Randy Komisar, KPCB: You Can’t Make Change from the Outside You’ve Got to do it from the Inside

The estimated reading time for this post is 1 seconds

Randy Komisar, Partner Kleiner Perkins spent his youth working in the public sector & nonprofit sector. He was raised in a house where he learnt to buy low & sell high really well: he was a good businessman. He fought all those instincts to try & follow more of a social mission. He had a crisis of faith one day coming home from work after a long arduous day & feeling really frustrated. He realized in that moment that the values that drove him to his social journey was human potential. He really cared about people & he cared about people being able to achieve their dreams & have an impact. He realized that the public sector jobs & nonprofit jobs that he had were actually belying those values. They weren’t supporting them! They were crushing their people, underpaying them, turning them into canon fodder, running these poor kids for 2 to 3 years until they never wanted to think about social mission again & then sending them out to become bank consultants after going to business school. Then bringing in the next group. While they had these lofty goals & fantastic mission statements he realized that it was inconsistent with what he really cared about. So he decided he would take the tools of business he was really good at & apply them to try & make a difference. In order to do that he had to prove he could do it as well as anybody else. If he couldnt compete in that world he didnt have credibility. If he didnt have credibility he can’t make change. You almost have to go into the belly of the beast, do it well & then be a model for how to do it differently. To sit on the outside & throw stones – you can’t make change in something as successful as Wall Street or Corporate America by throwing stones from the outside. You’ve gotta do it better! A lot of what he has done in the past 20 years is serve the God of Schumpeter which is creative destruction. Try to find those businesses that abuse their customers, try to find those businesses that abuse the environment & he tries to attack them with companies & business models that can do it better & profitably & hopefully can serve as role models for how to do it right!

Written by
Pemo Theodore

Pemo Theodore is a Media Publisher and a great people connector. She was Founder Silicon Valley TV which served the San Francisco Bay Area for 10 years! She has produced Silicon Valley Events for Investors & Startups for 10 years. Pemo loves to video interview venture capitalists & founders to engage the human behind the success stories.. She has been Executive Producer of FinTech Silicon Valley for 6 years, organizing twice monthly FinTech talks & panels in San Francisco & Palo Alto and audio podcasts. She believes in learning through a great discussion with experts in the domains. Pemo has a talent to bring the right people together and is an incredible networker. Pemo's events have been seen as supporting Venture Capitalists & Angels in sourcing great deal flow from startups who attend her events. Many founders have received funding through meeting investors at her events. Her favored medium is audio & visual media and she has built up a great body of work of videos of panels & interviews and podcasts in Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. She has lived & worked in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, London, Northern Ireland & Silicon Valley. Bio https://pemo.one

View all articles
Written by Pemo Theodore