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Vinod Khosla: “Don’t rely on what the world tells you is possible. Create the world you want.”

January 25, 2024

Vinod Khosla founded Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures.

In the clip below, he points out that in 2010 the Department of Energy projected that there would be 2,305 electric cars on the US market by 2035. In 2014, Tesla alone shipped about 80,000 electric cars.

Vinod’s takeaway: “This tells us an important story: they talked to all the experts, and experts only extrapolate the past.”

He then shares a few other examples of “experts” who were both overconfident and wrong about the future:

  • A cartoon from 1889 painting electricity as an existential thread to humans (a narrative that resembles the scaremongering taking place around AI today)

  • “Lord Calvin, who was president of the Royal Society and maybe the most informed person in science in the early 1900s, said in about 1906 that heavier than air flying machines were impossible, just before the Wright Brothers flew their plane.”

  • “Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will every use it.” — Thomas Edison

  • “Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will certainly flop. It has no chance of success.” — Time Magazine

He concludes his talk with the following line:

“The future belongs to those who dream the dreams & are unreasonable enough to try and make them come true, & who aren’t afraid to fail, & hence take, bold & radical risks.”

And he tells the audience:

“Don’t rely on experts. Don’t rely on what the world tells you is possible. Create the world you want. I say there’s two types of people: people who extrapolate the past and people who invent the world they want.”