Khosla Ventures to Open First Office Outside Sand Hill Road

Khosla Ventures is opening an office in New York this fall, its first outpost outside Sand Hill Road. Keith Rabois confirmed the plan Thursday night at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in New York’s West Village.

The office will be located on 14th Street and house a handful of Khosla investors, including Rabois. It will also include an “executive briefing center,” where 10 or 12 portfolio companies at a time can meet Fortune 500 companies four days a week. Rabois said the companies would gain pilots and customers from the arrangement.

Rabois said New York has ample junior talent, citing Ramp’s ability to recruit graduates directly from school. He described senior engineers and architect-level staff as harder to find, while calling senior executives the biggest challenge for companies with in-office cultures. Geography, commuting, and the cost of raising a family in the city can make recruitment difficult.

Ramp has mostly avoided that problem by building its workforce from the bottom up and not hiring senior people, a strategy it has followed for the last three years, Rabois said. He added that recruiting executives for five days a week in the office remains difficult.

The move follows Rabois’s relocation to the East Coast and comes as CBRE reports that New York narrowly surpassed the San Francisco Bay Area in total tech talent headcount for the first time in the 13 years it has tracked the data.