Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Vinod Khosla - Page 2

We humans think linearly but tech trends are exponential.

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.

Big data will replace the need for 80% of all doctors

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

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

Future is not extrapolation of past

Every big problem is a big opportunity.

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

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

Where most entrepreneurs fail is on the things they don't know they don't know.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

We don't need a fuel that's cleaner, we need a fuel that happens to be cleaner, but is half the price of oil.

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.

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.

You have to invent the future you want.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed.

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.

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.

How would you compete against yourself?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The willingness to fail gives us the freedom to succeed.

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.