Entrepreneurs, Don't Be Afraid to Fail | Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)

how's it going everybody all right my name is Brian Park I'm from Washington DC I mean from Washington DC here that's hello that's what I'm talking about our next guest is a legendary person in Silicon Valley he actually needs no introduction in fact though his pet peeve is when somebody says you know he needs no introduction and somebody does the introduction he hates it so I'm not gonna do it but in all seriousness though I have one question for you guys who have not heard of an ode please raise your hand it's okay I'm not gonna embarrass you wait who does not know of an ode you back there you got to leave but he's going to be interviewed by our fears fearless leader Derek Anderson so you guys ready gonna give him a big star crying here you guys ready okay ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Derek Anderson and Vinod Khosla well welcome oh thank you it's always exciting to be in front of so many entrepreneurs it just gets me energized well we're grateful to have you have you back I should say and I start by saying one thing that you'll learn from the note if you haven't seen him be interviewed or if you haven't followed him very much is he's very open about taking questions any question so so we'd love for you to put those on a Twitter hashtag startup grind I've got I've got the feed pulled up right here so we'll be throwing those in throughout the conversation and it may take a few from the audience as well but if you've got a question please throw it onto Twitter I'd love to start with you know I was I was on Yahoo a couple of months ago and it said the 10 worst business decisions ever and I'm like wow this has got to be good so I'm I'm flipping through these and right at the top of the list is one that you were involved in and so with love everyone's like oh geez what did he just what are you just asking are you you were on the good side of it you were trying to it was you would have made it a good decision but tell us about this experience where Google was almost sold when it was still Larry and Sergey essentially in the garage yeah let me start by a general statement which is you can't make good decisions without making bad ones at least the good ones that are unusual and high risk high upside so in battle it's hard to say that any decisions good or bad but the story derek is referring to is I want that excite to buy Google negotiated a price now there's some debate between Sergey and myself that was $350,000 or a million dollars but I'll pay a million today I tried to convince excite where I was the on the board and one largest shareholders to buy Google Larry and Sergey were okay on selling they didn't want to buy I tried about five times and till they literally kicked me out of their office and said we don't want to talk about it anymore the good thing is we at Kleiner got to invest in Google after that so it turned out really well also it's hard to say that Google would have turned out the same way I suspect it would not have had it been acquired so it's really hard to go back but it's one of those business decisions that I thought would make a big difference and the founders chose to do otherwise you talked a lot about failure I mean you go all you go to close I'm often accused of pushing founders because my job I find is to push founders to greatness one things I never do is force them to make a decision anyway I've never ever voted in 30 years on a board against a founder ever other than one issue which is when you have to hire a fire or CEO other than that don't like doing it won't do it no matter how important the decision because the founders job to execute and if they don't believe in a decision they won't execute so it's that's really important but the funny thing is Joe cows said to me later you didn't push us hard enough so I got accused of not being pushy enough well when you say when you say that you've never voted against the founder you're saying all right you certainly disagree with your entrepreneurs all the time but you're saying at the end of the day that it's their decision it's their vision and you'll support them whether you think it's right or not is that what you're saying I think that's right there's two parts of it first or and this is to a private companies not public companies in private companies a boards job should be to challenge a founder have them think differently have them consider issues that aren't natural to them so I'll even sometimes with founders take positions I don't believe in only because I want them to think from that angle so founders can never tell whether I actually really believe something or not because the job is to have them think multi-dimensionally and founders usually come from one background so they have sort of a singular perspective as opposed to a multi-dimensional perspective of lots of experience and so I try and add that element I think good board should do that having said that a board comes in once every six or eight weeks they're not spending enough time the founders are there 80 hours a week there's no way a board can know all the nuances of your business and so they shouldn't be pretending they can make decisions now the only decision boards can do reasonably well is the CEO doing a good job how to help them do it better and if sometimes it becomes necessary you replace the CEO but mostly that's a bad recipe if you have to respite replace the CEO you've lost the essence of a