How can AI help with that? Especially in the next 6-9 months, AI will also have what you call recursive learning, self-improvement. What does that mean?
I always love thinking about the future and what technology can do for humanity. And what we are doing is having AI learn the process.
Hi, I'm Pandu Shahar of Tarantara. Today I have the absolute privilege to host my senior in business school from Stanford, who is world-renowned as a venture capitalist, as an entrepreneur, and now a sports person as well.
Mr. Vinod Khosla, thank you, sir, for coming to Jakarta. I know Indonesia is not your first time, but to Jakarta it's your first time. Thank you. How's your first 24 hours here?
Well, I love Indonesia because of all, you know, the thing that matters most to me when I walk outside and I walk to this location from the hotel, all the green. You know, I love places that are really, really green.
My wife makes fun of me for loving trees.
Yeah. Thank you. You know, I read through also about your story, too. The fact that what I was really impressed about, Vinod, is actually he made sure he spent 20-plus nights a month to have dinner with his family. I'm trying to do that now the past two months. It's been super rewarding making sure you have that consistency. Tell me why. What made you do that?
Well, it's this basic question of what is important to you, and once you define it, what are you doing to make it happen? And so what I did, and now my kids are grown up and they have their own jobs and all, but when they were all living with us through high school and all, I basically said if this is important, I have to measure it, and measure it means my secretary was supposed to report it to me every month how many times I had dinner. And so that's how I wanted to enforce what I said. I wanted to make sure it actually happened.
Because that's probably for me the most impressive when I read through all the accolades. The fact that you made sure that you prioritized that over everything else, and especially because of a young 10-year-old, that's super cool. So I want to share, and because I know we have a lot of audience...
I grew up in India, so family values are always very, very important.
That's right. Well, a lot of our audience is coming out of Indonesia, we know, and you know, they're probably curious. You came from India. You really come from a humble beginning, humble background. Can you tell us a little bit on how you founded Sun Microsystems and built the company, especially coming out from a different country, entering into a large country like the United States?
So, one of the things I'm proudest of for myself is being a role model for young people. When I was 16, I used to go to Old Delhi to rent old magazines, and I rented this old magazine called Electronic Engineering Times. I was always technically inclined. And I read a story of Andy Grove, who was a Hungarian immigrant to the US who started Intel. And I said, 'If an immigrant to the US can start a company, then I can also start a company.' So I decided then, before I went to IIT, I would really want to start a company in Silicon Valley, and went through IIT, tried to start some things in India. It was very, very difficult back then in the '70s. And so I went to California and started first a company called Daisy Systems, which was quite successful and went public, and then Sun Microsystems and became public. So both were quite successful.
Very successful, if you call it not just quite successful. But what was that first, is that a first big break you think in your business career, the Sun Microsystems or the previous company?
Both were quite successful. You know, when you're in your 20s and you start a company that can go public, especially in the early 1980s, it was a big deal. So the first one was a break, and the second one, Sun, of course became very, very big. And so, but I was very fortunate or lucky.
Yeah. Well, we need both. And how did that then translate you into becoming what you're now known as a futurist and a venture capitalist? What made you go to venture capital?
So, two things. One, I always love thinking about the future and what technology can do for humanity. I've talked a lot about how AI can make free primary care to everybody in a country like Indonesia. That's a big, big deal. My wife runs a nonprofit where their AI tutors provide free tutoring to every kid, and that tutoring is better than the tutoring rich people can afford their kids because they can hire a human being. It's much, much better quality. So everybody can have the highest quality tutors for their kids and the highest quality primary care. Those are very exciting to me, and projecting that out. I first wrote about this idea in 2012.
In a publication called TechCrunch, because I didn't think India or most of the developing world could have enough doctors to match the patient-doctor ratio. So that was my motivation for that. But I've always looked at how do we get better energy, how do we get more minerals and copper, and how do we make things more efficient, how do we get self-driving cars. So almost every area I find, if you're creative enough, you can find a technology solution that multiplies your resources. And the world needs to multiply its resources.
You know, the way I describe my job when I turned 60, which was a long time ago, I'm 71 now, I wrote a 50-page document that's a public document on what I wanted to work on the rest of my life. So while most of my business school classmates were retiring, I was setting up a 20-year journey of what I wanted to work on. And it said about 10% of the world's population, 700 or 800 million people, have a rich lifestyle. That means rich in energy, rich in housing, rich in education, rich in entertainment, rich in transportation, in every way rich. But if we want 8 billion people to have it, we will destroy the planet. And that's where I got very interested in renewable and sustainable energy and other ways to multiply resources.
So there's more turning scarcity into plentiful for everyone. That's...
