Entrepreneurs, Don't Be Afraid to Fail | Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)

How's it going, everybody? All right. My name is Brian Park. I'm from Washington, D.C. How many from Washington, D.C. here? That's the love. That's what I'm talking about. Our next guest is a legendary person in Silicon Valley. He actually needs no introduction. In fact, though, his pet peeve is when somebody says, you know, he needs no introduction, and somebody does the introduction, he hates it. So I'm not gonna do it. But in all seriousness though, I got one question for you guys. Who have not heard of Vinod? Please raise your hand. It's okay, I'm not gonna embarrass you. Please, who does not know Vinod? You back there, you gotta leave. But he's going to be interviewed by our fearless leader, Derek Anderson. So, you guys ready? Gonna give them a big Startup Grind cheer? You guys ready? Okay, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Derek Anderson and Vinod Khosla!

Hi everybody! Thanks!

Well, welcome.

Well, thank you.

It's always exciting to be in front of so many entrepreneurs. It just gets me energized.

Well, we're grateful to have you, uh, have you back, I should say. And, um, I'd start by saying, uh, uh, one thing that you'll learn from Vinod, if you haven't seen him be interviewed or if you haven't followed him very much, is he's very open about taking questions, any question. So, uh, so we'd love for you to put those on Twitter, #StartupGrind. I've got the feed pulled up right here, so we'll be throwing those in throughout the conversation, and we may take a few from the audience as well, but if you've got a question, please throw it onto Twitter. I'd love to start with— you know, I was on Yahoo a couple of months ago, and it said the 10 worst business decisions ever, and I'm like, "Wow, this has got to be good." So I'm flipping through these, and right at the top of the list is one that you were involved in. And so would love— everyone's like, oh geez, what did he just ask Vinod? You were on the good side of it. You were trying to— you would have made a good decision. But tell us about this experience where Google was almost sold when it was still Larry and Sergey essentially in the garage.

Let me start by a general statement, which is you can't make good decisions without making bad ones. At least the good ones that are unusual and high risk, high upside. So in that, it's hard to say whether any decision is good or bad, but the story Derek is referring to is I wanted Excite to buy Google, negotiated a price. Now there's some debate between Sergey and myself, but it was $350,000 or $1 million, but I'll, I'll pay $1 million today. Um, uh, I tried to convince Excite, where I was the— on the board and one of the largest shareholders, to buy Google. Larry and Sergey were okay on selling. They didn't want to buy. I tried about 5 times, and— till they literally kicked me out of their office and said, "We don't want to talk about it anymore." Uh, the good thing is we at Kleiner got to invest in Google after that. So it turned out really well. Also, it's hard to say whether Google would have turned out the same way. I suspect it would not have had it been acquired. So it's really hard to go back, but it's one of those business decisions that I thought would make a big difference, and the founders chose to do otherwise.

You talk a lot about failure. I mean, you go all— you go to—

so I just want to add one more thing. I'm often accused of pushing founders because my job I find is to push founders to greatness. Uh, one thing I never do is force them to make a decision anyway. I've never ever voted in 30 years on a board against a founder ever, uh, other than one issue, which is when you have to hire or fire a CEO. Other than that, don't like doing it, won't do it no matter how important the decision. Because the founder's job to execute, and if they don't believe in a decision, they won't execute. So it's— that's really important. But the funny thing is Joe Krause said to me later, you didn't push us hard enough. So I got accused of not being pushy enough.

When you say— when you say that you've never voted against a founder, You're saying you certainly disagree with your entrepreneurs all the time, but you're saying at the end of the day that it's their decision, it's their vision, and you'll support them whether you think it's right or not. Is that what you're saying?

I think that's right. There's two parts of it. First, and this is true of private companies, not public companies. In private companies, a board's job should be to challenge a founder, have them think differently, have them consider issues that aren't natural to them. So I'll even sometimes with founders take positions I don't believe in only because I want them to think from that angle. So founders can never tell whether I actually really believe something or not, uh, because the job is to have them think multidimensionally. And founders usually come from one background, so they have sort of a singular perspective. As opposed to a multidimensional perspective of lots of experience. Um, and so I try and add that element. I think good boards should do that. Having said that, a board comes in once every 6 or 8 weeks. They're not spending enough time. Uh, the founders are there 80 hours a week. There's no way a board can know all the nuances of your business. And so they shouldn't be pretending they can make decisions. Uh, now the only decision boards can do reasonably well is the CEO doing a good job, how to help them do it better. And if sometimes it becomes necessary, you replace the CEO, but mostly that's a bad recipe. If you have to res— replace the CEO, you've lost the essence of a company. So we tried really, really hard to make our founders successful. By surrounding them by people who make up for whatever experience they don't have.

