Vinod Khosla Quotes

I do not know what got me interested in technology. What was very clear to me very early on was that I was not interested in religion and that naturally increased my curiosity about science and technology, and I fundamentally believe the two are conflicting.

The world is hung up on food-based biofuels. Not only are they the wrong thing, they're the uneconomic thing.

If you have a carbon cap and trade system, there'd be an agreed-to limit the amount of carbon we emit. That changes the economic picture for fossil technologies and for the renewable technologies. It makes the renewable technologies more attractive and the fossils less attractive.

One of the best things data can enable us to do is to ask questions we didn't know to ask.

I'm a fiscal hawk. I vote against all taxes, but I do believe the environment, and climate change, is a bigger issue than fiscal deficits are as a risk to the nation.

Future is not extrapolation of past

The U.S. has fallen well behind Europe in recognizing climate change and the implications of climate change.

I believe cellulosic fuels, biofuels made from nonfood crops are the only solution that will make a difference.

Communication always changes society, and society was always organized around communication channels. Two hundred years ago it was mostly rivers. It was sea-lanes and mountain passes. The Internet is another form of communication and commerce. And society organizes around the channels.

My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed.

Knowing whose advice to take and on what topic is the single most important decision an entrepreneur can make.

The willingness to fail gives us the freedom to succeed.

Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.

Spreadsheets are fiction. Believing in what you're doing and what you're building is what's important.

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.

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.

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.

Now it will take a long time to scale biofuels, but I'm the only one in the world forecasting oil dropping in price to $35 a barrel by 2030. I'll put it on the record: Oil will not be able to compete with cellulosic biofuels. If you do it from food, the food will get so expensive you can't make fuel out of it.

Setting an aggressive enough carbon-reduction goal will result in an appropriate price for carbon and will help many a renewable technology. Consumer education will help. Most importantly, though, will be the continually declining cost trajectory of the real breakthrough in clean-technology costs driven by research and innovation. In the end, private capital is the real barometer of change.

We don't need a fuel that's cleaner, we need a fuel that happens to be cleaner, but is half the price of oil.

Entrepreneurs have the flexibility and the ability to do things that large companies simply cannot. Could a large company pull off a trick like Amyris, going from anti-malaria medicine to next-generation fuel?

You need a degree of foolishness to cause disruptive change in healthcare. Dare to dream.

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is one of the reasons we have a coal-dependent infrastructure, with the resulting environmental impact that all of us can see. I suspect environmentalists, through their opposition of nuclear power, have caused more coal plants to be built than anybody. And those coal plants have emitted more radioactive material from the coal than any nuclear accident would have.

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.

There's no doubt in my mind over the next 25 years how we drive, how we build our houses, how we fly, how we build our buildings, will all change.

How would you compete against yourself?

Oil replacements and then efficiencies in engines and housing and the way we build houses is a very interesting market.

Every big problem is a big opportunity.

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.

You have to invent the future you want.

If I wanted to be a doctor today I'd go to math school not med school.

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.

It doesn't matter what your probability of failure is. If there's a 90% chance of failure, there's a 10% chance of changing the world.

The state of healthcare today is that we are busy in the practice of medicine vs. being in the science of medicine.

Imagine the world of mobile based on Nokia and Motorola if Apple had not been restarted by a missionary entrepreneur named Steve Jobs who cared more for his vision than being tactical and financial.

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.

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 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.

No one will pay you to solve a non-problem.

Any problem is an opportunity. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.

Where most entrepreneurs fail is on the things they don't know they don't know.

Success comes to those that dare to dream dreams and are foolish enough to try and make them come true.

In my view, it's irreverence, foolish confidence and naivety combined with persistence, open mindedness and a continual ability to learn that created Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Apple, Juniper, AOL, Sun Microsystems and others.

Your cellphone has 10 sensors, and your car has 400. But your body has none - that's going to change.

It is important in any population to have an ecosystem around start-up ideas to leverage the most out of them such an ecosystem needs developing and most of this is about giving entrepreneurs confidence.

Everybody else is afraid to fail. I do not really care because when I fail, I try something new.

Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable - from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems.

Screw up often; but screw up ahead of everybody else, and than learn as much, and than use it to make subsequent investments.

What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.

By 2025, 80 percent of the functions doctors do will be done much better and much more cheaply by machines and machine learned algorithms,

We humans think linearly but tech trends are exponential.

Not thinking it's possible is a failure of imagination.