The King of Green Investing

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Vinod Khosla |

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Khosla's almost obsessive thoroughness carries over into his private life. In the late 1980s, before hiring a designer for his new 12,000-square-foot home on a woody hillside, he read more than 100 books on architecture. He likes to set goals that can be measured. To remind himself to spend more time with his eldest child, he used to keep a jar of jelly beans on his office desk, removing one each Monday; those that remained were the number of weekends until she would go off to college. Although he travels frequently, he requires himself to be home for dinner at least 25 evenings a month; his administrative assistant monitors his performance. Sometimes his own bookkeeping is quirky; in midconversation with me on a cell phone several years ago, he pulled into his driveway, announced that he was "officially at home," and kept right on talking for an hour. But when I ask how often he skied last year, he answers immediately and precisely: 45 days.

Fellow investors describe Khosla as driven, arrogant, sometimes single-minded. He likes to argue and is so tenacious that his former partners often sent him into negotiations to defeat, or at least wear down, the opposition. "What makes him invincible is that he doesn't care if you don't think well of him," says an ex-partner. After Khosla expressed skepticism about hybrid cars, he responded to every last criticism of his position on the Gristmill blog. "I want to test my ideas," he explains. "I don't really care what they think, but one in 10 responses is something I should consider."

"What makes Khosla invincible is that he doesn't care if you don't think well of him," says an ex-partner.

Initially rejected by Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, Khosla lobbied the dean's office for two years, sometimes making weekly calls, until he was finally admitted. "The best way to get Vinod to do something," says longtime friend Doerr, "is to tell him you don't believe he can do it."

But there is at least one skill Khosla seems to lack. As his official biography has it, while still in his twenties, Khosla helped found two extraordinarily successful startups, Sun Microsystems and an early design-automation company called Daisy Systems. He wrote the business plan for Daisy while still a student at Stanford, but others ran the company and he soon left. At Sun, he was replaced early on as chief executive by his former roommate in business school, Scott McNealy. Khosla "had no people sense," recalls a Sun director of that era. "He would go through the factory floor and terrorize people and shut down the line. There was Vinod's way and no other way. It drove his cofounders crazy." (Khosla says that his disagreements with the board were frequent and significant but his involvement with production wasn't among them.) To keep him with the company, the board promoted him to chairman, but after he boycotted four board meetings in a row, sitting resentfully alone in his office, he was fired. He retained a large stake in Sun, however, as well as in Daisy, and their public offerings made him rich.

His brief, troubled tenure in the executive suite rarely stops him from telling startup CEOs what they ought to be doing. At board meetings, he's insistent -- "analytical, unemotional, and often blunt," says one fellow director. Another describes him as "massively intrusive." A third, more charitably, says, "He has so much more energy than other people that he can overwhelm entrepreneurs...If Vinod's on the board, the CEO needs a senior vice president in charge of managing him."

As we talk around a table in his office, Khosla pulls out a laptop and runs me through one of his numerous PowerPoint presentations, flipping the slides quickly until he reaches a diagram of possible remedies for global warming. "I get so many proposals that unless I have in my head what areas I will be interested in ahead of time, it doesn't really work," he tells me.

He's a tireless promoter, speaking at dozens of conferences a year. To contrast himself with Al Gore, now a member of Kleiner Perkins, Khosla likes to focus on what he calls "solutions, not problems." The presentation he shows me, his favorite, is entitled "Mostly Convenient Truths From a Technology Optimist" -- among them that global warming is "a technology crisis, not a resource crisis" and that solutions to large problems require "a dash of greed."

To mainstream environmentalists, some of his views are heretical. He contends that hydrogen fuels are a dead end. Although he drives a hybrid car, he believes that hybrids won't significantly slow global warming. And he's convinced that, in most places, energy from solar panels will for many years be much too expensive. "There are only four problems with global warming," he tells me, "oil, coal, cement, and steel. If we do those four, we're done."