Vinod Khosla Seeks Open Process For Democratic Presidential Candidate

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla says Democrats should not coronate Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's replacement

July 22, 2024

Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has taken an unusually blunt and public political stance. It is time for the Democrats to “have an open convention and get a more moderate candidate who can easily beat” Republican Donald Trump, Khosla posted on X yesterday. This was after President Joe Biden dropped out as the party’s candidate and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.

Khosla, 69, is an independent who in the past has backed both Democratic and Republican candidates.

Khosla is a big believer and investor in climate improvement and sustainability technologies. He opposes Trump, 78, since he expects the former president, if re-elected in November, will end Democratic policies and funding for businesses and technologies which seek to protect and improve the environment.

Khosla also stated on X, in an exchange with X owner Elon Musk, that it is, “Hard for me to support someone with no values, lies, cheats, rapes, demeans women, hates immigrants like me.” Musk, co-founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and other companies and with a net worth of $252 billion, backs Trump for president.

During Trump’s administration, 2017-2020, Khosla stated on X, “much more was plundered for tax breaks for the rich and special deals for real estate etc than for illegal immigrants. (I do think we need to be tougher on illegal immigration and profuse about legal immigration of talent.) The world is rapidly running out of workers and so all young immigrants will be wanted. We do need to contain despots like Putin and Ukraine is part of that or Taiwan, Poland etc will go next.”

Khosla is founder of Menlo Park, California based Khosla Ventures, which reportedly manages $15 billion in assets. His net worth is estimated to be $7.8 billion by Forbes.

Founded in 2004, Khosla Ventures invests in a range of businesses including artificial intelligence (AI), climate, sustainability, enterprise, consumer, fintech, digital health, medtech and diagnostics, therapeutics, and frontier technology. “We prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness,” says the landing page of Khosla Ventures website.

Khosla was an early investor in OpenAI, whose ChatGPT and DALL-E provide AI tools for businesses as well as consumers. OpenAI is a huge winner for Khosla, valued at $80 billion at its February funding round. Other wins for Khosla include consumer payments services Affirm, credit card services firm Square, and home delivery services DoorDash and Instacart.

Khosla grew up in an Indian army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about the founding of Intel, he dreamt of starting his own technology company.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He failed in an effort to start a soymilk company to service the many people in India who did not have refrigerators.

Migrating to the U.S., he earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Stanford University. He persisted in applying to Stanford even after being rejected twice.

In 1981, after his MBA, Khosla co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The Mountain View, California, company achieved sizeable revenue and profit growth and went public.

Then, in 1982, driven by the frustration of having to design the computer hardware on which the Daisy software needed to be built, Vinod started Sun Microsystems to build workstations for software developers. Sun was funded by Khosla’s longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

In 1986, Khosla joined Kleiner as a general partner. While there, he played a crucial role in taking on Intel’s monopoly by building and growing semiconductor company, Nexgen, which eventually was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Nexgen/AMD was the only microprocessor vendor to have significant success competing against Intel.

Then, Khosla helped incubate the idea and business plan for Juniper Networks to take on Cisco System’s dominance of the router market. He also was involved in the formulation of the early advertising-based search strategy for Excite. In addition, he helped transform the telecommunications business by funding Cerent Corporation, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $7.2 billion.

In 2004, seeking to be more experimental and to fund sometimes imprudent “science experiments,” he formed Khosla Ventures.

Khosla has also been blunt about his assessment of India, while pushing for closer U.S.-India relations. India’s greatest risk is a disruption to economic growth from the instability and inequality inflamed by Hindu nationalism, he told the New York Times in 2023. He added that it was time to recognize that the Modi government’s favoring of Hindus “can take attention off the principal path of economic progress, and set it back, and set back global relationships.”

In 2020, over 500 black Democratic leaders lobbied hard for Biden to select Kamala Harris as his vice presidential nominee. The previous year she had dropped out of the Democratic presidential contest because, as NBC News reported, her campaign was a mess: “Harris lacked money, a message and a cohesive campaign operation.” 

In 2016, Harris, 59, was elected to the U.S. Senate from California. Earlier she was twice elected as the state’s attorney general. Before one election, Harris asked Shobha Warrier, her aunt in Chennai, India, to pray and break coconuts for her victory at a Ganesha temple, Warrier wrote in Rediff.Com.

Kamala Devi Harris is half Indian and half black. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan, an immigrant from India and Warrier’s sister, was a breast cancer researcher. Gopalan studied for a Ph.D. in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. Harris’s father Donald Harris, who emigrated from Jamaica, taught economics at Stanford University. Her parents divorced when she was seven and she and her sister were brought up by her mother, partly in Canada.

Harris studied political science at Howard University in Washington DC and got a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College. In 2014, she married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, who has two children from an earlier marriage. They lived in a multi-million-dollar home near Hollywood in Los Angeles.

Khosla agreed with a post on X by The Economist that, instead of coronating Harris, “A genuine race for the Democratic Party’s candidate would bring scrutiny, valuable attention from the news media and, crucially, legitimacy.” Khosla stated that he wants an open process to pick the Democratic presidential candidate “who can best beat (Donald Trump) above all other priorities given how much of a danger he is.” An open process is also sought by major Democratic donors including Mike Bloomberg, net worth $105 billion, and Netflix founder Reed Hastings, net worth $4.6 billion.

Harris may not be the best Democrat to defeat Trump. Polls, held before Biden’s withdrawal, show that Harris’s approval rating among likely voters was also low and only slightly ahead of Biden, 38% to 36%; both trailed Trump’s 41% rating, according to ABC News 538.

Khosla states that he appreciates former Democratic President Barack Obama for “not endorsing anyone” to replace Biden. Yesterday, in a post on Medium, Obama wrote Democratic leaders “will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”

Obama noted that “President Biden pointed us away from the four years of chaos, falsehood, and division that had characterized Donald Trump’s administration.” Biden’s decision, Obama added, “to pass the torch to a new nominee is…a historic example of a genuine public servant once again putting the interests of the American people ahead of his own that future generations of leaders will do well to follow.”

Khosla posted on X that Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan or Joel Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, as the Democratic candidate “would be a great thing for America not held hostage between (Trump’s) MAGA extremists and (leftist) DEI extremism.”

The 2024 Presidential election is likely to be decided by a few hundred thousand votes in the swing states, especially Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Whitmer and Shapiro likely have a better chance of beating Trump than Harris, who is from California.

But both Whitmer and Shapiro have announced support for Harris. So, it appears that Harris will be coronated by the Democrats at their convention in Chicago next month. Khosla told CNBC today that Harris was a tough prosecutor and is tougher than Biden and that he believes she can beat Trump.