Sunday Conversation #11: Keith Rabois, Khosla Ventures (Round 4)

Welcome to the 11th Sunday Conversation — on a Monday. While I want to name these videos “Sunday Conversation,” I came up against an opponent — the NFL 😉 Anyway, since I do these only once in a while now, I’ll likely just post them at different times. I hope you understand. In Round 4 with Keith, we revisit Bitcoin (again), we talk about the rest of the Khosla team, YC’s latest Demo Day, the motivation founders need, chatter about parking startups, and much more. Note that full audio of the conversation is at the bottom, via SoundCloud. Also, Keith and I will likely do one more (maybe in November?) and then starting in 2015, we will have a new guest for the year. That person is TBD, but the short list is awesome. Keith is a tough act to follow, no doubt. ♦

Part I, Revisiting Bitcoin And Stellar (7:23). I give Keith an opportunity (again) to revisit his statements on Bitcoin both as a currency and as a protocol, and he discusses a few investments in the space, primarily leveraging the block chain. He also discusses the relationship between Stripe and Stellar, which is worth watching.

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Part II, Identifying Potentially Great Founders (8:28). Rabois goes in-depth about what intangibles he looks for in founders. This is notable because Keith is one of the few investors who will just invest in a team before any product. In this chat, he talks about how to leverage asymmetric information about people, how picking founders can be a bit like scouting athletes, and why it’s important to have a differentiated model in investing.

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Part III, The Rest Of Khosla Ventures (3:28). It dawned on me that aside from Keith and a few conversations with Vinod, I didn’t really know about the rest of KV. Keith gives a brief overview, describing the firm as “irreverant, broad,” and talks about the portfolio in alternative energy, sustainability, and food/ag tech.

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Part IV, “Peak Sports” Or Bubble? (6:15). Rabois explains why real-time sports dominates at aggregating consumer audiences and changing behavior given the passion (or addiction) society places on sports.

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Part V, Thoughts On Y Combinator (2:51). Rabois shares his views on the latest YC Demo Day. (I had written earlier that YC is kind of a like a growing startup.)

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Part VI, (Over) Optimizing In Fundraising (2:16). We discuss the pros and cons of split caps in seed rounds, and why changes in the macro environment don’t matter with respect to startups and early-stage investing.

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Part VII, Parking Startups Frenzy (3:04). I’m obsessed with this lately. It’s a thing people hate, it’s expensive and inefficient, destructive. We look into why it’s happening now.

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A special thanks to the team at Scaffold Labs for sponsoring the Sunday Conversation series on Haywire. Scaffold Labs is a boutique technology advisory firm based in Silicon Valley which designs and builds scientific and predictable talent acquisition programs that helps technology startups hire great people. Scaffold Labs has previously partnered with companies such as Cloudera, Appirio, and Nimble Storage, among others. For more information, please visit www.scaffoldlabs.com