Top 50 Vinod Khosla Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Vinod Khosla

2. “Any problem is an opportunity. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.”

— Vinod Khosla

3. “Every big problem is a big opportunity.”

— Vinod Khosla

4. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

6. “You have to invent the future you want.”

— Vinod Khosla

7. “The willingness to fail gives us the freedom to succeed.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

10. “Big data will replace the need for 80% of all doctors.”

— Vinod Khosla

11. “Future is not extrapolation of past.”

— Vinod Khosla

12. “Not thinking it’s possible is a failure of imagination.”

— Vinod Khosla

13. “If I wanted to be a doctor today I’d go to math school not med school.”

— Vinod Khosla

14. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

16. “One of the best things data can enable us to do is to ask questions we didn’t know to ask.”

— Vinod Khosla

17. “How would you compete against yourself?”

— Vinod Khosla

18. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

19. “Your cellphone has 10 sensors, and your car has 400. But your body has none – that’s going to change.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

22. “Spreadsheets are fiction. Believing in what you’re doing and what you’re building is what’s important.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

24. “We humans think linearly but tech trends are exponential.”

— Vinod Khosla

25. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

26. “The only way you multiply resources is with technology. To really affect poverty, energy, health, education, or anything else – there is no other way.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

28. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

29. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

32. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

33. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

34. “The right way to build a company is to experiment in lots of small ways, so that you have plenty of room to make mistakes and change strategies.”

— Vinod Khosla

35. “Where most entrepreneurs fail is on the things they don’t know they don’t know.”

— Vinod Khosla

36. “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?”

— Vinod Khosla

37. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

38. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

39. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

40. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

41. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

42. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

43. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

44. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

46. “If you’re going to re-invent healthcare you have to start from scratch.”

— Vinod Khosla

47. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

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

— Vinod Khosla

50. “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.”

— Vinod Khosla