Vinod Khosla – IIT to Stanford and beyond....

Vinod Khosla was born to an army officer on 28 January 1955 in New Delhi. He studied at the famous Mount St. Mary’s School in Delhi. Later, he completed electrical engineering from IIT Delhi and had started the first computer club in any IIT to do computer programming. Afterwards, he did his MS in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University followed by MBA from Stanford University.

In 1980, Khosla co-founded Daisy Systems, which created (computer-aided design) CAD system for electrical engineers. In 1982, he co-founded Sun Microsystems. Sun microsystems created Java programming language and within first five years, made $1 billion in annual sales. Satya Nadella was an employee in Sun before he joined Microsoft. In 2004, Khosla founded Khosla Ventures which today manages approximately $1 billion of investor capital. In 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle for $7.4 billion. Vinod Khosla also challenged Intel's monopoly by developing Nexgen/AMD. He also conceptualized the idea and business plan for Juniper to take on Cisco's dominance of the router market.

Over the years, Mr. Khosla went on to become the most influential investors in Silicon Valley. He was involved in starting and helping many companies in multimedia, semiconductors, video games, internet software and computer networking. He also founded The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a global not-for-profit networking organization that encourages entrepreneurship among college students.

Forbes counted Vinod Khosla among the 400 richest people in the United States in 2021. He was in 92 on this list. Today, his net worth is estimated by Forbes at $4.7 billion, thus making him #551 richest on Earth. Vinod is known to be the world’s #2 ranked Venture Capitalist.

And how Mr. Khosla keeps himself up-to-date. This is what he has to say, “First, I just read a lot - more than most people. And I read basic science. I almost never go to the financial conferences. I go to the techie-nerdie conferences. I spend my time with engineers, learning. And so I sort of think all these really smart entrepreneurs with great technologies in their heads are really my teachers. They come and teach me a lot and I learn from them.”

Khosla believes that in order to achieve big leaps in progress, one needs a multiplication of resources which can be done with science and technology.

His most famous quote is “My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed.”