Vinod Khosla Quotes

My advice to fledgling entrepreneurs is always the same: build a company that you plan to be with for the next 10 years - that is the best way to increase your chances of success.

The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.

We're certainly interested in maximizing our return and doing it - we're interested in maximizing our return, but we're also interested in doing it over a long period of time and in doing it in a way that never endangers the firm from a survivability standpoint.

The dominance of short-term perspectives has led to routine decisions in the markets that sacrifice the long-term buildup of genuine value in pursuit of artificial, short-term gains.

In the Valley, what's happened is you have entrepreneurs that just want to fill a hole in the market and have a rich exit.

It's important to choose initial investors who are not twitchy and rushing for an exit. Wall Street's quarter-by-quarter lens may make the CEO make sub-optimal long-term decisions.

Just like I gave Jack Ma and Alibaba the luxury of staying private for longer, I am now giving Arm the gift of being private. My only message to them now is take my investment and let's go, go, go.

Valuable companies take decades to build.

I love Gateway, and I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure the company can grow and prosper in this challenging environment.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.

The hardest thing was launching 'OK!' magazine; the easiest thing was Channel 5. 'The Express' was my defining moment because our turnover was less than £100m with 150 employees.

Cisco never had a red quarter. Never. Took us three years to get funding, and in those three years, we were never in the red, and that was because we had two products to sell. They were not sexy or cool, but we had enough of a market that we could generate enough of a cash stream to grow the company.

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

I think this is also a great time to invest in private equity, helping companies grow from the ground up.

Growing Ineos has been a lot of fun.

So it takes years to make a solid company.

We really wake up every day trying to build businesses. That is the goal of private equity. It's a misnomer out there that private equity profits by shrinking companies. In fact, it's just the opposite. Private equity creates value by growing great companies.

When you've got a great business going, you go open another and take the risk of losing the whole thing. It's fun!

A lot of web companies will take a short-term approach and sell to an incumbent and don't end up living up to their full potential.

I get the impression that most Chinese entrepreneurs are so focussed on doing what they need to do to succeed in the Chinese market - which is a big enough challenge even for the established players - that nobody is thinking much about the longer run or the bigger global picture.

I'm not somebody who is going to build something for a few years, sell it, and then go off and just have fun.

We've tried to build Sequoia Capital with an eye for the long term that we really look for in the companies we like to partner with.

You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.