The Trillion Dollar Teams — In conversation with Vinod Khosla

the vibe

The companies Vinod Khosla backed early are worth more than a trillion dollars today. He credits the teams, not the theses. He has argued for a decade that a company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes. "Hire great people" is useless advice, in his telling — the real work is hiring against your specific risks. Join us for a conversation with Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, which manages roughly $16B and wrote early checks into OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Square, Instacart, and Affirm. He built the thesis from experience. In 1982 he assembled Sun Microsystems out of three other people, and has spent the forty years since deciding who to back. Event starts at 4:00pm. Vinod will begin speaking at 4:30pm. Dinner will be served at 5:15pm. Some of the questions we'll explore: How he recognizes exceptional people before their track records make it obvious What he has learned about talent from building Sun and investing in companies like OpenAI How he would update "Gene Pool Engineering" for the AI era How founders should think about cofounders, early hires, equity, trust, and their obligations to the people who choose to follow them About Vinod Khosla: Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, which he started in 2004 to fund science experiments too speculative for a traditional partnership. He holds a BTech from IIT Delhi, an MS in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and an MBA from Stanford. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and served…