Vinod Khosla: 70-80% Of VCs Add Negative Value To Startups; In The Next 10 Years, Data Science Will Do More For Medicine Than All Biological Sciences Combined

September 12, 2013 1 Comment

Vinod Khosla: 70-80% Of VCs Add Negative Value To Startups

KIM-MAI CUTLER

posted 11 hours ago

Vinod Khosla, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems who later went on to create Khosla Ventures, says that the vast majority of VCs aren’t in a position to offer decent advice to startups. In fact, most of them probably hurt startups, he argued. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington prodded Khosla to single out VCs that were horrible on boards. “Who is the VC who is the most full of shit that you’ve ever heard?” Arrington asked. “I would be offending too many people,” Khosla retorted. “Maybe some percentage that’s substantially larger than 95 percent of VCs add zero value. I would bet that 70-80 percent add negative value to a startup in their advising.” He said that most VCs “haven’t done shit” to know what to tell startups going through difficult times. “I don’t know a startup that hasn’t been through tough times,” he said. He said that founders should listen politely and just do what they want to do anyway. He said of his approach toward helping entrepreneurs: “I give them advice, but I tell them what I’m uncertain about. I’m confident that I screwed up more often than most people in this room. Hopefully, I can advise entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes. But you can never be sure if you’re trying something new and unreasonable.” Vinod Khosla: In The Next 10 Years, Data Science Will Do More For Medicine Than All Biological Sciences Combined

FREDERIC LARDINOIS

posted 11 hours ago

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, TechCrunch and CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington andKhosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla took the stage to discuss the areas Khosla is currently most interested in. Besides food tech, the one area that seems to get him the most excited is clearly medicine. In his believe, “in the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.”

Now that’s a pretty controversial statement, but Khosla believes that mobile tech and cheap hardware could seriously change the health-care business within just a few years. To do this, though, he argues, entrepreneurs can’t just drop out of Stanford after the first year. It takes a few Ph.D.’s with degrees in robotics, machine vision, machine learning and similar topics to make this a reality.”

The area I’m most excited about is the kind of technology together with sensors and wearables changing the practice of health care,” he noted. To push this trend forward, Khosla has invested in products like Ginger.io, which uses big data analytics and mobile technology to improve healthcare, including psychiatry.

The other company he has invested in is CellScope, which aims to create a small diagnostic toolkit based on iPhone accessories – starting with a digital otoscope. Why, after all, should you have to go and see your doctor when you can safely diagnose an ear infection with your iPhone camera and CellScope, Khosla asked.

“Eighty percent of what doctors do, tech can do at a fraction of the cost — especially your rural doctor in India,” he continued. Still, he granted, tech won’t be able to replace the top doctors at research hospitals anytime soon.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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