Unlike his more famous former partner at Kleiner Perkins, the energetic John Doerr -- who has choked up onstage recounting his daughter's worries about climate change -- Khosla is unemotional about going green. He hopes to improve the world by developing, for example, cleaner-burning coal and cars that run leaner, but his more fundamental motivations seem to be the size of the potential market and, even more important, the intellectual challenge of intractable problems.
Some Khosla Ventures deals are so preliminary that even he calls them "imprudent science experiments" rather than companies. "Science experiments are key to solving the problems of global warming and energy independence," he says.
"Incremental approaches will not work." He has backed a company developing automobile injection systems that could double the fuel efficiency of gasoline engines, if its technology works. He has millions riding on efforts to make fuel from materials other than corn, although none has advanced beyond the pilot or demonstration phase.
He has put money into a company that believes its microbes, which can turn sugar into the basis for a malaria drug, also can turn it into cheap substitutes for gasoline -- and he did so long before the founders had figured out what the company's product would be. "We've funded an incredible number of things that would make no sense at all for a traditional venture fund," he says.
Khosla has long seemed drawn to venture capital by the chance to satisfy his curiosity and to demonstrate that, whatever the question, he has the answer. "I've never been interested in business, surprisingly," he tells me.
Image: An employee of Japan's Advanced Industrial Science and Technology introduces a prototype 'green color' organic solar cell with flexible modules at the Environment Fair. | Photograph: Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images
Also read:
Virtual tour of the awesome Cisco campus
Advertisement
