Khosla on investing: The technology must scale

Ian Lamont — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:10:29 -0700

I'm at Technology Review's Emerging Technologies conference at MIT, and Vinod Khosla -- the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist during the '90s Internet bubble and the current cleantech boom -- just finished his keynote. He talked about the four categories of technologies which Khosla Ventures is investing in: Alternatives to coal and oil, technologies that help fish and the world's oceans, and new materials. Khosla's approach to companies takes into account several factors, but two of the most important are total cost and competitiveness with fossil fuels.

Refering to the economic transformations taking place in India and China, Khosla noted "any technology had better be cheaper than its fossil competitors." He pointed to forecasts for sales of the Tata car in India, which might shoot to one million units in the year 2010 largely because of its $2,500 price. That compares to a forecast of just a few thousand more expensive Honda hybrids. Later in the keynote, Khosla said "we are not negative on hybrids," but added "we are focused on what can scale massively."

(Image: Technology Review video)

More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:

Analysis: Five reasons why a recession is a good time to start a company
Analysis: Keep it simple, because VCs are stupid
Analysis: 10 reasons that start-ups 100% absolutely should outsource (almost) everything
Special Feature: Where are they now? The Industry Standard tracks down 10 dot-coms from the Web bubble of the late 1990s