Vinod Khosla pointed out that the venture capitalists need to take more risks:

“Every time I fail at something, the press loves to write about it, but you shouldn’t let that scare you,” Khosla joked amid laughter from the crowd. “Failure does not matter. People don’t remember your failures.”

Khosla, who, at the age of 20, failed at his first attempt to start a soy milk company to serve people in India who did not have refrigerators. He eventually started Daisy Systems and co-founded Sun Microsystems a few years later.

Although Khosla focused on the entrepreneurship mentality during his talk, he did not hold back his skepticism of Silicon Valley, including experts’ opinions that limit innovation and the venture capitalists who seem to be more conservative these days by not being adventurous enough.

“I’ve seen the venture business gradually reduced the risk of venture to the point that the consequences of success are inconsequential.”

He said he would rather go back to have a higher ability to fail, but to make sure that if  an entrepreneurs succeeds, it is “consequential.”

“I don’t mind a 90-percent chance of failure … In fact, 90 percent failure sounds pretty bad, but 10 percent of changing the world seems like a pretty good deal,” Khosla said.

I like those odds.

Of course I do, I'm an optimistic entrepreneur. ;)

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. ~John Maynard Keynes, quoted by @VKhosla