Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, 68, said he still works 80 hours a week and has no plans to stop investing anytime soon.
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OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla said he still works 80 hours a week during an episode of “The Cerebral Valley Podcast.” The 68-year-old billionaire said he plans on investing for the next 25 years if his health permits. He even pointed to life extension efforts as a possible way to prolong his career.
Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley investor for almost 40 years, said in the past that he works 80-hour weeks. And the grind doesn’t appear to stop anytime soon.
In a recent episode of the “The Cerebral Valley Podcast,” host Eric Newcomer asked Khosla how much longer he plans on being an investor.
In response, the 68-year-old billionaire venture capitalist said he wants to continue investing for as long as he can — and is even willing to prolong his longevity to do just that.
“Well if life extension efforts by Peter Thiel or whoever else is doing it works…no seriously,” Khosla said as the live audience laughed in response.
“I have this saying ‘You grow old when you retire, you don’t retire when you grow old,'” the investor continued. “I’ve seen too many people retire and grow old. So I clearly plan to do — health permitting — this for the next 25 years. And then I’ll be Warren Buffet’s age and he’s still doing it.”
The 68-year-old investor started his investing career when he became a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1986. In 2004, he started his own VC firm he called Khosla Ventures, which backed companies like Instacart, Impossible Foods, and DoorDash. In 2019, Khosla Ventures invested $50 million — twice the size of any investment his VC firm made in the last 15 years — into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
Reflecting back on his long investing career, Khosla seems to still be passionate about his work and continues to spend large chunks of time on it.
“Look. This is so much fun and so impactful,” he said on the podcast. “I still work easily 80 hours a week, easily.”
As of October, Khosla said he is “making lots of fundamental investments in esoteric areas” instead of AI. Over the last three months, Khosla Ventures has made multi-million dollar bets on startups in the beverage, insurance, and climate tech space, according to Pitchbook.
As for the venture capitalist’s work-life balance, Khosla isn’t the only business leader who toils away for long hours.
In 2018, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk said he worked 120 hours a week running his car company, which he later said felt like “aging five years in one.”
In September, Steve Squeri, the CEO of American Express, told the Financial Times he works 17-hour days, and spends 3 hours each night responding to more than 150 customer emails.
Khosla didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment made through Khosla Ventures.