company so we tried really really hard to make a founder successful by surrounding them by people who make up for whatever experience they don't have so you talk a lot and you get can we go to another another topic okay one thing I love about interviewing you this happened the last time and I just screwed it up again is whenever somebody asks you the first question you answer something completely differently which is way better but it's great what's relevant to do everybody here it's great I got we're gonna we're gonna get your questions hashtag start crying tell me about failure failures all over your website not like the things that you've done but just the things that you're talking about you talked a lot about failure you got a very diverse and international audience you've people flying in from Africa and cross Asia and all over the world why is failure so inconsequential in your mind well so there's smart failure and dumb failure okay so let me be clear smart failure is when you take risks where if you lose you lose something and when you win you win much much more so you win 10x or 100x what's also important in this part gets forgotten about smart failure is you never want to fail in a way that kills your company well sometimes you have to do it but mostly failures should be learning experiments where failing at it is say 10 20 % of your burn not 80% of your burn and failing at it still gives you a chance to try something new failure is a way to learn not that failure is a good thing it's not but not being willing to fail means generally that you'll not take any risks you won't do anything new and innovative and if you don't do something new innovative you're doing what everybody else does so to do something exceptional you have to do something out of the ordinary and that usually means risk if you're doing the ordinary stuff the Laura stuff you're doing what everybody else knows how to do and will do and so you're not you're gonna the way I put it I'd rather have a high probability of failure and a large consequence of success then reduce risk to the point where my probability of success is high and the consequences of success are inconsequential and I think that happens in a lot of startup companies especially with boards and you've seen me riff on VC's in general they try and get early revenue or reduce risk to the point where if you succeed it's inconsequential success you're not doing something big or consequential so as much as you want to try failure try and not fail without being willing to fail you're not going to succeed in a big way because you're not going to take big risks and the definition of risk is taking failure my personal view is my willingness to fail is entirely responsible for my success it enabled my success my willingness to take risks that others wouldn't is what made me successful that plus a lot of luck so we shouldn't forget many of you are really good tried really hard and just get a few lucky breaks and you're successful and a bad breaks and you're unsuccessful that's why I say you can try again how do I is in early-stage entrepreneur talk about failure because like I don't want to look like a loser right and I don't want to look like somebody that's uninvested beliefs things so how do i how do I approach a venture capitalist or team members or whoever the stakeholder is and say to them like hey we're taking all this risk I'm but I'm not perfect - like how do you balance like that that kind of that messaging of those two sales first you know startups aren't about messaging to other people there's part of it that is that but most of it is where's your internal compass what are you really trying to achieve and if you're really trying to achieve something then so to say hey here's my vision and I'd like to say be obstinate about your vision but be really flexible about your tactics what does that mean it's sort of like think big act small what that means is it's important to have a vision of where you're trying to go how you get there is a series of experiments now you can call them a failure is when they don't work but they're learning experiments where you try things see what works try the next thing there's a great paper somewhere on our website on written by somebody at INSEAD on entrepreneurs do it's a factual reasoning they have a big vision but they don't try and get there in one leap what they try to do is see where they are what resources they have and it may be nothing except their college money but you take a step in the right direction so you can garner more resources you take a stepping stone in the right direction god no more resources try the next experiment the next step it may fail or succeed you may get more resources you may not try something new you try and garner resources for the next step every step not do the whole thing in one step that's very high-risk and this is why I actually believe people who raise too much money get too much confidence in their own plan which is normally be us and in sort of I say it the right way to do a business plan is flexi planning which is have a vision but plan the next three to six months test every assumption you have so but realizing a business plan is about testing every assumption even if you're sure it's true test it if you can in the marketplace in running an experiment that's so the step wise way of getting to a larger vision without losing sight of big vision is really what I suggest another analogy I use which i think is very very important for people who are just