Willingness to Fail Gives Me Ability to Succeed: Vinod Khosla
By Suman Ravikumar, SiliconIndia   |   Thursday, 10 November 2011, 23:47 IST
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Willingness to Fail Gives Me Ability to Succeed: Vinod Khosla
Bangalore: "You don't abandon your religion when you run into problems. Similarly, if your product is your religion then you will be passionate and never give up on your venture." They say the anatomy of an entrepreneur is knowledge in the mind, passion in the heart and fire in the stomach, a combination of three essential elements that gives rise to a powerful startup. Every startup has a roller coaster ride of emotions. In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. The part obviously is the lows. "You have to prepared with a Failure Strategy" says Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures VC Company, co-founder of Sun Microsystem and the most influential person in the Silicon Valley, who addressed many entrepreneurs at the Nasscom Product Forum in Bangalore. Kick starting the two day conclave, Khosla said "My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed." The ideal environment for innovation not only celebrates success, but also accepts, if not encourages, failure. Apple's brain child, Steve Jobs also confronted failure when Apple fired him from the company that he had created, only to welcome him back to transform the global market with his itouch products. "Big bets can only make larger shifts" Khosla said. An entrepreneur can make it big if he believed in the conviction of his idea, believed that his product was his religion, then an entrepreneur need not be part of someone else's bigger picture. He can be the master of his own idea. "You only lose 1x your money if you fail, but if you succeed, you can make 100x. That's the beauty of product companies," he told the packed auditorium of entrepreneurs. The innovation in India has been more on the exploration of the past and companies like Flipcart and Naukri.com have been the indianized version of Amazon and Monster.com. India has to explore different sectors that can prove to be potential goldmines like, health, education, NFC and clean energy. Khosla retreated that India needs to go "beyond outsourcing, replicating Western successes and beyond small shifts". He also predicted that entertainment tied with emotion will be a big business for entrepreneurs to try their hand at. He completely agreed that at least one product company from India will achieve $1 billion valuation every year given the fact that the companies come up in newer categories. Addressing the gene pool of the company, Khosla said that it is very important that startups have a diverse population in their company with people who think differently from each other. 30 years before when he founded Sun Microsystems, Khosla spent nearly 40 percent of his time in recruiting the right people for his startup. He was a glorified recruiter. When asked whether he ever feared failure, Khosla said only those who dare to fail can succeed. "Freedom to fail is a key ingredient in success. Try and fail, but do not fail to try. Every disadvantage in India is an opportunity to do something big," he said.

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