Author: Nellie Bowles / Source: New York Times
It sounds simple. For nearly a decade, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has been fighting in court to keep the public off a piece of beach that abuts his property on the Pacific coast. What could be more familiar than another case of rich Californian versus the oceangoing citizenry?
But the first thing you need to understand about this absurd war is that it didn’t begin with Mr. Khosla buying a beach house. Just south of Half Moon Bay, Mr. Khosla bought an entire beach village — forming a limited liability company that owned the land beneath about 47 cottages, and a little shop that at one point sold ice cream, and the only viable path to the sand.
The next things to understand are that he bought the place on what he says was a whim, has never spent a single night there, and regrets it enormously.
And the last thing — given that the case has wound itself to the Supreme Court, and could upend one of California’s most sacred promises to its citizens — is that Mr. Khosla is willing to keep litigating this for the rest of his life and has about $3 billion to spend on it.
Over the years, successive California titans have come up against the vexing fact that the beach cannot be privatized. The State Constitution establishes that property below the mean tide line belongs to the public, and the Coastal Act of 1976 enshrines this, mandating that public access be maximized consistent with (and here is the tricky part) “constitutionally protected rights of private property owners.” Mr. Khosla, through his L.L.C., is being sued by a nonprofit called the Surfrider Foundation over the matter of whether a permit is needed to block the road, and the thrust of his defense is that his property rights are being violated.
If every generation in California gets the beach villain it deserves — if the producer David Geffen’s battle in Malibu at the turn of the century epitomized the last, Hollywood-based era of wealth creation — then Mr. Khosla is the sandy antagonist of the digital age.
Mr. Geffen, humiliated in the press and shamed by his community, eventually gave up his fight. But Mr. Khosla, who by cofounding Sun Microsystems cemented his place in history as an inventor of the commercial internet, seems immune to criticism. Almost since the day in 2008 that he bought the 53-acre hillside known as Martin’s Beach, he has been in court, enduring attacks from multiple parties and crashing through obstacles using every legal tool available. He is driven by an almost manic belief that things must be done right and must be done fair. And somewhere along the line, the State of California triggered him.
Now, by dint of his character, which ticks all the major boxes of the venture capitalist archetype — aggressive, shameless, obsessive and optimistic — Mr. Khosla could disrupt the entire California coastal system. The stakes are both enormous and hilariously low.
If he wins, he could reshape the laws that govern 1,100 miles of shore. And if he loses, all he would be forced to do is apply for a permit to change the hours of operation on a single gate. The legal volleys would undoubtedly continue; Californians do not easily give up a good surf spot. But the last person against whom to wage a war of attrition is Vinod Khosla.
‘If This Hadn’t Ever Started, I’d Be So Happy’
The tea awaits Mr. Khosla on a bright purple leather coaster. The glass walls of the conference room at Khosla Ventures, his investment firm, are the same shade. The banister too, the sofa downstairs, a hose cord outside, all that exact purple.
Mr. Khosla is on time. He’s 63 years old and thin, with close-cropped white hair, and when he pops into his chair he has no interest in small talk. We already know each other. Mr. Khosla is loath to give interviews about Martin’s Beach, and it is certainly not in his best interest to do so, given that I’ve told him for years that he’s making a fool of himself with this beach, a place he doesn’t even like, and that his quest offends me, a native Californian.
But now Mr. Khosla wants to tell his side. He wants me to know that he is right. And where some shy from conflict, Mr. Khosla seeks it, almost destructively. So he invited me to his purple lair.
“A billionaire is a bad word in this country now,” he says, as his tea cools. “And that pains me.”
Mr. Khosla has no public relations team, no one sitting in the corner eyeing us — and in Silicon Valley, there always is. Bad publicity, he says, cannot compel him to do anything he does not want to do.
He’s wearing black jeans and white-soled slip-on walking shoes. He keeps his body open, friendly, leaning forward, sometimes swaying a bit. He holds long eye contact even as he’s moving. He hops out of his chair frequently. Sometimes he feigns ignorance of what all the fuss is about.
“I’ve never claimed people can’t come in from the ocean,” he says, seeming to suggest they swim around a rocky promontory. (“No, not death,” he says, when I call later to clarify. “Boats.”)
Mr. Khosla says he does not even want to triumph. “If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I’d be depressed about it,” he says. “I support the Coastal Act; I don’t want to weaken it by winning. But property rights are even more important.”
He does not want the beach at all, really. He does not swim. For fun, he hikes.
“I mean, look, to be honest, I do wish I’d never bought the property,” Mr. Khosla says. “In the end, I’m going to end up selling it.”
“If this hadn’t ever started, I’d be so happy,” he adds. “But once you’re there in principle, you can’t give up principle.” He frames the struggle in the Silicon Valley patois of contrarianism. “I’d rather do the right hard things now that I’m in,” he says, “than the wrong easy things.”
An Old-School Agitator
Early in his career, with Sun and then Juniper Networks, Mr. Khosla helped build the foundation of personal computing and global connectivity. But in more recent years, he has fashioned a new image as Silicon Valley’s agitator.
He doesn’t golf with the other venture capitalists. He doesn’t go to the Rosewood, their luxury hotel watering hole. He says food slows him down, so most days he fasts till dinner. His version of the inspirational Stanford Business School talk was to tell a class of 400 people that fewer than 5 percent of them were going to do relevant things in the end. He has said repeatedly that most venture capitalists are harmful to companies.
“This is why I get unpopular with other V.C.s,” he says. “Because I tell them they’re not adding any value.”
Mr. Khosla’s bluntness makes it difficult to find people who take his side of the Martin’s Beach battle. Bring his name up around Sand Hill Road, the nexus of venture capital in Menlo Park, Calif., and people grimace. Email the friends he suggested you email, and the responses vary.
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