Vinod Khosla Quotes

I suspect there's a lot of validity to the premise that big companies aren't going to attract entrepreneurial talent.

The bigger a company gets, the more people are involved in decisions, the slower decisions get made. Look, the whole theory of startups is that three motivated people can go and do something that every company can't.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world... If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

There's always a mismatch between small entrepreneurial outfits and large companies, which often don't have the same outlook.

I think there are too many start-ups and not enough real companies.

Let your customers be your partners; let your vendors be your employees. What's necessary in this transformation more than anything else is courage and a willingness to change.

With scale, there always becomes this tension of, how do you keep the start-up philosophy?

Small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things. Things that only large corporations and governments could do in the past.

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.

Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

Technology-fueled change is happening so fast that even a six-month-old process could be outdated. Saying this is the way it's always been done not only makes you sound lazy and resistant to change, but it could make your boss wonder why you haven't tried to improve things on your own.

The height of success is when you break your business, that is what I say! Just when you think things are really, really going well, that's the time to change.

For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast.

I've never been one who enjoys maintaining the status quo. I'm always pushing for new ideas, whether it's in business or philanthropy.

Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley.

When you look at every studio in the '20s or '30s, from Louis B. Mayer to Jack Warner, you see people who started with one plan and quickly shifted gears to adapt to a changing world. One of my favorite stories is that Walt Disney mortgaged his house to make 'Snow White.' He saw there was a real opportunity to change the world.

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.

By definition, startups are not constrained by the limits of established company culture. And so they push boundaries and develop new technologies and ways of doing things.

There would really be no reason to get up in the morning if Founders Fund was not willing to invest in companies that were doing important things, great businesses that very few people believe in.

An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

A lot of technologies in the world were unusual in the beginning, and became standard. That's the beauty of bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovations.

News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.