Khosla Ventures is opening its first office outside Sand Hill Road — a New York outpost on 14th Street that partner Keith Rabois said is expected to open this fall. Rabois confirmed the plan Thursday night at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Manhattan’s West Village, telling attendees the space is “allegedly being built out now,” then adding with a laugh that the opening date is “very vague in my mind.”
The move is striking for a firm that has spent its entire 22-year history within a few miles of Sand Hill Road. “We don’t even have an SF office, so this is a very big step for us,” Rabois said. The New York office will house a handful of investors — Rabois among them — but its centerpiece is what he calls an executive briefing center: a room where the firm will convene 10 or 12 portfolio companies at a time with a single Fortune 500 customer, four days a week. “The portfolio companies love this,” he said. “They get pilots and customers, and so it’s going to be a very vibrant office because of that.”
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A partner who moved east first, an office that followed
The announcement lands roughly a year after Rabois himself relocated to the East Coast, moving to be closer to his husband, Jacob Helberg, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, and their children, who are based in Washington, D.C.
Asked whether New York has the talent density he spent his career recruiting from the Bay Area, Rabois separated the question by seniority. At the junior end he was unequivocal, pointing to Ramp, the fintech he has backed repeatedly. “Individual contributor level, right out of school, absolutely,” he said, describing a critical mass built “from the intern class onward.”
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Senior technical talent was a different answer. “Senior engineers, architect-level — no, I think that’s a challenge,” he said, though he noted that modern AI tooling may mean companies need fewer of those people than they once did.
The harder problem, he argued, is seasoned executives — and it is as much a matter of geography as supply. Many senior people in the New York orbit live in commuter suburbs; Rabois, who grew up in one, said his own train ran an express 32 minutes into the city, but “many people live two concentric circles further away.” For a firm that believes in an in-office culture, that commute is “very challenging.”
Ramp’s answer, per Rabois, has been to sidestep it: “We don’t hire senior people. We just build from the bottom up, ground up. It’s been a very conscious strategy, very intentionally, for the last three years.” It is a blueprint Khosla’s New York investors may end up repeating for the startups they back there.
Why the New York outpost matters beyond one firm
Khosla joins a small club of Bay Area venture firms with New York partners, including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz — both of which have kept New York teams modest relative to their West Coast operations. Khosla’s move is more structural: a physical office rather than a single partner with a Manhattan apartment.
The timing follows a report released last month by commercial real estate firm CBRE, which found that 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 — a shift driven largely by finance firms hiring aggressively for AI roles while Bay Area tech employers cut staff. That study is not universally accepted: “I heard about that study,” one attendee said Thursday night. “I don’t buy it.”
For New York founders, the practical effect is a shorter trip to Menlo Park money and — more importantly — a dedicated venue for enterprise introductions, the thing early-stage startups consistently say they lack. Khosla’s briefing-center format turns office space into a sales channel, which is unusual for a firm of its size and a model worth watching if it works.
What to watch next: whether other Sand Hill Road firms respond with their own East Coast build-outs, and whether Khosla’s full-time partner presence in New York shifts which deals get done and where. Rabois did not offer a firm date, and build-out schedules in Manhattan have a way of slipping.
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