Khosla Ventures opens its first office outside Silicon Valley, in New York

Keith Rabois has spent most of his 13-year venture capital career associated with Khosla Ventures’ longtime home in Menlo Park, California. 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 on 14th Street in New York and is expected to open this fall. “It’s actually allegedly being built out now,” Rabois said. “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,” Rabois said. 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” — 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 to be closer to his husband, Jacob Helberg, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, and their children, based in Washington, D.C. Asked whether he thinks New York has the density of talent he has spent his career recruiting from in the Bay Area, Rabois said it depends on seniority. At the junior end, he was unequivocal: “Individual contributor level, right out of school, absolutely,” pointing to fintech company Ramp, which he has backed repeatedly, as proof.

Senior technical talent is a different story, he said: “Senior engineers, architect-level — no, I think that’s a challenge.” The bigger pain point, he said, is recruiting senior executives, which he attributed less to supply than to geography and lifestyle: commuting into an in-office culture from outside the city can be difficult for people who can’t afford to live in Manhattan while raising a family. Ramp’s approach, he said, has been to mostly avoid the problem by hiring junior and building up from within rather than recruiting senior leaders.

Khosla’s move puts it in a small but potentially growing club: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz both employ New York-based partners, though in comparatively small numbers relative to the Bay Area. It also comes after a report last month from commercial real estate firm CBRE that found New York had 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, driven largely by finance firms hiring aggressively for AI talent while Bay Area tech employers cut staff.

Why it matters

Khosla’s move suggests even Silicon Valley’s most Sand Hill Road-identified firms now see enough AI-driven finance and junior talent in New York to justify a physical presence there, reinforcing signs that venture capital’s center of gravity is no longer exclusively West Coast.