Keith Rabois
speaker
686 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jul 2025
Keith Rabois’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And so anybody who's writing a lot of active angel checks probably has in the back of their mind, one day I might want to be a professional investor. We could talk about the merits or demerits of that, but the goal was pretty clear in my mind. And then at some point, I think you have to make a decision. What do you want to be in life? Venture has long time horizons.
It is a job for life, like 15, 20 years is pretty much what you have to commit to. So you don't really want to start venture when you get too old because 20 years, you'll be like Donald Trump age. Yeah. So I can run for president in 25 years or something.
So COSA was great. I spent six years there. The truthful reason why I left, it's kind of funny given COVID and how history changes. I hated commuting to Sand Hill Road every day. We were one office period in office every single day. And I felt like the future of investing was more in San Francisco. than in Palo Alto at the time. And I just despise sitting in a car 45 minutes each direction.
Turns out, you know, COVID changed everything, how people do their work. Like we're recording this by Zoom. Before COVID, we'd probably all be in the same studio recording a podcast like this. And so, but Vinod and the team was very inflexible about it. And Founders Fund was located in the city. Obviously, I knew Peter since college, as Jason alluded to.
And I decided that, you know, it was better for me. I remember talking to Sam Altman, And I said, am I crazy for changing funds mostly on a commute basis? And Sam said, you're human. And every single study of human happiness is it's inversely correlated to your commute time. It's like, there's nothing wrong with being human. In any event, there are a lot of similarities between FF and KB.
Both are great funds that have put up incredible returns, have funded iconic founders and companies, but they're very different. KB is involved as early as possible, and FF is a momentum investor and is maybe the best on the planet at being a momentum investor. So almost every successful investment of founders fund over eight funds, was invested at $500 million or more entry valuation.
And almost every single investment at KV in eight funds was like the seed or series A investment with very few exceptions ever. And so Anduril and Ramp are the only exceptions at Founders Fund. Wow. And at KV, the only exception would be Stripe, which I led in 2013 or so, which was an order of magnitude higher valuation than any KV initial investment ever.
So KV is much more an input-driven organization. Founders Fund is much more output-driven. And there's great technology companies that are input-driven. Think Amazon, Apple. And there's great technology companies that are output-driven. So you can choose, but certain people are going to be better in some environments and other people are going to thrive in other environments.
I fit in really, really well at KV.
Well, A, I'm very good at it. I think I prefer to invest as early as possible on a keynote deck only. If I meet a founder and there's a keynote deck, there's no product, there's no metrics, that's my sweet spot. Because I also know nobody else in venture is good at that. Nobody else is still active in venture.
It comes down to founder assessment. At the end of the day, the only data point is, is this founder capable of building an iconic company, period? And I prefer to compete when there's no metrics because all the metrics you're going to do is confuse you. That said, there's a lot of investors who are very good once there's product metrics, financial metrics.
And so I can compete with people who are pretty good at what they do. So I'd prefer to go as early as possible. And then secondly, I like company building. I think part of my role is to help the founder increase the amplitude or probability of success. And I enjoy that. At FF, that's very controversial.
He's got to compete with our friend, Kenny Howery.
Hopefully some great destination, I'm sure.
No. I love politics. If you follow my Twitter feed, I pay a lot of attention. I used to be involved in politics before I got into tech. However, what I realized about where I am in my career in tech is if I stop doing what I do, I'm never going to come back. Like technology is rapidly emerging. We're going to talk about all the latest developments this week.
Like you can't take your foot off the gas in the network building parts of venture for two to five years and come back when you're like 50 years old. And so I felt like I'm not ready to give up on venture. I'm in like the prime of my venture career. I'm only 12 years in actually Chamath. So figure five, 10 more years like is the sweet spot.
And so I'd like to see the companies that I was involved in grow up, become public companies, et cetera. And I didn't feel like I could ever come back if I quit. At some point, would I like to get involved in politics? Probably yes, but it's a decade out.
Yeah, it's extremely exciting for him, obviously for the country, I think. which is he's going to be the chief economic officer really for the country. His job is to build foreign policy from the business standpoint, which if you think about it, what's the foundation of power in the world? It's economic success. Why did the United States win World War II?
Because we had an economic engine that could out-compete Germany plus Russia plus Japan. We could build more tanks, blah, blah, blah, blah, etc., And so the economic engine is critical to this administration. Obviously, Trump understands that. We had a great three years under his first administration, as he likes to say, best economy ever before COVID, which may be true.
And we need to rebuild American strength. And Jacob's job is to export that philosophy. And sometimes you can build economic strength through working through foreign affairs. And so that's his main job is to be the primary point person, undersecretary of economics. of economic affairs, and then they've got a bunch ... The Democrats and the woke people added a bunch of other things to the title.
Showing 561–580 of 686 · page 29 of 35
← Previous
Next →