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To find these investments, Khosla explained some of his operating principles: Don’t trust forecasts. Don’t believe the experts. And invest in companies that have a 90% probability of failure.

Khosla is working on a paper called the Black Swan Thesis of Energy Transformation. Just as Nassim Taleb spelled out in his book The Black Swan, Khosla believes that something improbable, impactful and retrospectively predictable will happen to change the way we use energy. An important ingredient: it needs to scale and meet the Chindia (China and India) price. Cell phones have already been adopted at an incredible scale in India such that there are twice the number of people in India with access to cell phones than people with access to toilets.

Risk is a hugely important element in Khosla’s strategy. “I tell my guys, only bring me tech stuff that has a 90% probability of failure.”  His point: if you have enough companies with a high chance of failing, most will fail but one will success and be the winner. “My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed,” he said. “I don’t mind failing but when I do succeed, it better be worth succeeding.”