So you talk a lot. Can we go to another topic? Sure. Okay. One thing I love about interviewing you, this happened the last time and I just screwed it up again, is whenever somebody asks you the first question, you answer something completely differently, which is way better. But it's great.

I try to think about what's relevant to everybody here.

It's great.

We're going to get your questions. #StarUpGrind. Tell me about failure. Failure's all over your website. Not like the things that you've done, but just the things that you're talking about. You talk a lot about failure. You got a very diverse and international audience. You have people flying in from Africa and across Asia and all over the world. Why is failure so inconsequential in your mind?

Well, so there's smart failure and dumb failure. Okay, so let me be clear. Smart failure is when you take risks where if you lose, you lose something, and when you win, you win much, much more. So you win 10x or 100x. What's also important, and this part gets forgotten about smart failure, is you never want to fail in a way that kills your company. Sometimes you have to do it, but mostly failures should be learning experiments where failing at it is, say, 10-20% of your burn, not 80% of your burn. And failing at it still gives you a chance to try something new. Failure is a way to learn. Not that failure is a good thing, it's not, but Not being willing to fail means generally that you'll not take any risks. You won't do anything new and innovative. And if you don't do something new and innovative, you're doing what everybody else is. So to do something exceptional, you have to do something out of the ordinary, and that usually means risk. If you're doing the ordinary stuff, the low-risk stuff, you're doing what everybody else knows how to do and will do. And so you're not— you're gonna— the way I put it, I'd rather have a high probability of failure and a large consequence of success than reduce risk to the point where my probability of success is high and the consequences of success are inconsequential. And I think that happens in a lot of startup companies, especially with boards. And you've seen me riff on VCs in general, they try and get early revenue or reduce risk to the point where if you succeed, it's inconsequential success. You're not doing something big or consequential. So as much as you want to try failure, try and not fail, Without being willing to fail, you're not going to succeed in a big way because you're not going to take big risks. And the definition of risk is taking failure. My personal view is my willingness to fail is entirely responsible for my success. It enabled my success. My willingness to take risks that others wouldn't is what made me successful. That plus a lot of luck, so we shouldn't forget. Many of you are really good, tried really hard, and just get a few lucky breaks and you're successful, and bad breaks and you're unsuccessful. That's why I say you can try again.

How do I, as an early-stage entrepreneur, talk about failure? Because like, I don't want to look like a loser, right? And I don't want to look like somebody that's uninvestable and all these things. So how do I, how do I approach a venture capitalist or team members or whoever the stakeholder is, and say to them like, hey, we're taking all this risk, but I'm not perfect too. Like, how do you balance like that kind of messaging of those two things?

So first, you know, startups aren't about messaging to other people. There's part of it that is that, but most of it is where's your internal compass? What are you really trying to achieve? And if you're really trying to achieve something, then sort of say, hey, here's my vision. And I like to say, be obstinate about your vision, but be really flexible about your tactics. What does that mean? It's sort of like think big, act small. What that means is it's important to have a vision of where you're trying to go. How you get there is a series of experiments. Now you can call them failures when they don't work, but they're learning experiments where you try things, see what works, try the next thing. Um, there's a great paper somewhere on our website on, uh, written by somebody at INSEAD, uh, on what entrepreneurs do. It's a factual reasoning. They have a big vision, but they don't try and get there in one leap. What they try to do is see where they are, what resources they have, and it may be nothing except their college money, right? You take a step in the right direction so you can garner more resources. You take a stepping stone in the right direction, garner more resources, try the next experiment, the next step. It may fail or succeed. You may get more resources, you may not. Try something new. You try and garner resources for the next step every step, not do the whole thing in one step. That's very high risk, and this is why I actually believe people who raise too much money get too much confidence in their own plan, which is normally BS. And so I say the right way to do a business plan is flexi-planning, which is have a vision but plan the next 3 to 6 months. Test every assumption you have. So, b— realizing a business plan is about testing every assumption. Even if you're sure it's true, test it if you can in the marketplace in running an experiment. That's sort of the stepwise way of getting to a larger vision without losing sight of big vision is really, uh, what I suggest. Um, another analogy I use which I think is very, very important for people who are just starting out. You want to shoot for Mount Everest, but nobody ever got to Mount Everest without getting to base camp first. You build a base camp of a stable place where you've learned a lot, where you can tread water for a while, rest up.

