Vinod Khosla Quotes

When I ran a small IT services business in the 1990s, it had strong recurring revenues - yet I couldn't accurately forecast cash flow for even the next few quarters. Small changes in the customer base or losing/hiring a few key employees could create massive swings in cash flow.

If your business is the right business, then money will never be an issue.

All of my businesses are profitable.

I worked for twenty-some years with no capital, so I never had any liquidity. Managing my loans alone wouldn't do it, and working hard twenty-four hours a day seven days a week alone wouldn't do it. You have to be properly capitalized.

I think in certain areas the demand is greater than it has ever been, and my business is better than it's been in 30 years. The music business is so precarious, as you know-you've got to make it while you can make it, and that's exactly what we're doing.

What do you want your business to do? Make money, of course. To pay for people and supplies, to be able to grow.

You have to manage money. Particularly with market economies. You may have a great product, but if your bottom line goes bust, then that's it.

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.

Combining their operating business will make Volkswagen and Porsche even stronger - both financially and strategically - going forward.

Every American business, from the biggest companies to small hardware companies, need money to flow through the system not only to create new jobs but to sustain existing jobs.

You can't operate a business running at a loss, and particularly if you're doing it by paying yourselves. It just doesn't fly.

How could anyone ever build a company if they didn't have investments? It doesn't make any sense.

The first aspect of a business that you need to make it work well is money. Once the money aspect is flowing, you can freely work on other aspects.

Too many startups get in the habit of continually raising more and more money, which has the deleterious effect of both pushing out profitability and limiting your exit options. The less rounds of capital you need to raise, the more of your company you get to own.

What we are doing is increasing our focus on cash flow, return on investment, and value creation.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin'.

PayPal is a strong business: it has a strong balance sheet and free cash flows, and it will help us take a look at where we want to independently invest.

Revenue cures everything in the business world.

Anybody who can improve the business in the long run is a good buyer.

Strategic partners are way more important than money.

As you start the company, you start spending spending spending ahead of revenue but then you come out of it and very quickly you should become a company that spends less than it makes. And what I mean by very quickly, is that window of time should be in that 6 to 8 year time frame. And the reason is because if you build your business model correctly it's almost unavoidable.

Marketing is an investment, not a cost.

I always said... I want to be the one who creates jobs. I want to be the guy who develops the wealth of the nation.

A small business can survive for a while without making a profit, but if its cashflow dries up, the impact is fatal.

You will always need more capital than you think, because it will always take you longer to reach profitability than you can imagine.