the big successes.
There’s a big difference between needs and requirements for grid-based electricity versus those for distributed rural homes or remote locations, or even rooftop solar, where photovoltaics do OK. The more economical a technology is, the faster we’ll see adoption.
Certain food-based biofuels like biodiesel have always been a bad idea. Others like corn ethanol have served a useful purpose and essentially are obsoleting themselves.
Seeking an acquisition from the start is more than just bad advice for an entrepreneur. For the entrepreneur it leads to short term tactical decisions rather than company-building decisions and in my view often reduces the probability of success.
