Vinod Khosla, Partner at Khosla Ventures, provides a powerful overview of what is needed to address climate change. He says the world needs 12 good instigators to tackle the break throughs needed to solve climate change. Vinod shares Elon Musk as an example of an instigator who not only opened up the path of EVs but also forced every auto manufacturer to move to electric manufacturing. Pat Brown of Impossible Foods is another instigator who believes and has proven that plant based meet can taste as good or better than animal meet. Vinod believes that many of the environmental ideas he comes across are not real breakthroughs of this kind: “They are just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.” To be a breakthrough that matters, Vinod says you have to start with one of the major challenges, find an instigator with a break through idea and funders who will back it. Vinod tells us that Clean Tech 1.0 didn’t fail at all—it just took longer than people thought. He explains that venture capital is built on a high risk model where 95% of the ideas can fail and there is still success with one giant break through. He shares some of the hard problems that companies he is backing are working on including: Sustainable Aviation Fuel, Green Cement, Fusion, Geothermal, Hydrogen, and High Tech Industrial Heat. He believes that we need to move subsidies from sectors which have already reached acceptable costs levels (e.g. solar, wind, EV) into new areas where break throughs are needed. He tells us that if we are smart we will repurpose infrastructure citing the example of Commonwealth Fusion that leverages existing power plants. Vinod believes that “more is possible than people think if we do it in the right way.” He shares some powerful wisdom from years of Clean Tech investing namely: “Ignore the experts—don’t believe when they tell you what can and can’t be done. They extrapolate the past rather than inventing the future.”