Build a business.

Maybe you get to cash flow breakeven on base camp. But you wanna set up base camp where it helps you scope out the path to Mount Everest. That's the whole point. Uh, and again, I riff on VCs. My problem is in the process of trying to get a cash flow neutral company or something base camp, they don't worry about that particular base camp being on the path to Mount Everest, helping you reduce your risk for the big climb. They'll set it up anywhere and then it doesn't help you get to the big vision. So these are nuanced trade-offs you make all the time. And it's what I hope all of you— and all this stuff I write about, we put it on our website. Um, and, and there's a lot of resources there for entrepreneurs. I love mentoring entrepreneurs. It's sort of what gets me all going.

We're going to get to your questions in a minute. Hashtag Startup Grind and send them away. Uh, got some good ones here. I want to just ask you about— just a question about food tech and agriculture. You've made several investments in this category, and, you know, when you're an entrepreneur and you're looking for the right people to invest or to take investment from in your, you know, in your sector, in your market, you always look for the domain experts. And, you know, I mean, I take one look at you and I think, are you the domain expert in food? And in tech, do you— have you ever felt the pressure to really gain 50 or 100 pounds and just start eating a lot so you become more of a, you know—

So, a couple of things. I recently tweeted, retweeted a tweet I saw that was great. Many times experts fail in predicting the future because they're experts in a past version of the world, not the current version of the world. So experts is a very tricky thing. Experience is generally a good thing. And this comes back to this issue of why I like founders as CEOs, um, and people under them who know the domain. Experience is a good thing, but experience generally means a bias, a bias about how the world works in that particular sector. And some of those biases are good and you want to consider them, and some are bad. And so experience is not always good. When Jack Dorsey— I'm on Jack's board— was asked by Wired magazine, why has Square succeeded in payments? And Square then had about 200 people. He said, of our first 200 people, only 4 ever did payments before. You want just enough domain knowledge, but you don't want those people with deep domain knowledge unless they're the founders driving the decisions, because then they'll do it based on conventional wisdom in that domain. But you want them around the table helping you make decisions. So founder instincts are really, really critical to navigating this. And whenever you hire a manager-type CEO, you lose the instincts and lose what you're trying to do that's new and different and how you're trying to change that domain. To answer your question, food is exciting. We've done some things in food that are totally radical that nobody in the food business would attempt. And yeah, some of them are adding food expertise now. Now I'll tell you, I'm not an expert in any area. I'm sort of like an inch deep and a mile wide. So I may pretend to know stuff, but I don't. What I do know is I'm an expert in one thing. I've screwed up more often than most people in Silicon Valley. I've tried more things, I've screwed up more often, and hopefully in giving advice, I can bring that experience of all the times I've screwed up to an entrepreneur who hasn't screwed up as many times. That's what I can bring. I can't bring everything. You know, Hampton Creek doing mayo, right? Know nothing about mayo, but nobody in the food business would go after mayo. Well, great founder, great personal story too. Guy was an Alabama high school football player, almost dropped out of high school, barely got to college. He's added a really key person on his board from Bon Appétit, which really knows the food business. That's the right way to craft. While we are talking about that, I want to give you guys a couple of things that I find are absolutely essential to starting a company. One is engineering the gene pool of a company. Vinod Khosla. There's a paper on our website, and I think I've published in TechCrunch too, how do you engineer the gene pool of a company? If there was only one piece of advice I'd give you, I'd say go read that paper of what increases the probability of success. How do you mix diverse opinions in your startup to increase the probability of success? If I were to give you a second piece of advice, in hiring the people to constitute the gene pool of a company, and the gene pool is absolutely critical, in hiring those people, you're not qualified to judge many of the people you need to hire. If you're a technology entrepreneur, you need to hire a VP of marketing, you do not have good instincts about how, what you need in a VP of Marketing or a CFO. So what do you do? I have a paper for that on the— something called the— I forget. If somebody needs to email me, the Art and Labor of Hiring or something like that on our website too. All these are big papers. They're like 15 pages each because I really wanted to get into meaty actionable stuff. Don't believe the crap of just hire good people. That's not actionable. I haven't run into anybody who says hire bad people. Uh, when it becomes actionable is when you have 10 tests you can run that by on engineering the gene pool or how you interview somebody to assess somebody in an area you don't know as well. Those are really helpful to a company. I know you want to ask me questions, but I want to finish with one part on that last question. I have all this stuff that comes to mind whenever I talk to entrepreneurs. Vinod Khosla. There's a huge difference between a $0 million startup and a $0 billion startup. And the difference is almost entirely about attitude, culture, and the kind of gene pool they want to engineer into their company. It's no different in the business plan. It's difference in attitude. And some of these— and most of you, if I meet you, I can usually tell immediately if you're trying to build a small company or a big company, independent of what you say, by how you think about who you need on your team, how you approach markets, what your culture is, that kind of stuff. I'm just trying to be helpful to entrepreneurs starting companies.

It's very helpful.

Your questions are less important.

You sound like my wife. You spend more of your time hiring and helping your companies hire great people than just about anything else. I wonder if you could just tell us How do you close a great team member? How do you convince them? What is that final step? It seems like you can get somebody interested, okay, a lot of people can do that, but like getting them from like being interested to actually like quitting their job, taking less money, and joining this crazy thing. What do you say?

What do you do? So that is one of the more important things. Entrepreneurs have to learn to do on the external side. I talked about the internal, having an internal compass. Without that, without religion and a religious belief about what you're trying to do, you won't be successful. You'll be distracted by lots of small opportunistic opportunities. But on the outside, you have to sell everybody. So Mark Leslie and I teach a class at Stanford Business School on entrepreneurship, on essentially selling. How you sell everybody. You sell your customers, you sell investors, you sell your employees. You know, when I was starting Sun, I was in my 20s. It was really painful to convince somebody to give up their job and join me knowing I wasn't 100% sure it'd be successful. And their wives would usually be complaining, or husbands would be complaining. That, hey, why are you giving up a good job? First, I think you spend a lot of time figuring out what's important to that person. Each person's different. Some care about working on the right thing or exciting thing for them. Some care about being part of the right team. Others care about a big idea. You figure that out., and then you sell on that metric. Uh, it helps now that I have credibility and my job becomes a lot easier than yours. That's why people find it surprising. It's the single largest portion of my week. The most number of hours goes to recruiting people for our companies all the way down to the many companies I've pushed for individual engineers and sell them. Like it takes an incredible amount of time. Um, but it's so key because it's partly— I use it to recruit the people to the company. I partly use it to teach the founders about how you engineer the gene pool of a company. So you'll take a very qualified candidate and then have a discussion of how that gene pool might help or hurt the team. And what's essential, or why to go after somebody they don't think is critical now to hire. So all those discussions happen well when you have a person, you've interviewed it, and then can have, you know, so take a company like Datera, which we funded probably a little over a year ago. I probably interviewed 40 engineers for them. Because it's a—

Not senior, not VPs, engineers.

Well, those too, but lots of engineers, right? And part of it is at some point the team gets pretty astute about— they know the domain expertise way better than I do. But there's other things about hiring that most entrepreneurs don't recognize early, and that's what I call venture assistance. Really, uh, I don't think I'm in this investing business. I've actually never publicly said I'm a venture capitalist. I don't like that term. I like to say, and if you look at our website, it says we are in the venture assistance business. We are in the business of making entrepreneurs successful. And that's why I like preserving the entrepreneur's vision and buttressing support structure around them so they can be more successful and lower risk.

This comes from the audience, and if you fail, your startup dies, you have this, you know, you've put your heart and soul into this thing for however long you did it, but how do you stay motivated after that? Like, how do you, what do you tell entrepreneurs to get back on the horse and keep going?

