VC Profile: Vinod Khosla (Video)

If you have ever looked into the venture capital scene, Vinod Khosla is probably a name you have heard thrown around. I have recently been following a lot of Khosla’s work on Black Swan investing, but I have been even more intrigued about his mantra on entrepreneurship as a religion.

Although Khosla founded companies like Sun Microsystems and Daisy Systems, I think that the man’s story of getting an MBA is a far more telling adventure of his personal philosophy:

After receiving a full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon and completing a biomedical sciences degree, Khosla felt destined to attend Stanford Business School. Unfortunately, Stanford’s admissions team did not feel the same way.

For two years, Khosla networked and pestered his way to knowing almost everyone at the admissions office in Stanford. He would unwittingly call the director of admissions on a monthly basis to discuss what he could do to get in. After months of constant rejection, a fall term was approaching and he absolutely demanded that he be admitted. The Wednesday before classes began, Khosla’s persistence paid off in earnest- an admitted student had dropped out at the last minute. With only a few days left to spare, Khosla finally received his admissions letter to Stanford.

The rest of his failures and successes can be found all over the web, and I encourage you to read up on them. Nonetheless, I’ve noted below three points that Khosla will make central to any of his sound-bytes on venture capital:

1) Failure is Key-

“Only those who dare to fail can succeed. Freedom to fail is a key ingredient in success. Try and fail, but do not fail to try.”

2) Be Foolish-

“Brainstorming, day-dreaming and wild guessing are fundamental activities because they drive technological innovation. The boldest are those who dream the dreams, and are foolish enough to try and make them come true. These entrepreneurial dreams do not require a lot of data to make their guesses. They may know a lot of science, “facts” and data, but they don’t let what’s already been done, or what might have failed in the past, constrain what they think might be possible."

3) Do Not Listen to Experts-

“Experts are handmaidens to hindsight, whereas dreams are mothers to progress. Experts apply existing data and trends to analyses and projections; they focus on past trends, known drivers, known technologies, and large public company announcements. They often ignore the wild claims of startups in the same space. As a result, they general derive linear, incremental predictions that work well until they are wildly wrong.

The trouble with predictions of this sort is that it can create closed thinking in otherwise creative people, making them believe there are no opportunities left. The real tragedy occurs each time a creative mind turns away from a challenge because enough experts tell them it’s unsolvable.“

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So what do you think- on a scale of 1 to Boss, how awesome is Vinod Khosla? Does anyone else have some interesting facts or stories about the venture capitalist?