SPENCER MICHELS: Do you think that the use of venture capital is the best way to go about developing all this new technology or is there some better way? Should the government be heavily involved? Should the stock market be involved? Some, I don’t know, any of the other way to finance this?
VINOD KHOSLA: Not only is there no better way, there isn’t any other way. And for one very simple reason. We can’t extrapolate our assumptions. This has got to be what Nassim [Taleb] calls the black swan phenomena. We have to radically change our assumptions. We are very much like turkeys and as Nassim says in his book, Black Swan, “for a thousand days, a turkey’s worldview model is it gets fat every day these humans come out and feed it. Somehow [...] before thanksgiving, it’s model changes.” We have to follow that model. We have to radically change, and that can happen for the negative or the positive.
We have to shift from extrapolating past assumptions, ignore what economists and econometrics tells us about how much oil we need and when we’ll run out and what consumptions will be. Because they are based on the false assumptions. Once those assumption change and technology will drive that change, the world will be different. Our assumption was long distance calls cost money. And then the internet came along, changed that assumption, and it didn’t matter what AT&T wanted, they disappeared essentially, got sold for a song.
- Vinod Khosla, PBS
