Vinod Khosla and Keith Rabois on Building and Investing in Enduring Companies | Ep. 40

Vinod Khosla and Keith Rabois are Managing Directors at Khosla Ventures. Vinod is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. In 2004, Vinod formed Khosla Ventures to focus on both for-profit and social impact investments that have included OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and many more. Vinod previously co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers, which led to an IPO. He later went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982, serving as its first chairman and CEO. After joining Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers (KPCB), Vinod incubated the idea for Juniper Networks to take on Cisco System’s dominance of the router market. Keith is also currently the CEO of OpenStore and 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. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:58) The working relationship (4:26) Pie chart on what’s discussed (7:11) Ethos of investors today vs yesterday (10:42) Comparing FF and KV (12:46) What makes a great founder (22:56) Alpha in today’s market (30:05) Themes within AI (38:23) AI companies built differently (46:23) Excitement outside of AI (53:12) Politically active on X (58:24) Evolution of political leanings More on Vinod: https://x.com/vkhosla https://www.khoslaventures.com/team/v... More on Keith: https://x.com/rabois https://www.khoslaventures.com/team/k... More on Jack: https://www.altcap.com/ https://x.com/jaltma https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Email: [email protected]