CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The current financial crisis might actually have a silver lining for venture capital investing, VC titan Vinod Khosla told Andy up on the MIT campus yesterday. “When we go through a period like this, it’s actually healthy in the long run,” he says in this clip. Khosla is an affiliated partner at KPCB and the founder of Khosla Ventures.
He says that people with money will invest it somewhere, and the current complexity of the financial system will drive people to “invest in things we understand and are real,” making it easier, rather than harder, to raise funds in the VC world. “I’m an optimist,” he adds.
This isn’t to say that there won’t be any repercussions–he does anticipate a year or two of more cautious investing.
Andy interviewed him at the MIT Technology Review EmTech08 conference, where Khosla was a keynote speaker.
Martin LaMonica at CNET wrote a story about his presentation, and Khosla expounds upon the opinions he expresses in this interview in a piece he wrote for Forbes that ran on Monday.
—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer
