Top 25 Vinod Khosla Quotes

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.

Who cares if companies are overvalued or not?

I believe a board in a small startup company should never vote on anything.

The combination of brilliant ideas and entrepreneurial spirit should lead us to a safer and more secure future.

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.

Hopefully, I can advise entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes. But you can never be sure if you’re trying something new and unreasonable.

I’ve failed at more things than anyone I know. No one remembers the failures.

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.

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.

Nobody who comes in once every six weeks while you’re working 80 or 90 hours a week is qualified to make a decision.

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.

Your willingness to fail is what will let you succeed.

One thing about technology is that there’s always a win, place, and show, and everyone else goes under.

You take something like RingCentral. It doesn’t need any more money or financing: it is relatively mature, recurring revenue business – not really worried – but you know, we could sell it tomorrow. We have not been in a rush to sell it. We don’t care about exits as much. We care about building fundamental value.

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.

We love serious technology innovations, and there is a strong bias towards large technology innovations that are sort of disruptive to the current market.

Environmentalists get in the way. They often ask the right questions, but they’re chasing the wrong answers – often hypothetical or uneconomic solutions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If everyone played it safe, we wouldn’t get anywhere.

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.