starting out you want to shoot for Mount Everest but nobody ever got to Mount Everest without getting to base camp first you build a base camp of a stable place where you've learnt a lot where you can tread water for a while rest up build a business maybe you get to cash flow breakeven on a base camp but you want to set up base camp where it helps you scope out the path to Mount Everest that's the whole point again I reckon we cease my problem is in the process of trying to get a cash flow neutral company or something Basecamp they don't worry about that particular Basecamp being on the path to Mount Everest's helping you reduce your risk for the big climb they'll set it up anywhere and then it doesn't help you get to the big vision so these are nuanced trade-offs you make all the time and it's what I hope for all of you and all this stuff I write about we put it on our website and there's a lot of resources there for entrepreneurs I love mentoring entré it's sort of what gets me all going we're gonna get to your questions in a minute hashtag startup grind and cinema way got some good ones here what does this ask you about just a question about food tech and agriculture you've made several investments in this category and you know you when you're an entrepreneur and you're looking for the right people to invent or to take investment from in your you know in your sector and your market you always look for the domain experts and you know I mean I take one look at at you and I think are you the domain expert in food and in in detect you do have you ever felt the pressure to really to gain 50 or hundred pounds and just start eating a lot so you become more of a you know know things I recently tweeted at retweeted a tweet I thought that was great many times experts fail in predicting the future because they're experts in a fast version of the world not the current version of the world so experts is a very tricky thing experience is generally a good thing this comes back to this issue of why I like founders as CEOs and people under them who know the domain experience is a good thing but experience generally means a bias a bias about how the world works in that particular sector and some of those biases are good and you want to consider them and some are bad and so experience is not always when Jack Dorsey I'm on Jack's board was asked by Wired magazine why has squared succeeded in payments and squared then had about 200 people he said of our first 200 people only forever did payments before you want just enough domain knowledge but you don't want those people with deep domain knowledge unless there's the founders driving the decisions because then they'll do it based on conventional wisdom in that domain but you want them around the table helping you make decisions so founder instincts are really really critical to navigating this and whenever you hire a manager type CEO you lose the instincts and lose what you're trying to do that's new and different and how you change trying to change that domain to answer your question food is exciting we've done some things in food that are totally radical that nobody in the food business business would attempt and yeah some of them are adding food expertise now now I'll kill you I'm not an expert in any area I'm sort of like an inch deep and a mile wide so I I may pretend to know stuff but I don't what I do know is I am an expert in one thing I've screwed up more often than most people in Silicon Valley right I've tried more things I've screwed up more often and hopefully in giving advice I can bring that experience of all the times I've screwed up to an entrepreneur who hasn't screwed up as many times so that's what I can bring I can't bring everything you know Hampton Creek doing meal right know nothing about meal but nobody in the food business would go after meal well great founder great personal story too guy was an Alabama high school football player almost dropped out of high school barely got to college he's added a really key person on his board from Varna which is really knows the food business that's the right way to craft while while we're talking about that I want to give you guys a couple of things that I find are absolutely essential to starting a company one is engineering the gene pool of a company there's a paper on our website and I think I've published in tech branch too how do you engineer the gene pool of a company if there was only one piece of advice I'd give you I'd say go read that paper of what increases the probability of success how do you mix diverse opinions in your startup to increase the probability of success if I were to give you a second piece of advice in hiring the people to constitute the gene pool of a company and the gene pool is absolutely critical in hiring those people you're not qualified to judge many of the people you need to hire if you're a technology entrepreneur you need to hire a VP of Marketing you do not have good instincts about how what you need in a VP of Marketing our CFO so what do you do I have a paper for that on the lathe something called up I forget if somebody needs to email me or the art in labor of hiring or something like that on our website - all these are big papers they're like 15 pages each because I really wanted to get into meaty actionable stuff don't believe the crap of just hire good people that's not actionable I haven't run into anybody who says hire bad people when it becomes actionable is when you have 10 casts you can run that by on engineering the gene