Uncapped #40 | Vinod Khosla and Keith Rabois from Khosla Ventures

**Keith Rabois** (0:00)
I've invested a lot in AI.

**Vinod Khosla** (0:02)
Yeah, I love your quote about AI and how you'd have done it differently if you hadn't joined the Khosla Ventures.

**Jack Altman** (0:08)
Yeah, I want to hear it.

**Keith Rabois** (0:09)
Before I joined KV, I joined KV literally two years ago, basically this week. Yeah. I had invested in zero, rejoined, yeah, rejoined. And literally had invested in zero AI companies before.

**Jack Altman** (0:21)
Interesting.

**Keith Rabois** (0:21)
Since then, in the last two years, I'd say it's about 70% of my investments are AI. And had I not rejoined KV, I think I would either have missed the whole wave and been completely irrelevant or been reckless.

**Jack Altman** (0:36)
Keith and Vinod, I'm incredibly excited. I got to do this with each of you individually last year. First thing I wanted to do coming into the year was ask two of you to come on together. So thanks for doing it.

**Keith Rabois** (0:44)
Pleasure to be with you.

**Vinod Khosla** (0:45)
Yeah.

**Jack Altman** (0:45)
Obviously, I follow both of you a lot, you know, sort of on online and watching a lot of podcasts you've done and just knowing you over time. And I've never seen you together in this kind of format. And so I was really excited to set this up. One of the first things I want to get into is like how the two of you work together. Because I think like it's rare that you have two people who are both super individually accomplished at a venture firm working side by side. You've done it for many years now and you're obviously very different people, but there's like a lot in common. Like I see you as this like Venn diagram with a lot in the middle, but you also have your own styles. So I guess just to start, like what's the like texture of your day to day working relationship like? Like how do you guys operate together? How do you communicate with each other? Like what does it look like? Just like all the time?

**Vinod Khosla** (1:28)
You want to start?

**Keith Rabois** (1:30)
Well, we first started working together when Vinod joined the Board of Square. So and you know, I learned a lot of things.
Well, we worked together slide, but that was more intermediated through Max. And I would hear about these meetings with Vinod and all these ideas and these grand theories about how we should be running the business. But it wasn't like hands on. I actually worked with another one of our partners, David, slide very directly. He told me my first revenue model was terrible. And so David's a little bit of a quire taste.

**Jack Altman** (1:54)
Sounds like David.

**Keith Rabois** (1:55)
Yeah. He's like, this revenue plan is very mediocre. It was the exact quote, which turned out to be right. But in any event, while he was on the border square, he taught me a lot of things, including the most important precept of the team he builds, the company he builds. So when I was considering being a VC, it was a very natural fit because a lot of the contributions that Vinod had at Square resonated with me. I could see the style of KV and how that translated through my brain and that I felt like it would be a really good parent.

**Jack Altman** (2:22)
What was it like for you? So like, you know, when you're starting to work with Keith, like, could you tell immediately that stylistically it was like what you like? Like, how did you know?

**Vinod Khosla** (2:31)
For me, it's really one thing. It's first principles thinking. If you can do first principles thinking, it's easy to know where you agree and where you disagree. It isn't this hand baby thing.
A, B, and C, then we can debate those three factors. It's worked out very smoothly. It's seldom we grossly disagree. We'll even come down to if facts were true, then this is a good decision or a bad decision.

**Keith Rabois** (3:00)
Which is incredibly helpful. Like, there's one specific investment I remember last summer where I couldn't actually decide what to do is close the line, wasn't quite sure. And then Vinod said the key attributes of the founder that really matter for this are 123 And then our junior colleague, John Chu and I were like, well, on those three dimensions, this founder is AAA. So it made the decision really easy because he was able to isolate the key variables for that particular company.

**Vinod Khosla** (3:23)
Yeah.

**Jack Altman** (3:24)
Do you guys like get into like strong debates over ideas or have you mind melted so hard at this point that you don't even need to as often or, because it's hard for me to imagine either of you shying away from us very like you're obviously both going to say whatever you think all of the time.