To meet with me, he has taken a break from writing a position paper on where the world will get the biomass it needs for oil independence. He writes two or three such papers a month, averaging more than 100 pages a year. "Nobody wastes less of the time in his life than Vinod," says venture capitalist Roger McNamee, whose office at Integral Capital Partners was for a decade just down the hall from Khosla's, at the storied Silicon Valley partnership of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
During nearly two decades at Kleiner Perkins, Khosla lost far more often than he won. He wasn't responsible for the firm's best-known successes of his era -- Amazon, Netscape, and Google.
By my reckoning, he was most closely involved with 42 startups. Most were sold or closed, although a few still operate privately. Eleven, however, went public (mostly during the dotcom bubble). That's better than 25% -- not at all bad in the VC world.
And measured by return on invested capital, Khosla's record has been outstanding. His half-dozen best deals at Kleiner Perkins multiplied $314 million in investments into $15 billion in cash and stock -- an increase of nearly fiftyfold, and five times more than all the money invested in all 42 companies.
It was at the peak of his success in late 2000 and early 2001 -- when Fortune named him the "most successful venture capitalist of all time" and he later appeared on the covers of two other national business magazines in a single week -- that he decided to change.
Image: US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama at Carnergie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla (extreme right), American Online co-founder Steve Case (left extreme), MIT President Susan Hockfield (2nd fromleft), and General Motors CEO Richard Wagoner. | Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images
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