Vinod Khosla Quotes
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.
Khosla, Vinod, and Neeru Khosla. "Giving Pledge Letter." The Giving Pledge, Apr. 2011.
That was written in 1932. The benefits of man’s scientific and technical development had not reached all Americans or even most Americans. By the 1960s however these benefits were distributed to most Americans where the poor and middle class improved their share of the benefits of society both in terms of proportion and absolute improvement/ This increased till the Reagan administration and then slowed and really went backwards in the George W. Bush Administration.
He was observing that from a public policy point of view, it is very difficult to target research funds on projects that will have practical innovations because so many come from basic research or research in an entirely different field of science.
While this is generally true, from the scientific point of view, it is not quite right. The layman and most engineers believe that scientists discover things that exist. Although they do most of the time, breakthrough’s of the last century have for example discovered new chemical elements, but there are a few that science has CREATED—they exist nowhere in nature. Scientists are beginning to develop new life forms as well as discovering already existing ones. For over a century now the science of metallurgy has created thousands of alloys that did not previously exist.
Although a conservative Republican, he and most other CEOs of modern companies do not denigrate and ignore science the way many other conservatives have done over the years.
Most environmentalists limit the vision of their solutions to using less of our precious natural resources which is very important but just as important and perhaps more so in the long run is increasing the supply of these resources. Food is an example. The major reason that there is no serious food shortage world-wide is that we have increased the productivity of agriculture requiring less labor, less water, less fertilizer, less land, and less dependency on weather. Distribution has also improved, but there is no very good way of distributing something for which there is a great shortage.
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. In 2014, Forbes counted him among the 400 richest people in the United States. In 2020, he was listed No. 353 on the Forbes 400 list.
