Khosla Ventures to open first office outside Sand Hill Road on New York's 14th Street

Khosla Ventures is opening its first office ever outside Sand Hill Road, and it will be in New York. Keith Rabois announced the move at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in New York's West Village on Thursday, according to TechCrunch. The outpost, located on 14th Street, is expected to open this fall.

A first for a firm that stayed in Menlo Park

Rabois, who has spent most of his 13-year venture career tied to the firm's longtime Menlo Park base, was candid about the timeline: construction is supposedly underway, but after years of watching buildouts slip, he described the fall opening date as hazy. He framed the expansion as a genuine break from the firm's habits, noting that Khosla Ventures does not even maintain a San Francisco office.

The space will host a small group of the firm's investors, Rabois among them. Its more distinctive element is what he called an executive briefing center: a venue where roughly 10 to 12 portfolio companies at a time would meet with a Fortune 500 corporation, four days a week. Rabois told attendees that founders embrace the format because it produces pilots and paying customers.

The announcement follows Rabois's own relocation 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, who are based in the Washington, D.C. area, TechCrunch reports.

Talent: abundant at entry level, scarce at the top

Asked whether New York offers the talent density he has long recruited from in the Bay Area, Rabois said the answer depends on seniority.

At the junior end, he was emphatic. For individual contributors straight out of university, the city delivers — he pointed to Ramp, the fintech company he has backed repeatedly, which he said has assembled remarkable depth of talent starting from its intern class.

Senior engineers and architect-level staff are another matter, which he described as a challenge, while adding that companies today may need fewer such people than they historically did.

The hardest gap, in his view, is senior executives — and he attributed it less to supply than to geography and lifestyle. Senior people in the New York region tend to live outside the city, and a daily commute into an office is punishing. Rabois, who grew up in a New York commuter suburb himself, noted his family rode a 32-minute express train in, while many others sit much farther out.

Ramp's response has been to sidestep the problem: the company largely does not hire senior people and has deliberately built from the ground up for the past three years. That can work, Rabois said, until a company needs a CFO or an SVP of sales with real gravitas — and he observed that unless such executives are independently wealthy, raising a family in the middle of Manhattan is rarely affordable.

A small club, and a contested data point

Khosla joins a small but possibly growing set of Bay Area firms with a New York footprint. Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz have both employed New York-based partners for years, though in modest numbers compared with their Bay Area rosters.

The move also lands weeks after commercial real estate firm CBRE reported that New York has narrowly overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area in total tech talent headcount — the first such lead reversal in the 13 years CBRE has tracked the data. The report tied the shift to financial firms hiring aggressively for AI roles while Bay Area tech employers cut staff. TechCrunch noted that at least one attendee at Thursday's event remained skeptical of the finding.

Why it matters

Sand Hill Road has been venture capital's symbolic center for half a century, and Khosla Ventures has been one of its most rooted occupants. A first-ever satellite office — staffed by a partner of Rabois's profile and built around enterprise customer introductions rather than traditional deal sourcing — signals where the firm expects founders and buyers to congregate. It also tracks a broader drift: New York's claim on tech talent is strengthening, AI hiring by financial firms is pulling engineers east, and the scarcest resource of all — seasoned executives — remains scattered across commuter geography that any in-office culture will have to confront.