Description: Khosla talks about funding environmental technologies and why he joined the environmental movement.

Question: Who are you?

Transcript: Vinod Khosla, partner at Khosla Ventures. Well, I think I’m in the business of funding those great technological ideas that can cause breakthroughs in technology in all areas.  But we have a strong focus on energy and energy revolution. Not enough innovation has happened in the energy business.  The traditional oil companies don’t spend any money on real R&D in new areas.  They spend most of their time and money on getting more oil out of the ground and researching that.  And so I think that the lack of real talent, and creativity, and innovation in energy research – and that’s what we are trying to find – both at the early stage, and then taking them to commercialization. Well I started looking at the environmental movement in the ‘90s.  I’ve always considered myself a fairly concerned person about those issues.  But what I found in the ‘90s was most organizations who are working on small pieces of the solution . . . not really things that could change the fundamentals.  What does changing the fundamentals mean?  We have to wean ourselves off oil and we have to wean ourselves off coal.  If we do those two, we are 80 percent of the way where we need to be.  And so I then started to address those two big issues.  I really started to learn about it a long time ago.  I started dabbling in energy investing in 2001 or so, and then over time have picked up steam.

Recorded on: 9/26/07