Keith Rabois has spent most of his 13-year career in venture capital associated with Khosla Ventures’ longtime home in Menlo Park, California. 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.
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. 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. 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. When you need to recruit proven executive talent, and you really believe in an in-office culture, [that has] been very challenging.” Ramp’s solution, he said, has been to mostly opt out of that problem entirely.
We just build from the bottom up, ground up. It’s been a very conscious strategy, very intentionally, for the last three years,” he said. Other major Bay Area venture firms have maintained a New York presence for years, though typically a modest one.
For example, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz both employ New York-based partners, if in comparatively small numbers relative to the Bay Area. It also comes on the heels of a report released last month by commercial real estate services firm CBRE that found New York has narrowly overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area in total tech talent headcount for the first time in the 13 years CBRE has tracked the data. This has been driven largely by finance firms hiring aggressively for AI talent while Bay Area tech employers cut staff.
Judging by the room Thursday night, plenty of New Yorkers aren’t ready to believe the headline yet.
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