pool or how you interview somebody to assess somebody in an area you don't know as well those are really helpful to a company I know you want to ask me questions but I wanna finish with one part on that last question have all this stuff that comes to mind whenever I talk to entrepreneurs there's the huge difference between a Z million dollar startup and a zero billion dollar startup and the difference is almost entirely about the attitude culture and the kind of gene pool they want to engineer into their company it's no different in the business plan its difference in attitude and some of these and most of you if I meet you all I can usually tell immediately if you're trying to build a small company or a big company independent of what you say by how you think about who you need on your team how you approach market what your culture is that kind of stuff I'm just trying to be helpful to and for those starting companies it's very your questions are less important you sound like my wife you spend more of your time hiring and helping your companies hire great people than just about anything else I wonder if you could just tell us how do you close a great team member how do you convince them what is that that final step it seems like you can get somebody interested okay but a lot of people can do that but like getting them from like being interested to actually like quitting their job taking less money and joining this crazy thing what do you say what do you do so that is one of the more important things Artful knows have to learn to do on the external side I talked about the internal having an internal compass without that without religion and a religious belief about what you're trying to do you won't be successful you'll be distracted by lots of small opportunistic opportunities but on the outside you have to sell everybody so more closely and I teach a class at Stanford Business School on entrepreneurship on essentially selling how you sell everybody you sell your customers you sell in masters you sell your employees you know when I was starting son I was in my 20s it was really painful to convince somebody to give up their job and join me knowing I wasn't 100% sure it'd be successful and their wives would usually be complaining or husbands would be complaining that hey why are you giving up a good job first I think you spend a lot of time figuring out what's important to that person each person is different some care about working on the right thing or exciting thing for them some care about being part of the right team others care about a big idea you figure that out and then you sell on that metric it helps now that I have credibility and my job becomes a lot easier than your that's why people find it surprising it's the the single largest portion of my week the most number of hours goes to recruiting people for our companies all the way down to in the many companies have pushed for individual engineers and solomon-like it takes of an incredible amount of time but it's so key because it's portly I use it to recruit the people to the company i partly use it to teach the founders about how you engineer the gene pool of a company you'll take a very qualified candidate and then have a discussion of how that gene pool might help or hurt the team and what's essential or why to go after somebody they don't think is critical now to hire so all those discussions happen well when you have a person you've interviewed it and then can have you know so pick company like doTERRA which we fund it probably a little over a year ago I probably interviewed 40 engineers for them because it's so that's senior not VP's enjoy those two but lots of Engineers and part of it is at some point the team gets pretty astute about they know the domain expertise way better than I do but there's other things about hiring that most entrepreneurs don't recognize early and that's what I call venture assistance really I don't think I'm in this investing business I've actually never publicly said I'm a venture capitalist I don't like that term I like to say and if you look at our website it's a we are in the venture assistance business really in the business of making entrepreneurs successful and that's why I like preserving the entrepreneurs vision and buttressing support structure around them so they can be more successful than lower risk this comes from the audience and if if if you fail your startup dies you have this you know you've put your heart and soul to this thing for however long you did it but how do you stay motivated after that like how do you what do you tell entrepreneurs to get back on the horse and keep going it you know the honest truth is entrepreneurship is hard sounds romantic all of you who are actually doing it know how hard it is how many butterflies you get in the stomach how many sleepless nights it's just part of this issue of taking a risk big enough that others won't take so first you should be proud you willing to take a risk so this kind of optimism is essential to entrepreneurship with that optimism you have to be schizophrenic and also have paranoia and I recommend people read any groves book which was written in the 80s only the paranoid survive you're sort of happy to be schizophrenic but having said that what I'd say to all of you is if there's ten things that make you successful you may at best control four of them three depend on what your competitors do and three depend on pure luck something happened that got things to take off so if you failed you may have done