Randy Komisar is a partner with Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers, one of the largest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. He invests in entrepreneurs and helps them build businesses that can benefit the world. He started meditation and formal Zen practice in 1995. He is married, in his sixties, and is the author of the best-selling book The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living. He tries to bring his Buddhist values to Silicon Valley, a place he describes as “an extreme example” of the challenges people are facing all over the developed world, in terms of the frenzy, anxiety, stress, competitiveness, and uncertainty people are living with.
Randy has lived in Silicon Valley since the early 1980s. He says the world’s tech mecca is now too focused on making money. He sees a lot of arrogance about that money. He thinks good things are being created but believes many products are “not interesting and have no real consequence.”
He thinks entrepreneurs like Elon Musk represent the spirit of a past time when there were big thinkers who wanted to risk everything not to gain wealth but to test their ideas. “I do think there are people like Elon, but find me five others,” he says.
Randy feels that operating in Silicon Valley while trying to follow the three essential elements of Buddhist practice (moral conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom) is like “going into the boxing ring with your hands tied behind your back.” Despite that, he says one can still fight and make a difference: “I wouldn’t do it any other way.”
Teresa Bouza: How did you become interested in Zen?
I was exposed to Eastern philosophy and Zen through the ‘60s culture, with all its civil unrest and experimentation with drugs. I tried meditation practice at the time but was plagued by a busy monkey mind. Then mid-career, when I was forty or so, I felt disillusioned. I was successful but unhappy, which is actually a blessing. If you are unsuccessful and unhappy, you think it’s because you’re unsuccessful. But if you’re successful and unhappy you have to look deeper. So I left my job, reopened to Eastern philosophy, and started my Zen practice. I haven’t missed a day of sitting since. That was over twenty years ago.
What were you doing at the time you were successful but felt unhappy?
I was a serial CEO, and before that an attorney. I had worked at Apple Computer in its first incarnation. But I felt I was missing my life; it was moving so quickly and I was preoccupied with so many things that I found unimportant. My life was running by at such a rapid pace that I had no consciousness or appreciation of it. I was simply doing, I wasn’t living. I had this gnawing sense that there was something bigger than success or accomplishment, though I didn’t know what it was and or how to find it. I remember my first thirty-minute zazen sitting. I had a moment of what I would now call real awakening, and that taste was powerful. I had to keep doing it.
How did that change you? How after these twenty years of Zen practice are you different?
My values and priorities are clearer, I have a natural sense of equilibrium, I know what’s important to me, and I don’t easily lose my way. And more importantly, when I do lose my way, I find my way back pretty quickly.
Please elaborate more about these “values and priorities.”
What I look for in my practice is peace of mind and a path to being the best person I can be. It’s a sense of appreciating life and sharing it with others. An important value for me is non-separation, realizing my connection to everything. I find great satisfaction in sharing that sensibility with others.
Going back just to the period when you decided to start Zen practice and you reinvented yourself. Can you say more about that?
I love to create. I love innovation and I like working with others to build teams that can accomplish the impossible. I strive to construct healthy environments and cultures that can accelerate and amplify success. I have cultivated a role in Silicon Valley called “Virtual CEO,” where I work through others to achieve more than I could on my own. To develop talent, not just businesses. That requires me to give up control, and effectively work through influence alone. Zen practice helped me feel comfortable with that role; not being in control, not owning the results, detached from the ultimate decisions, but at the same time being a curator of excellence. You have to be relatively selfless to follow that model, because it’s not about you—it’s about everything else.
What do you think about Buddhist ideas of renouncing family and wealth?
What’s most powerful for me in Buddhism is what it brings to daily life. The power of the practice is in the streets—in daily life, in the communities where we live. The power is in engagement. My practice is translating what I’ve found in Buddhism into my secular life and expressing that to others through my behavior.
And you’re in a position to make a powerful impact in the world.
Yes, I think that might be right. I’ve been privileged and that brings with it a responsibility to use that privilege for the benefit of others. In Silicon Valley, it’s much easier to merge my practice and my profession than probably anyplace else in the world. Most businesses focus on extracting value—from the competition, from consumers, from other businesses—effectively living from some limited pool. But thankfully, I don’t have to compromise my values or right livelihood by trying to extract value from someone else. I don’t have to take; I can create. I experience abundance. And that’s a privilege.
I don’t want to be judgmental, but I just want to see if you think being a Buddhist and being financially successful is fine? What is your opinion on that?
I don’t think you need to be an ascetic to live as a Buddhist. But I do think that to live right livelihood in the context of the Eightfold Path, you must be mindful of your consumption, what you take from the world and from others. I think of myself as a steward of the value I have created, not the recipient. Otherwise I don’t think I could be successful in living the Eightfold Path.
What challenges in the world are you trying to address?
I’m most attuned to global education, food and nutrition, peace, social justice, and health care. These are the global themes that don’t seem to change much from generation to generation. I gravitate toward people solving big problems that impact all of us. There’s great consternation about how globalization impacts the world today, but there is no escaping our interconnectedness.
How long have you been in Silicon Valley?
Since 1983. I came from the East Coast, the Boston area.
You’ve seen a lot changes here. How do you see Silicon Valley now?
It feels troubled right now. It feels rather dysfunctional to me. It doesn’t seem sustainable in its current form. When I got here, there was a humility to the valley, fueled by optimism. There was a sense that you could create things that would change the world, and there was humbleness that it was just your job, it was what you did, and that you weren’t anything special. That’s all changed.
There seems to be a new sensibility arising here in Silicon Valley about more and more people caring about mindfulness and Buddhism. I wonder if this could be the beginning of something.
Mindfulness is commonly taught as a tool, not a spiritual practice. Young people come to it either because they are looking for relief from what ails them or because they are looking to improve performance: to be smarter, more attuned, more acute. The mindfulness trend feels faddish to me. It doesn’t require much commitment, and as a result I don’t think there’s much staying power to it. But as an opportunity for people to taste awakening as I did the first time, it certainly creates a bigger funnel. I don’t think we will see a huge transformation in sensibility from the mindfulness trend alone, but I do think we will see more people find their way to Zen practice as a result of experimenting with mindfulness.