So I give the simple example: a lot of the steel in the world is used for cars. But a typical car in the US will drive 12,000 miles or 18,000 kilometers a year. That's typical. But you could have it drive 10 times more, and then the same steel, the 2,000 lb of steel, goes 10 times further because as part of public transit it will probably drive 120,000 miles, not 12,000. And so now you're using the steel much better. So those kinds of problems, they're almost chess puzzles, but they're also technology puzzles. How do you do that? And so AI self-driving can let a public transit system do much, much better. That's just one example, but there's in every area, whether it's AI development or how you do doctors, how do you do structural engineers in AI, how do you do all these things, how do you produce better energy with AI like in fusion. Those are all areas where I get very excited about trying to project the future and then working with great entrepreneurs.
So you're now touching the most important point. We're going straight to the meat of this discussion.
But to your question, I love mentoring entrepreneurs. I almost don't think of myself as an investor. I'm helping entrepreneurs realize their dream of building a big company.
So what you wrote 10 years ago or 12 years ago, to now, it's not a job. It's more of a mission.
That's what you're doing with your life.
It's a mission. It happens to be a very profitable mission.
And so then maybe I'll look now selfishly, I want to look at what Indonesia is, because what's so interesting for all of you is that if you, like you came from India, is a country of 1.6 billion people, a GDP per capita of around maybe 2,000, while Indonesia is a country close to 300 million people and also a GDP per capita is higher, 5,000. What do you think, and this is probably so now topical to discuss, when you look at AI, what can AI do for us as a country and for the individuals or the citizens or the shareholders of this country?
So I would give you two perspectives. Out of the, what, 2 and how many million?
280 million people. There's probably 100 people, 20 and 30-year-olds, who could completely change Indonesia by having breakthrough entrepreneurship. And that's what the country really needs: entrepreneurship that makes a new world happen, do much better mining, much better refining, much better health care, much better drugs, much better entertainment. Almost every respect. 100 people, imagine 100 companies like Grab or GoTo.
Yeah. So the talent is definitely there in the country. I forget the statistic. I think 1.4% of every population in the world has an IQ over 130. So that's there already.
Millions of people in Indonesia who have IQ above 130. It's true of every population. They may have different levels of education, but the IQ is still there. So the resource of people is here in Indonesia, and they can start these 100 companies. So that's one, on the human capital side that's existing today. The other is, you know, it's pretty easy, in fact it can be done even as a nonprofit, to provide primary care to everybody in Indonesia, to provide free education through AI tutors, or even college degrees from home while you're working another job. I mean, today in college you have to give up four years of your working life and you give up income to get a degree which hopefully helps you in the future. You could probably do both in parallel, and those kinds of things are starting to be possible. Everybody can get educated, not only those who can afford that tuition. One of the great things in India was IIT didn't have much tuition expense, so anybody who got in could get a good degree.
We're watching closely what's happening in the United States where you are, in terms of the politics related to AI. Do you have any opinion on what that means to the progress of AI and how can we learn as a country from that?
So, you know, unfortunately, whether it's Indonesia or the US, politics is always a dominant force in what happens in the country. The Republicans in the US are very focused on growth and favor AI. The Democrats are afraid of job displacement and so are more resistant to AI. I suspect there's different factions in Indonesia too that have different priorities, and in any society, probably every society has that, and there's multiple ways. Because I understand the US much better than I do Indonesia. I have proposed certain mechanisms where you first use AI to the maximum because it is so much benefit to the people, and we should start with the things that help people the most, which is why I focus so much on healthcare and education.
Those two, healthcare and education.
Yeah, also entertainment is the third thing. Everybody likes it.
Yeah. Everybody's always on their phone, videos to watch.
So AI should first touch people in a beneficial way. And the way to address the job concern in the US that I have proposed is not to protect jobs, but to protect people. And I have proposed ways in which you can protect people who are displaced in a deficit-neutral way where it doesn't take more money. So I won't go into the details of that proposal, that's very specific to the US, but I worry a lot about these issues and we do have to be sensitive to people and protect them. But I would say the following: there is a huge opportunity for all sorts of people to become entrepreneurs. I call them micro entrepreneurs.
So just walking outside, there's the flower shops, right? Those are micro entrepreneurs. And if AI can help somebody go in business because they don't need to know anything about money or accounting, or they just cook the best food, or carve the best wood, or any of these skills, they can have a global market because AI can do the marketing, the accounting, the legal, or everything for them. So suddenly people are working for themselves. And I think those are much, much better jobs than say working as a farm worker in a farm or working on an assembly line. I don't...
So in your view, at least, would love to learn more, AI should be a great equalizer.
I am very optimistic AI will be a great optimizer.
Equalizer is the better word. And probably the most powerful force for the bottom three billion people on this planet.
Oh, that's so interesting. Economically lower strata.
It benefits the bottom of the pyramid the most.
Has the potential to benefit people at the bottom of the pyramid the most.
Yeah, if governments embrace these beneficial things.
Ah, so in your view then, AI, especially in healthcare, education, that will give the greatest impact in the beginning.
Entertainment is also going to be important to people.