You know, the honest truth is entrepreneurship is hard. Sounds romantic. All of you who are actually doing it know how hard it is, how many butterflies you get in the stomach, how many sleepless nights. It's just part of this issue of taking a risk big enough that others won't take. So first, you should be proud you're willing to take a risk. Uh, so this kind of optimism is essential to entrepreneurship. With that optimism, you have to be schizophrenic and also have paranoia, and I recommend people read Andy Grove's book which was written in the '80s, Only the Paranoid Survive. Uh, you sort of have to be schizophrenic. But having said that, what I'd say to all of you is if there's 10 things that'll make you successful, you may at best control 4 of them. 3 depend on what your competitors do, and 3 depend on pure luck. Something happened that got things to take off. Uh, so if you failed, you may have done all the right things. Of course, you may have done all the wrong things too, in which case what I say is learn as much, critically examine what failed and what you would have done different. If you did all the right things, then still learn, but try again. It's just a great lifestyle. I don't consider entrepreneurship a job. I consider it a lifestyle. I've done it my whole life, and I tell people who work in big companies, you can have a job or a lifestyle. Which one would you like? And, you know, people have different preferences.

Let's give Vinod a big round of applause. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

So instead of going to the other room, we're going to stay in here. If you want to get up and leave, this is the break right now. This is your chance. We're going to go straight into Steve Case and Mary Grove after this. So feel free to get up and leave if you need to take a quick break. And we'll just get started with some of these. What has been your biggest failure? Boy.

You know, I failed so many times, it's really—

They're all blurred together?

They're all blurred together. I can give you isolated examples. Anyone is, um, we had a company long time ago, and, and, you know, every failure, especially the larger ones, are a learning example. A company called Dynabook. We wanted to do a laptop before anybody else did it, um, we did a lot of things right, but we made the mistake of hiring a CEO who came from IBM. Um, look, I was Vinod Khosla was pretty young. He had all the right credentials and none of the entrepreneurial instincts. That's why we focus on that so much. And I didn't realize that just because there's a big name and a big title, that that won't make a successful leader for that effort, for that vision. And we made lots of mistakes by doing things the way a big company and experienced person would do it instead of a scrappy entrepreneurial style. So that was one. Right after that we did Go. That was a different kind of learning. Dynabook was learning about not going by resume alone, because resumes can be impressive without the person being appropriate for what you need to do in a startup. Go, Go was a great tablet startup. Think today's iPad in the late '80s. Um, and it was pen-based, not touch-based because touchscreens weren't, um, uh, and the company was very clever in its marketing slogans. The pen, the, the slogan was the pen's the point, and you get lost behind marketing. It sounded sexy. We all believed it. John Doerr and I were both on the board. And we sort of spent a lot of money before realizing the pen wasn't the point. Sexy marketing was misleading us, and that's a warning I'd give all of you. Just because others believe your marketing pitch doesn't mean it's right. In fact, mobility was the point of what we were trying to build, and then because of a great marketer, we got lost in the marketing of it. You know, pen computing, the pen's the point. People want mobile email. If we had just done that like BlackBerry did much later, we would have been successful. So being critically examining each one, literally if you mention an area, I'll mention a failure I've had.

Right? Off some of the things you were talking about earlier about kind of trusting your gut or following your internal compass, How do you know the difference?

Well, follow your gut and your internal compass, but surround yourself with people who will critically challenge you in a constructive way. You know, again, that's critical to deciding what experiments to run, what it's okay to fail at, what it's not okay to fail at, what's a good failure, what's a dumb failure. But I think that kitchen cabinet which goes into, and again goes back to this, Engineering the gene pool of people who are giving you advice is absolutely key. But please continue with your question.

How do you know the difference between your gut and indigestion? Like, how do you know, like, hey, like even with Go or something, like I'm guessing you followed your gut, or maybe you didn't. But like, how do I tell the difference between like, hey, this is actually— is a real— this is really my internal compass, or this is something else I fabricated because I just am in love with it?

I think gut instinct is important, especially about new things. If you're doing something new, Dataquest doesn't have a report. If Dataquest has a report, you're not doing something new. It's, it's a tautology. But when you're trying something new, It's inherently uncertain, right? And so what you have to do is find ways to test as much of your gut instinct with experiments and try these little things instead of going for the whole enchilada in one step. All the experiments that might validate your gut instinct. So gut instinct is great, but only if you critically test, start testing pieces of it and validating it. And once you do, you learn so much. This is why business plans never end up where they start, because as you test these assumptions, as you learn, uh, you are iterating slowly, uh, to the right set of assumptions in the right plan. That's why FlexiPlanning instead of business planning is good. Business plans are good to say what kind of critical thinker you are, but not really to tell you what's actually going to happen. You might— by the way, one of the mistakes I find boards make is once an entrepreneur has committed to a business plan or a deck or an annual plan, they make them stick to it. That's really dumb. If you're learning new stuff every 3 months, you should be iterating and changing. And boards don't like that. VCs like predictable stuff. They reduce risk to the point of hurting a company, I find.

