I am more optimistic on India than China: Vinod Khosla

Noted entrepreneur and veteran venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is one of the prominent Indians who have made their mark on the global map. In an interview with ET Now, Mr Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures, talks about his journey, his failures and achievements, as well as the current investment environment. Excerpts:




You did not really have a technology background. You were in the forces. Your dad was in the Indian Army, and yet you moved into this line. What were your growing years like and what really motivated, what got you into taking up entrepreneurship?



I do not know what got me interested in technology. What was very clear to me very early on was that I was not interested in religion and that naturally increased my curiosity about science and technology, and I fundamentally believe the two are conflicting. 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.



You tried to set up a company at the age of 20, but that venture did not work out. Was it a big setback for you?



I wanted the hard things. I find most personalities very different from everybody else. Everybody else is afraid to fail. I do not really care because when I fail, I try something new.



Frustration of having to set up a computer hardware system on which Daisy Software could be built and supported drove you to actually set up Sun Microsystems. It gave you the idea to set up Sun Microsystems. It was essentially about setting up workstations to support software.



This is the kind of thing that always happens and this is why this country is great. First, I was still in business school. There were two guys - engineers at Intel - wanting to start a company to help design silicon chips and electronic circuits. But they did not want to give up their jobs because you stop your paycheque. I was at Stanford finishing my MBA. So I essentially became the first person at Daisy Systems to start writing the business plan and get funding and all that, and that worked out really well. The company started, it was successful, actually went public, did an IPO and all that. So it was great.



But when I looked at what we had done, there was no general purpose computer like a personal computer or PC you could develop your software on. So almost everybody, who was competing in this market, developed their own hardware, their own computer and then the software. When I looked at what we had done at Daisy, I realised that we had spent most of our money developing the computer and a little bit of money developing the software, the application we wanted to use like the Computer Aided Design, the electronic design application and I said that is silly.