“Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.”
“I do not know what got me interested in technology. What was very clear to me very early on was that I was not interested in religion and that naturally increased my curiosity about science and technology, and I fundamentally believe the two are conflicting.”
“The only way you multiply resources is with technology. To really affect poverty, energy, health, education, or anything else – there is no other way.”
“We love serious technology innovations, and there is a strong bias towards large technology innovations that are sort of disruptive to the current market.”
“I believe a board in a small startup company should never vote on anything.”
“Did Google know much about media? Or Amazon about commerce? Tesla about cars? SpaceX about rockets? EBay about classifieds? What did I know about computing when I started Sun Microsystems? We should celebrate these entrepreneurs, not pillory them for fighting entrenched incumbent industries that have political influence and money.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I don’t know a startup that hasn’t been through tough times.”
“I’ve failed at more things than anyone I know. No one remembers the failures.”
“You know, one of the great things about most renewable technologies – not every technology, but many of them – is the jobs have to be local. When you’re talking about a power plant and power generation using solar thermal technology, the jobs will be where the plant is.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If you have a carbon cap and trade system, there’d be an agreed-to limit the amount of carbon we emit. That changes the economic picture for fossil technologies and for the renewable technologies. It makes the renewable technologies more attractive and the fossils less attractive.”
“What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.”
“The probability of failure doesn’t matter to me.”
“The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.”
“We like to say at Khosla Ventures, and this is one of the reasons to do what we do, we’ll take technical risks that nobody else will.”
“I don’t believe – till something radical changes that we are not on track to do – that hybrids are material to climate change. They’re fashionable, everybody loves them, the Prius is selling well, but so are Gucci bags. But they don’t impact the way the world carries stuff. You know it’s a fashion statement.”
“Now it will take a long time to scale biofuels, but I’m the only one in the world forecasting oil dropping in price to $35 a barrel by 2030. I’ll put it on the record: Oil will not be able to compete with cellulosic biofuels. If you do it from food, the food will get so expensive you can’t make fuel out of it.”
“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.”
“The U.S. has fallen well behind Europe in recognizing climate change and the implications of climate change.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everybody else is afraid to fail. I do not really care because when I fail, I try something new.”
“If I collected all the diamonds in the world, I’d have no ‘income’ but I’d have a lot of ‘assets’. Would my company be worth nothing because I have no income? A lot of Net companies are collecting assets. They have to be measured with a new set of metrics.”
“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.”
“Seeking an acquisition from the start is more than just bad advice for an entrepreneur. For the entrepreneur it leads to short term tactical decisions rather than company-building decisions and in my view often reduces the probability of success.”
“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.”
“If everyone played it safe, we wouldn’t get anywhere.”
“I’m a fiscal hawk. I vote against all taxes, but I do believe the environment, and climate change, is a bigger issue than fiscal deficits are as a risk to the nation.”
“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?”
“Will biofuel usage require land? Absolutely, but we think the ability to use winter cover crops, degraded land, as well as using sources such as organic waste, sewage, and forest waste means that actual land usage will be limited. Just these sources can replace most of our imported oil by 2030 without touching new land.”
“Knowing whose advice to take and on what topic is the single most important decision an entrepreneur can make.”
“First, you should take money and have plenty of money fueling your tank. But money becomes dangerous if you assume it’s going to keep coming. Make sure you can get your burn rate to a sustainable level if you hit the brakes hard, within 90 days.”
“Who cares if companies are overvalued or not?”
“Entrepreneurs can benefit a lot from the right help and advice, and you can avoid costly mistakes. You can get incredible leverage in hiring people who wouldn’t even talk to you if you have the right help. An investor isn’t about money – it’s about the help and advice you can get.”
“When I started doing things on my own, I was figuring – remember, it was a very nascent market. And there was a lot that was unknown about the renewable marketplace in 2004, early 2003, when I was planning on it.”
“You take something like RingCentral. It doesn’t need any more money or financing: it is relatively mature, recurring revenue business – not really worried – but you know, we could sell it tomorrow. We have not been in a rush to sell it. We don’t care about exits as much. We care about building fundamental value.”
“Our focus is not on exit. In fact if you talk to any of my entrepreneurs, I’m generally saying, ‘Don’t sell the company,’ when other investors want to sell. I’d much rather focus on building long-term value in building companies rather than worrying about exits.”
“My life is full of way more mistakes than successes.”
“Germany has a lot of solar power. In fact, in 2005, some 55 or 57 percent of worldwide installations were photovoltaics in Germany. That’s 57 percent of all worldwide solar photovoltaics. Because of the high feed-in tariff, they have a way of allowing you to produce electricity and ship it into the grid at very high prices.”
“Photovoltaics are a great technology for certain applications, and, in fact, we invest in photovoltaic technologies. But they’re not good substitutes for grid electricity.”
“There’s a big difference between needs and requirements for grid-based electricity versus those for distributed rural homes or remote locations, or even rooftop solar, where photovoltaics do OK. The more economical a technology is, the faster we’ll see adoption.”
“The bulk of the utility industry today believes that coal and nuclear are the only solutions we have. Nuclear is greener but has the other issues. Coal, they think, can be transformed into the so-called clean coal technologies.”
“Venture-capital firms invest in trends by projecting returns. But most projections are pretty much bogus, and research shows that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing monkeys.”
“Environmentalists get in the way. They often ask the right questions, but they’re chasing the wrong answers – often hypothetical or uneconomic solutions.”
“I’m very excited by biomass and biofuels. We have a company, KiOR, that turns biomass – for instance, wood chips – into gasoline. The potential value of this company is huge. It could compete with regular crude oil without subsidies.”
“Eighty percent of what doctors do, tech can do at a fraction of the cost – especially your rural doctor in India.”
“I challenge anybody to claim that clean tech done right is a disaster.”
“Hopefully, I can advise entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes. But you can never be sure if you’re trying something new and unreasonable.”
“Your willingness to fail is what will let you succeed.”
“Nobody who comes in once every six weeks while you’re working 80 or 90 hours a week is qualified to make a decision.”
“People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”
“The combination of brilliant ideas and entrepreneurial spirit should lead us to a safer and more secure future.”
“One thing about technology is that there’s always a win, place, and show, and everyone else goes under.”
“New industries are created by entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily have subject matter expertise when they get started, yet they are still responsible for most of the innovation we see in society.”
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