I've probably failed more often than anybody else in Silicon Valley. Those don't matter. I don't remember the failures. You remember the big successes.
Interpretation
Failures are often overshadowed by achievements, which define our journey.
In this quote, Vinod Khosla reflects on the nature of success and failure in his career in Silicon Valley. He acknowledges that while he may have experienced numerous failures, they are insignificant compared to the successes he remembers. This highlights the importance of resilience and focusing on positive outcomes rather than dwelling on setbacks.
In practice
During a motivational speech at a startup event.
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.
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.
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?
The only way you multiply resources is with technology. To really affect poverty, energy, health, education, or anything else - there is no other way.
You need a degree of foolishness to cause disruptive change in healthcare. Dare to dream.
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.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
You know, I don't only play for the record books.
Most investors want to do today what they should have done yesterday.
The only way to reach the mountain peaks of life is to forget about self and help other people reach greater heights.
Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.
I’ve been thrashed by the critics. I love having critics for breakfast. I’ve been having them for 30 years in Mexico - just eating them like chicken and then throwing the bones away. They have not survived, I have!
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