This sponsored post is produced by VLAB Founders Series.
Vinod Khosla grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur despite growing up in an Indian army household with no business or technology connections.
After moving to the Silicon Valley, Khosla started Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for software developers. Through the years at the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Khosla took on Intel’s monopoly with Nexgen/AMD (the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel, sold to AMD for 28 percent of AMD), incubated the idea and business plan for Juniper to take on Cisco’s dominance of the router market, formulated the very early advertising-based search strategy for Excite, and transformed the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7B).
Khosla, now at Khosla Ventures, has a passion for nascent technologies that can have a beneficial effect and economic impact on society. His greatest passion is being a mentor to entrepreneurs, helping them build technology-based businesses.
The MIT/Stanford VLAB Founder’s Series hosts leading visionary expert mentors who have brought unique innovations, special entrepreneurial characteristics, and sometimes even the emergence of entire industries to Silicon Valley — and the world. These mentors have made significant impacts on the spirit of entrepreneurialism and have a strong interest in seeding the next generation of life-changing developments.
The Founder’s Series is held once a month. Approximately 80 founders of solid early stage startups are selected to take part in a collaborative “office hours” style session. Several startup founders are picked for the “hot seat,” where they each have six minutes to ask questions of the featured expert and receive feedback specifically about their startup. All founders in attendance will hear the questions, responses, and overall insight from the featured mentor.
This event is exclusively for startup founders. Several founders will be given the opportunity to be on the “hot seat”– a chance to interact directly with Khosla to get direct feedback about your startup idea, execution, or positioning. Please apply here for an invitation to the April program: http://goo.gl/3kRWi
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