Vinod Khosla on Why Infrastructure Moonshots Need Patient Capital

Greennex sees a contradiction at the heart of climate investing. While the world demands rapid deployment of sustainable infrastructure, the capital behind it often behaves like it’s chasing short-term exits. Climate infrastructure — particularly at the early stage — needs something different: conviction, time, and tolerance for ambiguity.

Few investors embrace this ethos as clearly as Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, one of the earliest and most vocal champions of high-risk, high-impact innovation in deep tech, clean energy, and infrastructure.

In a recent episode of The Twenty Minute VC, Khosla spoke about what it takes to fund transformative technologies before the market even knows it needs them. He didn’t frame infrastructure as static or yield-seeking. Instead, he positioned it as one of the last great domains for technological leapfrogging — if investors can stay in the game long enough to see it work.

Q&A with Vinod Khosla

Q: You’ve been clear that Khosla Ventures isn’t looking for incremental startups. What are you looking for in infrastructure and climate tech?

Vinod Khosla:

We don’t do low-risk, low-return investments. That’s not venture capital — that’s private equity. We’re looking for things that are unlikely to work… but if they do, they completely rewrite the rules of the market. That’s how we think about infrastructure too. It’s not just about decarbonization. It’s about rearchitecting how systems work.

Q: A lot of VCs say they care about climate. What’s different about your approach?

Vinod Khosla:

There’s a difference between being climate-aligned and being willing to fund climate breakthroughs. We’ve backed carbon-negative cement, autonomous grid technologies, next-gen nuclear. Most of these companies were unfundable when we first invested. That’s the point. You have to invest when others don’t yet believe — and be willing to look wrong for a long time.

Q: You’ve talked before about the importance of “patient capital.” What does that mean in practice?

Vinod Khosla:

It means staying in. If you fund a deep-tech company, you don’t get hockey-stick growth in 12 months. You get slow iteration, tech risk, and regulatory noise. But if you stick it out, and you’re right, you own a market no one else can touch. Infrastructure especially needs investors who aren’t afraid of time.

Q: What do you think most investors get wrong when it comes to infrastructure startups?

Vinod Khosla:

They confuse physical scale with financial conservatism. Just because it’s hard to deploy doesn’t mean it can’t deliver returns. In fact, when a startup cracks a physical system — whether it’s in energy or food or waste — the moat is massive. You can’t A/B test a grid. You have to build it with confidence.

Greennex Takeaway

Vinod Khosla’s investment model is a radical counterweight to mainstream venture thinking. While many climate VCs circle safe returns and fast exits, Khosla Ventures continues to underwrite the moonshots — the category creators, the market rewriters, the infrastructural bets that need 7–10 years before they look obvious.

For early-stage infrastructure investing, his approach reframes the risk equation:

• From consensus to contrarian: If the market already agrees, it’s too late.

• From deployment to disruption: Real returns come from rethinking the model, not scaling the same one.

• From capital velocity to capital patience: The biggest impact plays take time — and pay accordingly.

Greennex believes the infrastructure investors of the next decade will look less like real estate financiers, and more like builders of improbable systems. Vinod Khosla has been walking that path for years.

This piece draws from Vinod Khosla’s interview on The Twenty Minute VC podcast, as well as additional commentary from his public writings and speaking engagements. Listen to the full interview here.