Opinion
Khosla: 90% of VCs add no value, 70% add negative value
“I think, 90% of investors add no value. In my assessment, 70% of investors add negative value to a company.”
Insight
Khosla: Process managers prevent startups from becoming truly great companies
“And so, if you have great managers, good process people, they will work against allowing the company to become great. They'll take, take a great idea and turn it into a good one, And execute a decent idea at lower risk that's more reasonable, more sensible.”
Opinion
Khosla tells Sam Altman his biggest problem with Y Combinator startups
“By the way, this is my single biggest beef with YC. Not enough option pools. Right? Not enough option pools. Not enough focus on recruiting the right co-founders.”
Opinion
Khosla: Many investors prioritize short-term revenue over long-term strategic assets
“My big beef with a lot of investors is they want revenue, They want to meet plan as opposed to collect assets for this larger ascent to Mount Everest.”
Insight
Khosla: Rate of learning matters far more than experience in startups
“Experience doesn't matter. The rate of learning matters. First principles, thinking matters. Pick for the best athlete, not the person who's the most established wide receiver who knows how to run one pattern and one pattern only.”
Insight
Khosla: Top executive hires should elevate peers, not just execute functional roles
“Ah, when you hire a VP of marketing, and I've said this to you before, one question, the functional question is, can you do marketing? But that's not the most important question. If he's one of the top five people in the company, The most important question is…”
Insight
Khosla: Business plans are irrelevant except for evaluating how founders think
“So I often tell entrepreneurs a business plan is completely irrelevant other than to judge how somebody's thought about a problem, not what they're going to do.”
Insight
Khosla: An investor is an employee you cannot fire
“I think an investor is an employee who you can't fire. And that's how you should think about it. Otherwise, all the same principles apply.”
Disclosure
Khosla bans junior VCs from taking board seats to protect founders
“So some of the junior people here, when they ask me, hey, at this other firm, people, young people are going on boards, can I be on a board? I say, you haven't earned the right to advise an entrepreneur, so it's unfair to the entrepreneur.”
Insight
Khosla: Rate of founder change is the strongest indicator of success
“In the three months that they're, that they've been at YC, what's their rate of change? If we've had multiple points of intercept. That may be a stronger indicator than any other single indicator.”
Insight
Khosla: Candidates without great opportunities to walk away from shouldn't be hired
“The people who don't have something great to walk away are probably the people you don't want.”
Insight
Khosla: Every part of GDP can achieve 100% to 1,000% resource improvements
“Turns out there's no part of non-governmental U.S. GDP that one can't innovate on. In ways that are not five, 10% improvements, but are hundred to a thousand percent improvements in resource inputs.”
Insight
Khosla: A company becomes the people it hires, not its plan
“So one of my favorite tweets I like tweeting out is, a company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes. And that's grossly under appreciated.”
Insight
Khosla: Choosing whose advice to trust is an entrepreneur's hardest decision
“Whose advice to trust on what topic is the single hardest decision an entrepreneur makes?”
Insight
Khosla: In recruiting, a 'no' is a maybe and a 'maybe' is a yes
“I sort of say in recruiting, a no is a maybe, and a maybe is a yes.”
Disclosure
Khosla agreed to fund Impossible Foods in first meeting without details
“And we, I think I said yes to him in our very first meeting. We didn't last. I didn't even need to know the details. It was just a vision too big to not attempt.”
Assertion Supported
Sun Microsystems almost went bankrupt over defective Philips monitors
“And there was a period, there was a three month period where we almost went bankrupt because we had a hardware problem. Monitors we were buying from Philips were breaking every 30 days.”
Vinod Khosla