all the right things of course you may have done all the wrong things too in which case what I say is learn as much critically examine what failed and what you would have done different if you did all the right things then still learn but try again it's just a great lifestyle I don't consider entrepreneurship a job I consider it a lifestyle I've done it my whole life and I tell people who work in big companies you can have a job or a lifestyle which one would you like and you know people have different preferences let's give the note a big round of applause thank you very thank you instead of going to the other room we're gonna stay in here if you if you want to get up and leave this is the break right now this is your chance we're gonna go straight into Steve Case and Mary Grove after this so feel free to get up and leave and if you need to take a quick break and and we'll just get started with some of these what has been your biggest failure boy you know it's I failed so many times it's really they're all blurred together they all boy blurred together I can give you isolated examples I'd know if anyone is we had a company long time ago and and you know every failure especially the larger ones are a learning example the company called Dynabook we want to do a laptop before anybody else did it and we did a lot of things right but we made the mistake of hiring a CEO who came from IBM look I was pretty young he had all the right credentials and none of the entrepreneurial instincts that's why we focus on that so much and I didn't realize that just because there's a big name in a big title but that won't make a successful leader for that effort for that vision and we made lots of mistakes by doing things the way a big company an experienced person would do it instead of a scrappy entrepreneurial style so that was one right after that we did go that was a different kind of learning Dynabook was learning about not going by resume alone because resumes can be impressive without the person being appropriate for what you need to do in a startup go go as a great tablet startup think today's iPad in the late 80s and it was pen based not touch base because touchscreens were and the company was very clever in its marketing slogans the pen picked up the slogan was depends the point and you get lost behind marketing it sounded sexy we all believed that John Doerr and I were both on the board and we sort of spent a lot of money before realizing the pen wasn't the point sexy marketing was misleading us and that's a warning I'd give all of you just because other believe others believe your marketing pitch doesn't mean it's right in fact mobility was the point of what we were trying to build and then because of a great market here we got lost in the marketing of it you know pen computing depends the point people want mobile email have you just done that like blackberry did much later we would have been successful so being critically examining each one literally if you mention an area I'll mention us failure I've had but off some of the things you're talking about earlier about kind of trusting your cut gut or following your internal compass how do you know the difference well the follow your gut and in your internal compass but surround yourself with people who will critically challenge you in a constructive I you know again that's critical to deciding what experiments to run what it's okay to fail at what it's not okay to fail like what's a good failure what's a dumb failure but I think that kitchen cabinet which goes into and again goes back to this engineering the gene pool of people who are giving you advice is absolutely key but please continue with your question how do you know the difference between your gut and indigestion like how do you know like hey like even with go or something like I'm guessing you followed your gut or or maybe you didn't but like how do you how do I tell the difference between like hey this is actually this this is a real this is really my internal compass or this is something else I found because I just am in love with it I think gut instinct is important especially about new tanks if you're doing something new data quest doesn't have a report if data quest has a report you're not doing something new but it's it's our ology but when you trying something new it's inherently uncertain right and so what you have to do is find ways to test as much of your gut instinct with experiments and try these little things instead of going for the whole enchilada in one step all the experiments that might validate your gut instinct so gut instinct is great but only if you critically test start testing pieces of it and validating it and once you do you learn so much this is why business plans never end up where they start because as you test these assumptions as you learn you are iterating slowly to the right set of assumptions in the right plan that's why flexy planning instead of business planning is good business plans are good to say what kind of critical thinker you are but not really to tell you what's actually going to happen you know by the way one of the mistakes I find boards make is once upon two Pro has committed to a business plan or a deck or an annual plan they make them stick to it that's really dumb if you're learning new stuff every three months you should be iterating and changing and boards don't like that we cease like predictable stuff they reduce risks to the point of hurting a company I find in today's struggle for top technology talent do