OpenAI investor and Indian-American tech billionaire criticizes Silicon Valley’s ‘Founder-Friendly’ culture, says ‘what it really means is…’

Vinod Khosla, an early investor in OpenAI and the founder of Khosla Ventures, has voiced strong criticism of the ‘founder-friendly’ culture in Silicon Valley. Speaking on the Minus One podcast, he argued that the ‘founder-friendly’ culture does more harm than good for entrepreneurs. He also dismissed the notion that being overly accommodating to startup founders leads to success. Instead, he suggested that real venture capital support should involve pushing founders beyond their comfort zones.
“I hate the culture — there’s a number of firms in the Valley who push the idea we are founder-friendly," Khosla said. “What [it] really means, they're never going to challenge you. They want to be popular with you as opposed to help you.”

According to Khosla, effective investors do more than just provide capital. He described his approach as that of a “venture assistant” rather than a venture capitalist, emphasizing the role of guidance and constructive criticism in a startup's journey.
“Great founders, the majority of the time, are incomplete in some dimension,” he stated, adding, “Your job as an investor is to help them with that.”
During the podcast, Khosla also pointed out that 95% of feedback from investors tends to be “hypocritical politeness”—flattering but ultimately unhelpful. He urged founders to seek investors who provide “brutally honest” feedback that challenges their decisions and business strategies.
“Founders should strive for a real, well-intended critique of their strategy, something that challenges them to think,” he said.

Earlier this year, Khosla accused DeepSeek of “ripping off” the technology behind its R1 model. As per Khosla, its DeepSeek chatbot makes the same mistakes as OpenAI’s o1, raising suspicion of intellectual property theft. “One of our startups found Deepseek makes the same mistakes O1 makes, a strong indication the technology was ripped off,” Khosla then said. “It feels like they [DeepSeek] then hacked some code and did some impressive optimizations on top. Most likely, not an effort from scratch,” he added.