Quotes from Vinod Khosla

If everyone played it safe, we wouldn't get anywhere.

My life is full of way more mistakes than successes.

Not thinking it's possible is a failure of imagination.

The combination of brilliant ideas and entrepreneurial spirit should lead us to a safer and more secure future.

First, you should take money and have plenty of money fueling your tank. But money becomes dangerous if you assume it's going to keep coming. Make sure you can get your burn rate to a sustainable level if you hit the brakes hard, within 90 days.

Doctors can be replaced by software – 80% of them can. I'd much rather have a good machine learning system diagnose my disease than the median or average doctor.

Nobody who comes in once every six weeks while you're working 80 or 90 hours a week is qualified to make a decision.

What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.

I'm a fiscal hawk. I vote against all taxes, but I do believe the environment, and climate change, is a bigger issue than fiscal deficits are as a risk to the nation.

The state of healthcare today is that we are busy in the practice of medicine vs. being in the science of medicine.

Now it will take a long time to scale biofuels, but I'm the only one in the world forecasting oil dropping in price to $35 a barrel by 2030. I'll put it on the record: Oil will not be able to compete with cellulosic biofuels. If you do it from food, the food will get so expensive you can't make fuel out of it.

The probability of failure doesn't matter to me.

Eighty percent of what doctors do, tech can do at a fraction of the cost - especially your rural doctor in India.

Photovoltaics are a great technology for certain applications, and, in fact, we invest in photovoltaic technologies. But they're not good substitutes for grid electricity.

Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology.

Who cares if companies are overvalued or not?

Seeking an acquisition from the start is more than just bad advice for an entrepreneur. For the entrepreneur it leads to short term tactical decisions rather than company-building decisions and in my view often reduces the probability of success.

People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.

Did Google know much about media? Or Amazon about commerce? Tesla about cars? SpaceX about rockets? EBay about classifieds? What did I know about computing when I started Sun Microsystems? We should celebrate these entrepreneurs, not pillory them for fighting entrenched incumbent industries that have political influence and money.

I don't mind the low probability of success, but it better be impactful if we do succeed.

Your willingness to fail is what will let you succeed.

There are parts of the country in America, in the Midwest, where wind is a big resource, and we should absolutely use it. But to try and apply it nationally doesn't make sense. There are technologies that will work that are appropriate to certain regions.

Will biofuel usage require land? Absolutely, but we think the ability to use winter cover crops, degraded land, as well as using sources such as organic waste, sewage, and forest waste means that actual land usage will be limited. Just these sources can replace most of our imported oil by 2030 without touching new land.

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.