The Trillion Dollar Teams — In conversation with Vinod Khosla
The companies Vinod Khosla backed early are worth more than a trillion dollars today. He credits the teams, not the theses.
He has argued for a decade that a company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes. "Hire great people" is useless advice, in his telling — the real work is hiring against your specific risks.
Join us for a conversation with Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, which manages roughly $16B and wrote early checks into OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Square, Instacart, and Affirm.
He built the thesis from experience. In 1982 he assembled Sun Microsystems out of three other people, and has spent the forty years since deciding who to back.
Event starts at 4:00pm. Vinod will begin speaking at 4:30pm. Dinner will be served at 5:15pm.
Some of the questions we'll explore:
Does "a company becomes the people it hires" still hold after 1,500 investments?
Hiring against your risks rather than filling an org chart: what does that look like when picking your co-founder(s)? What does it look like at pre-seed?
He's said the first ten to fifteen hires determine what a company becomes. How many can a founder realistically get right?
He's also said fifteen years at a legacy company may now be a liability. If experience is depreciating that fast, what's left to select for?
He describes AI as an intern you supervise. Does the gene pool now include agents?
About Vinod Khosla:
Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, which he started in 2004 to fund science experiments too speculative for a traditional partnership. He holds a BTech from IIT Delhi, an MS in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and an MBA from Stanford. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and served as its first CEO, then spent 18 years as a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins before starting his own firm. In September his family completed the $9.6B purchase of the Seattle Seahawks, the largest transaction in NFL history, where he serves as chairman.
About Outcast Ventures:
Outcast Ventures is an early-stage venture firm co-founded by Andy Chen and Amy Lin, alums of Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, NFX, and YC. Outcast is built on the belief that founding teams matter more than founding ideas.
Outcast invest $500K–$1M at pre-seed and seed. Some teams are already formed. Others form through Catalyst.
Sponsors:
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a division of First Citizens Bank, is the bank of some of the world’s most innovative companies and investors. SVB provides commercial banking to companies in the technology, life science and healthcare, private equity and venture capital industries. SVB operates in centers of innovation throughout the United States, serving the unique needs of its dynamic clients with deep sector expertise, insights and connections. SVB’s parent company, First Citizens BancShares, Inc. (NASDAQ: FCNCA ), is a top 20 U.S. financial institution with more than $200 billion in assets. First Citizens Bank, Member FDIC.
Fenwick is a leading law firm, purpose-built to guide visionary tech and life sciences companies and their investors through every stage of growth, from startups securing their first round of funding to leading publicly traded global enterprises. As one of Silicon Valley’s original legal practices, today we have over 600 lawyers, patent agents, engineers, and scientists serving clients all over the world. Named 2024 Practice Group of the Year for both Life Sciences and Technology by Law360, we are consistently ranked a Chambers first-tier firm for delivering the deep experience and technical skill that help innovators at the forefront of their industries shatter boundaries and redefine what’s possible.