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Vinod Khosla, the Lion of Silicon Valley?

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Last week, the Wall Street Journal took a cheap dig at Silicon Valley’s most outspoken biofuels evangelist, Mr. Vinod Khosla. For the sake of full disclosure, I support biofuels and (if occasionally ambivalently) support Mr. Khosla’s efforts to bring them into the mainstream of our modern energy economy. Perhaps this explains why I felt so disappointed with Mr. Khosla’s weak-kneed response to the Wall Street Journal’s attack. The attack was cheap and short-sighted but accurate. As I explained in an earlier post, Mr. Khosla is guilty of the same sins routinely committed by players in the conventional energy industry (e.g. using lax campaign finance laws to influence government policy, benefiting disproportionately from government funded research initiatives). The list is much longer and each item on it can be documented by documents publicly available. If I were writing a legal brief, I would delineate the evidence that supports this characterization in minute detail. But because this is a blog post and I’m (like most bloggers) pressed for time, I’ll wait for someone to express an interest in reading it before I spend hours writing it. Ergo: anyone with an interest should speak up.

So what frustrated me about Mr. Khosla’s response was that he didn’t admit the accuracy of the Wall Street Journal’s characterization. Of course, Khosla has partnered with the government. Energy is the mother of all capital intensive sectors and neither the government nor the private sector could for all practical purposes effect the kind of momentous change that our energy economy needs. If Mr. Khosla hadn’t stepped up, America would not have a meaningful alternative energy policy at all. The venture capital community led by the likes of Mr. Khosla has filled a void left by Exxon and other conventional energy giants. The project they’ve concocted might not be the best of all possible energy policies for the future, but it is the only one we have and we only have it because fellows like Mr. Khosla put their pennies on the line to make it happen. I, for one, am grateful for the start they’ve made and wish they had the gumption to take the credit they deserve for it.