you see the engineering workforce becoming more contract based I don't think so I think cumulative knowledge in a company is great because all the things you tried and didn't work are really an important ass they're not just things that didn't work there are important learnings and you want to accumulate that and that becomes less well less valuable if somebody is contracting but you know rare talent is getting very competitive and frankly that's why I spend so much time competing for talent so I you know there'll be some of it contractual but I don't think for the startup world that's that critical at v-- Khosla hashtag startup crying to ask a question I know you mentor a lot of female interns Eva several people asking about about this what is your advice for female entrepreneurs in trying to raise capital have you back female entrepreneurs what well what advice do you have for them we backed a lot of female entrepreneurs what I would say in general is I don't have a good view of what other we sees do but you know female aren't knows bring something that I actually think is better is missing in many tests Ron's testosterone heavy male entrepreneurs which is more empathy and more Maron neurons what that does is help you understand the customer much better I also happen to have three daughters who care a lot about this issue so we have a lot of discussions at home again as part of engineering a gene pool you want somebody who's really empathetic to customer requirements and empathetic to employees you know some entrepreneurs are just judge to their employees all around I think the worst teams really help and diversity has huge benefits of its own I'd love to see more female entrepreneurs I say you know my feeling at least in our shop is people don't prefer our male our female entrepreneurs there's they look at the plan and the person what I find is a real shame is how many women and girls are discouraged from going into the more technical disciplines in high school starting in sort of middle school and high school and that's a shame because we're losing half the talent in a critical area in our country and overseas everywhere because of sort of self-image or expectations I'm not an expert in the topic but it's a shame what's your personal opinion on Bitcoin and does it bear the same disruptive potential as the internet a couple of things I would say we have made a few Bitcoin investments like any early system it has problems we invested in blood stream to try and fix some of those problems and blood stream has the most amazing set of individuals who are intimate with the Bitcoin ecosystem what I would say to people is they're going to be opportunities it's the time you know we're not placing fifty million dollars bets in Bitcoin but we are placing a lot of smaller bets doing a lot of learning testing assumption if you ask me I'd say the blockchain is way more important than Bitcoin five so some people understand that there's good and bad and I think because some of the bad uses a Bitcoin it will cause regulatory ire I don't believe in the in Arcis world there's problems with the regulatory world that we should try and minimize but there's real problems with anarchist world too and so I don't subscribe to that reason for Bitcoin as a currency but there's huge other benefits of Bitcoin as a currency but way more important is the blockchain where you can do I would love to do all software contracts on Bitcoin if I'm gonna get bet on a Michigan gas football game I'd rather not have a book in the middle I'd rather have a software contract with you instead of doing escrow for your house in with a title guarantee company that does nothing and giving them a lot of money I'd rather do title escrow differently I draw the issue stocks start certificates through the blockchain so there's lots and lots of really interesting applications I don't think we are far enough into the ecosystem people like block stream are trying to solve some of the problems with Bitcoin and and that's that it will enable much more innovation it will change payments but will change many other areas that we don't think about as relevant I saw a great article about doing the domain name service with a blockchain approach now people don't connect the two but it's really exciting to see those kinds of applications what were you talking about this I'd say this I do one of the questions I get asked a lot is what are interesting areas so the blockchain is definitely very interesting maybe even more than Bitcoin we talked a lot about food and AG but that's representative we have a company that has that's making ground beef I tasted the burgers last week and couldn't tell which one was real beef just could not and I was looking for differences be a company that makes me a very fundamental change in approach to food and AG you know this Mayo this beef way more sustainable and eventually way cheaper then beef cattle are eggs and way more humane if you want to know what how inhumane your Mayo is just Google crushed chicks they crush live male chicks because they don't lay eggs crush them in live in a hopper it's just this guy I can't watch the videos making Ford more humane making it more sustainable real opportunity we have robots we have robots that are going in the fields that can remove weeds if robots can mechanically remove weeds you could eliminate herbicides on the planet that'd be an awesome thing to do my point is the following almost every area I look there is innovation to be had there's technology to