Khosla Ventures is opening its first office outside of Menlo Park this fall, locating on 14th Street in New York City—a significant geographic expansion for a firm that has no presence even in San Francisco.
Keith Rabois, an investor at the firm, confirmed the move Thursday at a StrictlyVC event in New York. The key feature of the new office will be an executive briefing center operating four days weekly, designed to bring 10 to 12 portfolio companies together at a time to meet with Fortune 500 corporations.
The model addresses a concrete business need: startups seeking pilots and paying customers. "They get pilots and customers," Rabois said of portfolio companies using the space.
The office announcement follows Rabois's own relocation to the East Coast. He moved to be closer to his husband, Jacob Helberg, who serves as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, and their children in Washington, D.C.
Rabois offered a granular view of New York's talent landscape relative to Silicon Valley. He identified junior technical talent as a genuine strength, citing fintech portfolio company Ramp as proof that startups can build "a critical density of talent from the intern class" in New York.
Senior architects remain scarce in New York—a challenge Rabois acknowledged but contextualized by noting that modern companies may require fewer such individuals than they historically did.
The most acute bottleneck is senior executive talent, driven not by supply but by geography. Many senior professionals in the New York area live outside the city, making regular office attendance costly. Rabois, who grew up in a New York commuter suburb with a 32-minute express train into the city, understands the friction firsthand.
