If everyone played it safe, we wouldn’t get anywhere | #DailyBlink29
Most of the insights on entrepreneurship are quite similar and is being repeatedly amplified by a lot of entrepreneurs. But, here I have collected some of the insights of Vinod Khosla which seems to be different than the mainstream.
Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite being from an Indian army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about the founding of Intel, he dreamt of starting his own technology company. [read more…]
Vinod Khosla’s thoughts on Entrepreneurship:
“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.”
“The only way you multiply resources is with technology. To really affect poverty, energy, health, education, or anything else — there is no other way.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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 it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes adapt to the world.”
“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.”
“Knowing whose advice to take and on what topic is the single-most-important decision an entrepreneur can make.”
“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.”
“Eighty percent of what doctors do, tech can do at a fraction of the cost — especially your rural doctor in India.”
“I don’t know a startup that hasn’t been through tough times.” “Your willingness to fail is what will let you succeed.”
“The combination of brilliant ideas and entrepreneurial spirit should lead us to a safer and more secure future.”
“It’s really important not to have everybody come from the same background or have the same point of view. It’s important that everybody respects everybody in the team, but that they are very different. I think it’s really important to have disagreement, diversity and the ability to debate.”
“Every problem is an opportunity. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.”
If you are starting a startup or a company in India then these are like a nugget. You can relate to most of these insights by Vinod Khosla. Seek principles, it will help you build your mental model through which you will have a different perspective towards the world.
When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles — generally three to twelve of them — that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.
— An excerpt from the book Succeeding, John Reed