In today's struggle for top technology talent, do you see the engineering workforce becoming more contract-based?

I don't think so. Um, I, I, I think, uh, cumulative knowledge in a company is great. Because all the things you tried and didn't work are really an important asset. They're not just things that didn't work, they're important learnings and you want to accumulate that and that becomes less, uh, less valuable if somebody is contracting. But you know, uh, rare talent is getting very competitive and And frankly, that's why I spend so much time competing for talent. So, you know, there'll be some of it contractual, but I don't think for the startup world that's that critical.

@Vinod Khosla, #StartupCrying to ask a question. I know you mentor a lot of female entrepreneurs. You have several people asking about this. What is your advice for women female entrepreneurs in trying to raise capital? Have you backed female entrepreneurs? What advice do you have for them?

We've backed a lot of female entrepreneurs. What I would say in general is I don't have a good view of what other VCs do. But— You know, female entrepreneurs bring something that I actually think is, is missing in many testosterone-heavy male entrepreneurs, which is more empathy and more mirror neurons. What that does is help you understand the customer much better. I also happen to have 3 daughters who care a lot about this issue, so we have a lot of discussions at home. Again, as part of engineering a gene pool, you want somebody who's really empathetic to customer requirements and empathetic to employees. You know, some entrepreneurs are just jerks to their employees. All around, I think diverse teams really help, and diversity has huge benefits of its own. I'd love to see more female entrepreneurs. I'd say You know, my feeling, at least in our shop, is people don't prefer male or female entrepreneurs. There's— they look at the plan and the person. What I find is a real shame is how many women and girls are discouraged from going into the more technical disciplines in high school, starting in sort of middle school and high school. And that's a shame because we're losing half the talent in a critical area in our country and overseas, everywhere, because of sort of self-image or expectations. I'm not an expert in the topic, but it's a shame.

What's your personal opinion on Bitcoin, and does it bear the same disruptive potential as the internet?

A couple of things I would say. We have made a few Bitcoin investments. Like any early system, it has problems. We invested in Blockstream to try and fix some of those problems, and Blockstream has the most amazing set of individuals who are intimate with the Bitcoin ecosystem. What I would say to people is there are going to be opportunities. It's the time, you know, we're not placing $50 million bets in Bitcoin, but we are placing a lot of smaller bets, doing a lot of learning, testing, assumption. If you ask me, I'd say the blockchain is way more important than Bitcoin. So some people understand that there's good and bad, and I think because of some of the bad uses of Bitcoin, it will cause regulatory ire. I don't believe in the anarchist world. There's problems with the regulatory world that we should try and minimize, but there's real problems with the anarchist world too. And so I don't subscribe to that reason for Bitcoin as a currency, but there's huge other benefits of Bitcoin as a currency. But way more important is the blockchain where you can do— I would love to do all software contracts, uh, uh, on Bitcoin. If I'm going to bet on a Michigan football game, I'd rather not have a bookie in the middle. I'd rather have a software contract with you. Instead of doing escrow for your house with a title guarantee company that does nothing and giving them a lot of money, I'd rather do title escrow differently. I'd rather issue stocks, stock certificates through the blockchain. So there's lots and lots of really interesting applications. I don't think we are far enough into the ecosystem. People like Blockstream are trying to solve some of the problems with Bitcoin, and that's— that will enable much more innovation. It will change payments, but it will change many other areas that we don't think about as relevant I saw a great article about doing the domain name service with a blockchain approach. Now, people don't connect the two, but it's really exciting to see those kinds of applications. While we are talking about this, I'd say this, I, I, the one of the questions I get asked a lot is what are interesting areas? So the blockchain is definitely very interesting, maybe even more than Bitcoin. We talked a lot about food and ag, but that's representative. We have a company that has— that's making ground beef, and I tasted the burgers last week and couldn't tell which one was real beef. Just could not. And I was looking for differences. We have a company that makes milk. Very fundamental change in approach to food and ag. You know, this mayo, this beef, way more sustainable and eventually way cheaper than beef cattle or eggs and way more humane. If you want to know what, how inhumane your mayo is, just Google crushed chicks. They Crush live male chicks because they don't lay eggs. Crush them live in a hopper. It's just disgusting. I can't watch the videos. Making food more humane, making it more sustainable, real opportunity. We have robots. Yeah. We have robots that are going in the fields that can remove weeds. If robots can mechanically remove weeds, you could eliminate herbicides on the planet. That'd be an awesome thing to do. My point is the following: almost every area I look, there is innovation to be had. There's technology to be applied to changing the basic assumptions. Who thought you could replace herbicides? I'm now convinced we can do it and be a huge win. And you would eliminate the locks companies have on seats. So lots of fun stuff to do. It's challenging. It's hugely impactful. Other areas, I think in 20 years medicine will change completely. I'm a huge fan of digital health. We've made probably 15 investments in digital health. Uh, This is my new Jawbone UP Band. Tracks my heart rate.

