Words of Wisdom from Vinod Khosla

by Scott Edward Walker on September 12th, 2013

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we present Vinod Khosla, a brilliant entrepreneur and founder of Khosla Ventures.

In this interesting interview conducted yesterday by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt, Vinod shares some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs, including the following:

• “Lots of VC’s will talk about value-add, but very few…have done enough themselves.” (at 2:53)
• “I don’t even go to Board meetings anymore…because everyone is there from other venture firms talking as if they’ve earned the right to advise entrepreneurs — when they haven’t done shit.” (at 3:15)
• “Knowing whose advice to take and on what topic may be the single most difficult decision an entrepreneur has to make.” (at 4:11)
• “I don’t know a startup that doesn’t go through tough times.” (at 4:28)
• “If you’re doing what everybody else is doing then you’re not doing anything interesting, and we don’t want to invest.” (at 5:12)
• “Maybe some percentage substantially larger than 95% of VC’s add zero value; and I would guess, 70 to 80 percent of VC’s add negative value to a startup….” (at 5:39)
• “You’re starting to see software applied to human-judgment equivalence; and I think that will move much faster than most people expect.” (at 15:10)
• “In the next ten years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all the biological sciences combined.” (at 15:49)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott