'Dare to fail, do the unreasonable'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Don't follow expert forecasts, embrace failure and do something unreasonable. A statement entrepreneurs would rather discard as being utterly absurd, if it were not from the man, who is never known to mince words.

Billionaire serial entrepreneur Vinod Khosla goaded, admonished, cajoled and, not the least, inspired hundreds of enthusiastic people with a passion to float their own ventures or those already running one. He was delivering the keynote address at the Nasscom India Product Conclave 2011 here on Wednesday.

"A study by Prof. (Philip) Tetlock analyzed more than 80,000 expert forecasts over 20 years, and he finally concluded: Forecasters are less likely to be right than dart-throwing monkeys," said Khosla to buttress his argument.

He narrated an incident when Internet portal Excite turned down an offer from Google to buy the search engine for under $1 million. "The could not imagine that search would be big in near future."

Quoting his own life and personal experiences, he said, much to the amusement of audiences, "My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed. If you are afraid to fail, you will never do anything unreasonable."

"Failure is scary," said Khosla, "but let's face it, nobody remembers it after five years. Everybody remembers success for times to come."

Upon failing, one could lose only one time their money (investment), but could make even 100 times when success comes along, he justified.

The Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems pointed out that new ideas came from risking on something that others had not tried their hands at. "There are some areas like payments, sensors and automation that are not done yet."

Khosla also said that health, education and the next level of social media were to be explored further as entrepreneurship avenues. "The best way to win any game, is to make your own rules."

On the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), he commented that though there is a lot of scepticism about the project, it was a new and great capability. "It may not be visible till 2020, but holds out a lot of promise and a number of opportunities," added Khosla.

He highly recommended Andrew S. Drove's Only the Paranoid Survive and neurologist Robert Burton's On Being Certain to budding entrepreneurs.