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 husband, 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.”
But the biggest pain point for companies is talented senior executives, Rabois said, explaining that it has less to do with supply than with geography and lifestyle. “If you have an in-office culture, most of the more senior people that live and reside in the New York area live outside the city, and the commute in and out of the city for an office environment can be very painful,” said Rabois, who grew up in a New York commuter suburb himself. “We were like a 32-minute express train into the city, but many people live two concentric circles further away. 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 don’t hire senior people. 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. “That can work,” he continued. “But if you need a CFO, an SVP of sales, someone who’s got a lot of gravitas and experience, it’s really hard to have them in the office five days a week, because unless they’re very independently wealthy, they really can’t afford to raise a family right in the middle of the city.”
Khosla’s move puts it in a small but, potentially, growing club. 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.
Could it be coincidence? Judging by the room Thursday night, plenty of New Yorkers aren’t ready to believe the headline yet.
“I heard about that study,” said one attendee. “I don’t buy it.”
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