This week I enjoyed speaking quickly with Keith Rabois, a Managing Director at Khosla Ventures and the CEO of OpenStore. At Khosla, Keith led the first institutional investments in DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, invested early in Stripe, and co-founded Opendoor. While a General Partner at Founders Fund, he led investments in Ramp, Trade Republic, and Aven, and before that made early personal investments in YouTube, Airbnb, Palantir, Lyft, Udemy, and Eventbrite. Keith started his career in leadership roles at PayPal and LinkedIn before becoming COO of Square.
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We covered:
(0:00) Competing where there isn’t competition
(2:29) Traits of top decile founders
(7:16) Picking people
(9:57) Being a consigliere
(13:54) Decision making
(21:51) Acting when confident
(26:43) Advantages of a large fund
(31:06) Raising in a frothy market
(35:47) Tech and the government
(43:21) Being vocal on politics
(46:47) Valuing board members
(52:24) Former operators vs career investors
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