Quotes from Vinod Khosla

You know, one of the great things about most renewable technologies - not every technology, but many of them - is the jobs have to be local. When you're talking about a power plant and power generation using solar thermal technology, the jobs will be where the plant is.

By 2025, 80 percent of the functions doctors do will be done much better and much more cheaply by machines and machine learned algorithms.

The only way you multiply resources is with technology. To really affect poverty, energy, health, education, or anything else - there is no other way.

I'm not a political person. I'm a techie nerd, and I enjoy the techie part. I mean, all my life, I've loved great technology.

I'm very excited by biomass and biofuels. We have a company, KiOR, that turns biomass - for instance, wood chips - into gasoline. The potential value of this company is huge. It could compete with regular crude oil without subsidies.

The U.S. has fallen well behind Europe in recognizing climate change and the implications of climate change.

Is it 10 years, 20, 50 before we reach that tipping point where climate change becomes irreversible? Nobody can know. There's clearly a probability distribution. We need to ensure this planet, and we need to do it quickly.

Germany has a lot of solar power. In fact, in 2005, some 55 or 57 percent of worldwide installations were photovoltaics in Germany. That's 57 percent of all worldwide solar photovoltaics. Because of the high feed-in tariff, they have a way of allowing you to produce electricity and ship it into the grid at very high prices.

You take something like RingCentral. It doesn't need any more money or financing: it is relatively mature, recurring revenue business - not really worried - but you know, we could sell it tomorrow. We have not been in a rush to sell it. We don't care about exits as much. We care about building fundamental value.

Our focus is not on exit. In fact if you talk to any of my entrepreneurs, I'm generally saying, 'Don't sell the company,' when other investors want to sell. I'd much rather focus on building long-term value in building companies rather than worrying about exits.

Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.

Knowing whose advice to take and on what topic is the single most important decision an entrepreneur can make.

In the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.

I've failed at more things than anyone I know. No one remembers the failures.

I don't know a startup that hasn't been through tough times.

I don't believe - till something radical changes that we are not on track to do - that hybrids are material to climate change. They're fashionable, everybody loves them, the Prius is selling well, but so are Gucci bags. But they don't impact the way the world carries stuff. You know it's a fashion statement.

If you have a carbon cap and trade system, there'd be an agreed-to limit the amount of carbon we emit. That changes the economic picture for fossil technologies and for the renewable technologies. It makes the renewable technologies more attractive and the fossils less attractive.

We love serious technology innovations, and there is a strong bias towards large technology innovations that are sort of disruptive to the current market.

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.

Entrepreneurs can benefit a lot from the right help and advice, and you can avoid costly mistakes. You can get incredible leverage in hiring people who wouldn't even talk to you if you have the right help. An investor isn't about money - it's about the help and advice you can get.

Venture-capital firms invest in trends by projecting returns. But most projections are pretty much bogus, and research shows that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing monkeys.

You have to invent the future you want.

Entrepreneurs have the flexibility and the ability to do things that large companies simply cannot. Could a large company pull off a trick like Amyris, going from anti-malaria medicine to next-generation fuel?

Environmentalists get in the way. They often ask the right questions, but they're chasing the wrong answers - often hypothetical or uneconomic solutions.