Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla says curiosity keeps him alive

The billionaire entrepreneur believes in being curious and switching things up to explore new areas.

Keep learning — this is a piece of advice one often hears from the successful. Sun Microsystems founder and investor Vinod Khosla added his two bits to it during a fireside chat at MIT in the US recently.

Khosla started on a personal note, speaking about how science came to be his religion, before moving on to discussing his views on interdisciplinary learning. Explaining why he deep dives into subjects he may not know much about, Khosla said that for him, to be curious, is to be alive.


A couple of years ago, Khosla was invited by the head of Lawrence Berkeley Labs to speak to the heads of departments. Someone asked him for his suggestion on ways to increase the speed of innovation at the labs. His answer — shuffle it up. “Make the head of biology the head of nuclear, take the head of nuclear and make him or her the head of chemistry. My view is that whenever I learn a new area, I co-relate across other areas, [and] that it is the best way to make quantum jumps in your thinking and understanding of new areas,” he said. Khosla went to Santa Fe for a postdoctoral stint in 2001, his idea of a “great sabbatical” from his business.

“That completely changed my view of how medicine should be practised,” he said. “There is a symptom that causes diagnosis, [and a] disease that you find a drug for. Or you could say there are 3,000 metabolic pathways in the human body, they are all interacting, so it’s network theory that is more important than biology. That kind of correlation across disciplines is really valuable, no matter what area you work in.”