We had Hussein here last year.

Oh, you— great. You know, in a future version, I can monitor atrial fibrillation if I had AFib. I don't, thankfully. That's way more effective than any treatment for AFib is monitoring it, treating it early. So digital health has huge potential. I don't think we've started to see the beginnings of what health is. Unfortunately, there the regulatory regime, um, and the FDA is actually doing a pretty good job of being permissive. I'm much more optimistic on the FDA than other people are, but too many digital healthcare investors focus on payment reimbursement codes and payment models. And I think If you focus on that, you're not going to disrupt that fee-for-service payment model system. And so I find too many startups directed towards what I think is less disruptive, less interesting, more mediocre business plans. So digital health is a huge area. Machine learning and AI, awesome area. We made a bunch of investments there. Applications of that, infinite number of applications, trying to replace legal research, trying to do machine learning to do weeding. It's a weeding machine learning problem. Um, trying to diagnose atrial fibrillation, trying to detect mental health. You know, we know more about somebody's mental health than their psychiatrist can know because of machine learning. So almost every area. There's some negative consequences to that, and I wrote a blog post, very long blog post, I write too much, in Forbes about last November. There will be some social consequences of this machine learning that concern me a lot. I don't have easy solutions in this, I won't go into that here because I put most of it down in the blog post for those of you interested, but I covered a lot of areas that are really, really interesting and exciting. And frankly, new ones keep popping up every single day.

This is a little bit change of pace, but I think it would be interesting to know, what were you like as a child?

You know, I don't remember. My mom said great things. Everybody else thought I was a maniac. I believe my mom. I, you know, I'd say I'll give you a couple of stories. I always decided what I wanted to do and then just tried to make it happen, and what got in the way didn't matter. And so I'd end up in fights with teachers all the time, and things I wouldn't recommend kids do, but I wasn't past really arguing or physically fighting with teachers.

No kidding.

If they were doing dumb things, and that's not always smart, but challenging conventional wisdom is very important. Because all of you entrepreneurs, I'd say no matter how hard something is, it's mostly doable. When I joined IIT Delhi, There was no programming course, let alone a computer science course, anywhere in any of the IITs that I knew about. So what did we do? We started the first ever hobby club to teach Fortran programming. 4 of us did. We started that and frankly evolved into something much more. But you can do that. I was 16 then in college. And we just made it happen. Even though we had to convince one professor to learn it, we learned a lot of it ourselves, and we just made it happen. I was also interested in biomedical engineering, so 2 or 3 of us got together with one professor and started a biomedical engineering sort of specialty within electrical engineering. There was no such thing anywhere in India. And we started that, and we started working on it. So a lot more is possible even in really bureaucratic government-run institutions that, like the Indian Institute of Technology, if you persist with it. So persistence is really important. If you're good at selling, I talked about persistence is an important characteristic of entrepreneurs. Selling is an important characteristic of entrepreneurs. Internal compass and religious beliefs about your convictions and not getting distracted by short-term attractions. Those are essential characteristics. I know we are running out of time, so I'll stop there, but—

Let's give Vinod Khosla a big round of applause. Thank you very much.

Thank you all.

Since we have—

since we have 13 seconds or 10 seconds, I'd say, Vinod Khosla. My favorite thing is to dream the dreams and then sort of be foolish enough to go out and try and make them happen. And if you're totally sensible and not foolish, you're not going to pursue your dreams. This is not an original quote. I saw it in a hang gliding movie the first time I learned hang gliding a long, long time ago, but it is very appropriate for entrepreneurs, and I love seeing people do entrepreneurial efforts. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.