be applied to changing the basic assumptions who thought you could replace herbicides I'm now convinced we can do it and be a huge win and you would eliminate the LOX company have on seeds so lots of fun stuff to do it's challenging it's hugely impactful other areas I think in 20 years medicine will change completely I'm a huge fan of digital health we made probably 15 investments in digital health this is my new job on up band tracks my heart rate and I'm saying here last year are you great you know in a future version I can monitor atrial fibrillation if I had a Feb I don't have tang fully that's way more effective than any treatment for afib is monitoring it treating it early so digital health has huge potential I don't think we've started to see the beginnings of what health is unfortunately there the regulatory regime and the FDA is actually doing a pretty good job of being permissive I'm much more optimistic on the FDA than other people are but too many digital health care investors focus on pain reimbursement codes and payment models in I think if you focus on that you're not going to disrupt that fee-for-service payment model system and so I find too many startups directed towards what I think is less disruptive less interesting more mediocre business plans so digital health is a huge area machine learning and AI awesome area we made a bunch of investments there applications of that infinite number of applications trying to replace legal research trying to do machine learning to do weeding it's a we machine learning problem trying to diagnose atrial fibrillation trying to detect mental health you know we know more about somebody's mental health than their psychiatrists can know because of machine learning so almost every area I wrote there's some negative consequences to that and I wrote a blog post very long blog post I write too much in Forbes about last November there will be some social consequences of this machine learning that I concerned me a lot I don't have easy solutions and this I won't go into that here because I put most of it down in the blog post for those of you are interested but I covered a lot of areas that are really really interesting and exciting and frankly new ones keep popping up every single day this is a little bit change of pace but I think it would be interesting to know what were you like as a child you know I don't remember my mom said great things everybody else thought ours Romania hmm I believe my mom I you know I'd say I'll give you a couple of stories I always decided what I wanted to do and then just try to make it happen and what got in the way didn't matter and and and so I'd end up in fights with teachers all the times in things I wouldn't recommend kids do but I wasn't past really arguing or physically fighting with teachers no kidding um if they were doing dumb things and that's not always smart but challenging conventional wisdom is very important because all of you aren't knows I'd say no matter how hard something is it's mostly doable when I joined IIT Delhi there was no programming course let alone a computer science course anywhere in the car in any of the IITs that I knew about so what did we do we started off the first ever hobby Club to teach Fortran programming four of us did we started that and frankly it evolved into something much more but you can't do that I was 16 then in college and and we just made it happen even though we had convinced one professor to learn it we learnt a lot of it ourselves and we just made it happen um I was also interested in biomedical engineering so two or three of us got together with one professor and started a biomedical engineering sort of specialty within Electrical Engineering there was no such thing anywhere in India and we started that we saw working on it so a lot more is possible even in really bureaucratic government land run institutions that like the Indian Institute of Technology if you persist with it so persistence is really important if you're good at selling I talked about persistence is an important characteristic of entrepreneurs selling is an important characteristic of entrepreneurs internal compass and religious beliefs about your convictions and not getting distracted by short-term attractions those are essential characteristics I know we were running out of time so I'll stop there but let's give an OCO still a big round of applause I think we have 13 seconds or 10 seconds I'd say my favorite thing is to dream the dreams and then sort of be foolish enough to go out and try and make them happen and if you're totally sensible and not foolish you're not gonna pursue your dreams this is not an original quote I saw it in a hang gliding movie the first time I learned hang gliding of long long time ago but it is very appropriate fonteneau's and I love seeing people do entrepreneurial efforts thank you very much

Channel: Startup Grind

Views: 23,875

Rating: 4.9099097 out of 5

Keywords: Vinod Khosla, Entrepreneurship, failure, startup failure, technology, tech, startup grind, startups, startup, Khosla Ventures, Derek Andersen, how to start a business, business ideas, startup ideas, fundraising, investor, startup advice, startup pivot, pivot, venture capital, growth hacking, marketing, vinod, entrepreneur, entrepreneur advice, life advice, lessons learned, learning, learn, how to raise money, how to be successful, how to get into tech, fail, startup bubble

Id: y5TUBhGp7Y8

Length: 49min 27sec (2967 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 12 2015