Vinod Khosla Quotes

In the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

An entrepreneur is someone who dares to dream the dreams and is foolish enough to try to make those dreams come true.

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

Doctors can be replaced by software – 80% of them can. I’d much rather have a good machine learning system diagnose my disease than the median or average doctor.

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.

You have to invent the future you want.

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.

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

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.

For electric power generation, we are very optimistic about solar-thermal technology, and we’re intrigued by the potential of enhanced geothermal energy to replace coal-based power generation. Traditional carbon capture and sequestration-based coal power generation is somewhat unlikely to be competitive.

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.

I don’t mind the low probability of success, but it better be impactful if we do succeed.

We humans think linearly but tech trends are exponential.

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

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

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

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

The first rule of venture capitalism is hands-on experience. You have to get your hands dirty.

How would you compete against yourself?

I don’t mind failing, but if I succeed it better be worth succeeding for.

Future is not extrapolation of past

Every big problem is a big opportunity.

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

As for companies invested in the space - I think its important to distinguish between a good investment and a material climate change technology - you can have the first without the second, even in the "clean tech" space.

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?

The willingness to fail gives us the freedom to succeed.

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

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

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

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.

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

Maybe some percentage that’s substantially larger than 95 percent of VCs add zero value. I would bet that 70-80 percent add negative value to a startup in their advising.

If you're going to re-invent healthcare you have to start from scratch.

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.

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'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.

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

Is it 10 years, 20, 50 before we reach that tipping point where climate change becomes irreversible? Nobody can know. There's clearly a probability distribution. We need to ensure this planet, and we need to do it quickly.

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.

Climate deniers are clearly the fringe group and need to see a proctologist to find their heads.

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.

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

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.