Vinod Khosla, founder of the venture capital firm, Khosola Ventures talked about his experiences as an entrepreneur, investor, and of course, a failure expert at this year’s Failcon conference in San Francisco on October 24th.
Mr. Khosla was joined with Liz Gaines, Senior Editor at AllThingsD, and gave some great insights for Startups on how not to fail, and how to succeed. Here’s some great takeaways from that session:
On Failure:
- Having the willingness to fail, will give you the ability to succeed
- If you are going to succeed, it better be worth succeeding
- Too many VCs try to reduce risk, so when they succeed, it’s inconsequential
- Most entrepreneurs fail because of what they don’t know and don’t ask
- Lots of small failures = lots of learned opportunities
Business Insights
- Projects usually fail because of poor implementation and tactics; so don’t change vision, instead change tactics
- Be persistent: give yourself enough time to get lucky!
- When 10 (companies) go for a goal, only 3 will matter: win, place, show
- Always ask others for feedback
- Most biz plans are worthless
- He’s never seen a business plan that was accurate
- Most ‘experts’ are full of shit
On Working with VCs:
- Ask VCs to critique plan, even if not looking for funding
- If a VC has a clear view of what you are doing, it’s probably not a good VC
- Talk to VC portfolio companies that failed or didn’t go to plan
It was a great conference, with a great list of speakers. Be sure to put Failcon on your radar for next year!
Excellent summary from failcon!
some great insights from Vinod – and a great bulleted summary. thx.
Vinod Khosla has some pretty interesting ideas and he definitely makes a point.
However, failure DOES happen, even if all precautions have been taken.
The most important thing is to be persistent. See what worked and what didn’t and go for it again.
Never give up!