Preview: Sunday Conversation With Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois (December 15)

For Sunday Conversation #7, Haywire will host Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures on Sunday evening, December 15. In addition to being an influential, early executive at seminal technology companies like PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square as well as one of the best pure angel investors in the Valley, Rabois is unabashedly candid and public with his thoughts about startups and technology on Twitter. While most investors participate in content marketing via their blog, Rabois puts his thoughts out there clearly through Tweets and Quora answers, sometimes making statements which undermine strongly-held startup beliefs others hold dear. It’s this fearlessness that makes Rabois an interesting actor in the startup world, and in this discussion, we touch upon a number of topics, such as his transition from angel investor to venture capitalist, how one filters for founders (and outliers) in venture capital versus hiring in a company, how he gained enough conviction to invest in team pre-product, a story about a cold tweet that turned into an investment, and his thoughts on AngelList, why Instagram would have beat Facebook, and why valuations today may be headed for a slight market correction. As always, the conversation will be broken into smaller bits. I’ll post the videos next Sunday evening (Dec 15), and the audio will be available on Swell through SoundCloud, as always.