Keith Rabois on His Return to Khosla Ventures After Leaving for Founders Fund in 2019
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This is a TechCrunch interview about venture capitalist Keith Rabois returning to Khosla Ventures. It has minimal direct relevance to AI safety, though Khosla Ventures is a notable investor in AI companies and the article briefly touches on Sam Altman.
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Importance: 5/100interviewnews
Summary
TechCrunch interviews Keith Rabois about his surprise return to Khosla Ventures after five years at Founders Fund. Rabois explains his original departure was driven by commute concerns and office culture, and his return was prompted by a spontaneous conversation with colleagues. The article covers VC firm dynamics, fund sizing, and Rabois's career trajectory.
Key Points
- •Keith Rabois is returning to Khosla Ventures after leaving in 2019 to join Founders Fund alongside Peter Thiel.
- •His original departure was primarily due to commute dissatisfaction and KV's strong in-person office culture, not personality conflicts.
- •The return was triggered by a casual conversation about starting his own fund, which quickly evolved into dinner with Vinod Khosla.
- •Rabois dismisses fund size differences (FF cutting back vs. KV closing $3.1B) as a factor in his decision.
- •Sam Altman is briefly mentioned as someone Rabois consulted when originally considering leaving KV.
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Earlier today, Forbes reported that venture capitalist, operator and entrepreneur Keith Rabois is returning to Khosla Ventures (KV), the Silicon Valley outfit where he cut his teeth as a full-time VC before joining Founders Fund (FF) in 2019, teaming up with former Stanford classmate Peter Thiel in the process.
The move came as a surprise to industry watchers — including this one. I spoke with Rabois in October about working for Founders Fund in Miami, where he moved during the pandemic and also oversees a startup called OpenStore that he co-founded in 2021.
When we’d talked last, Rabois sounded content where he was. Today, he said the decision to switch teams was very recent, stemming from a discussion with his former Khosla Ventures’ colleague Samir Kaul about the possible merits and pitfalls of starting his own fund; Rabois says that chat quickly turned into dinner with firm founder Vinod Khosla, who separately announced today that he is “ thrilled ” about Rabois’ return.
To learn more, I hopped on a Zoom with Rabois this afternoon; more from that back-and-forth follows, edited lightly for length and clarity.
TC: Congrats on the move, though it was never crystal clear why you left Khosla Ventures in the first place after spending six years there.
KR: The real reason is really simple. I hated coming down from SF to Sand Hill Road, and KV at the time — this obviously was pre-COVID — had a very strong in-person, one-office culture and it was pretty demanding from the top down that people should be in the office at least three or four days. And I just felt that the future of venture was more distributed.
I remember talking to Sam Altman about the pros and cons of leaving KV for Founders Fund, which was in San Francisco; I was like, “Am I crazy to factor in this geographic commute stuff?” And he was like, “Look, every single study on human happiness suggests the single best predictor is inverse correlation to commute time, and you’re human, and you shouldn’t be shy about that.”
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