Vinod Khosla

VK One

A few days ago, Vinod Khosla got into a war of words with Marc Andreessen. Or was it Elon? It was an argument over OpenAI and “open” AI. It might have felt like a bunch of capitalist leviathans butting their big heads, but for me, this was classic Vinod.

Always speaking his mind, and batting a 1000 percent for the companies he has backed. Standing his ground, giving his reasons like the rat-a-tat of a Tommy gun, argumentative and not giving an inch.

I couldn’t resist diving into the recent spat between Vinod and other tech leaders. It took me back to the late 90s when I interviewed the legendary VC for a Red Herring cover story.

Here’s my take on the man.

As a reporter for Forbes and Red Herring, I wrote about broadband and everything that powered the network. Not surprisingly, there was no getting away from Vinod.

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Technology
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Hard Things

Katie Fehrenbacher (also my co-chair for our Roadmap conference on design and user experience) was the first person to alert me about Shuji Nakamura, co-founder of a company called Soraa and his collaborators being given the Nobel Prize for Physics. Nakamura, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan (who worked together at the University of Nagoya) helped create blue light emitting diode technologies (blue LED) and for the far reaching impact they are having on the lighting needs of billions of people in a world that is increasing starved for energy.

Katie pointed out that Nakamura’s company Soraa is using Gallium Nitride (long thought of as wonder material) for LEDs. It is backed by Khosla Ventures and NEA. Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures in a guest post for Techcrunch pointed out, “Physics-based technology development and startups are extraordinarily difficult as many valuable things are. We must not be

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Musings
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With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility

“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla.  To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but to someone who is not from this landmass we call Silicon Valley or part of the tech-set, that comment is about the futility of their future.

And more often than not, the reality of Silicon Valley giants, who are really the gatekeepers of the future, is increasingly in conflict with the reality of the real world!  What heightens that conflict — the opaque and often tone-deaf responses from companies big and small!

Silicon Valley (both the idea and the landmass) means that we always try to live in the future. We imagine what the future

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My Essays
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