Keith Rabois has spent most of his 13-year career in venture capital associated with Khosla Ventures’ longtime home in Menlo Park, California. But that’s changing.
Speaking Thursday night at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in New York’s West Village, Rabois confirmed that Khosla Ventures is opening its first-ever office outside Sand Hill Road. The new outpost will be in New York, on 14th Street, and is expected to open this fall.
“It’s actually allegedly being built out now,” said Rabois, who has clearly dealt with a missed construction timeline or two. “We’ll see. This fall opening date is very vague in my mind.”
The move is notable partly because of how unusual it is for Khosla Ventures specifically. “We don’t even have an SF office, so this is a very big step for us,” said Rabois.
The office will house a handful of Khosla investors, Rabois among them, but its more unusual feature is what he called an “executive briefing center.” That will be a space where the firm will bring 10 or 12 portfolio companies at a time to meet with a Fortune 500 company, four days a week.
“The portfolio companies love this,” he told attendees. “They get pilots and customers, and so it’s going to be a very vibrant office because of that.”
The announcement comes months after Rabois himself relocated to the East Coast, moving to be closer to his husb and, Jacob Helberg, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, and their children, who are currently based in Washington, D.C.
That move prompted an obvious question from this editor, which is whether he thinks New York has the density of talent that he has spent his career recruiting from in the Bay Area. He paused, then said it depends on seniority.
At the junior end, Rabois was unequivocal.
“Individual contributor level, right out of school, absolutely,” he said, pointing to Ramp, the fintech company he has backed repeatedly, as proof.
“We’ve been tapping into right-out-of-school graduates and been able to create a critical density of talent from the intern class [onward] that is extraordinary.”
Senior technical talent is a different story. “Senior engineers, architect-level — no, I think that’s a challenge,” he said, adding: “Fortunately, maybe in the modern age, you need less of these people per company than you have historically.”
