20VC Exclusive: Keith Rabois on Rejoining Khosla Ventures

There's certain things about, you know, KB that led to that successful track record in KB four, five, and six that I kind of missed. And then there's several personal things that just were more appealing to me as a human, you know, aside from my professional aspirations and goals and admissions. And so the combination made a lot of sense.

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbing. And this Wednesday we had some of the biggest venture news in a long time. Keith Rabois, legendary Founders Fund investor, who'd backed the likes of Stripe, Fair, Ramp, and others, was leaving Founders Fund to rejoin Vinod Khosla and Koosha Ventures. In this exclusive, we dig into the motivation behind the move, the plans ahead for both Keith and Koosha with their $3 billion in new funds, and then dig into some of his biggest lessons investing from now over 11 years as a professional investor. But before we dive into the show today, there's no shortage of helpful AI tools out there, but using them means switching back and forth between yet another digital tool. What was supposed to simplify your workflow just made it way more complicated. Unless, of course, you're in Notion. In Notion, you can automate tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps, really freeing you up to do the deep work that we all want to do. And that's why Notion is used by over 50% 50% of Fortune 500 companies and teams that use Notion send less emails, cancel more meetings, and reduce spending on tools. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/20vc. And speaking of amazing products like Notion there, I'd like to talk to you about a company called Digits. They're a full service AI account accounting company. And if you're in need of an accountant or looking to switch, there's no better solution than Digits. Starting at just $350 a month, which is less than half of what you'd pay a traditional firm, Digits is the most accurate, most efficient solution on the market. They've developed proprietary AI technology that automates tedious financial tasks and delivers reports at the actual close of the month, not two to three weeks later, as always. And they also allow you to keep track of key metrics like revenue, burn, cashflow and runway in an incredible live dashboard. The best part of all of it, this is vetted and signed off by their in-house CPAs. If you're interested, visit digits.com/20vc to claim your special offer today. That's digits.com/20vc. And finally, travel and expense are never associated with cost savings, but now you can reduce costs up to 30% and actually reward your employees. How? Well, Navan rewards your employees with personal travel credit every time they they save their company money when booking business travel under company policy. Does that sound too good to be true? Well, Navan is so confident you'll move to their game-changing all-in-one travel corporate card and expense super app that they'll give you $250 in personal travel credit just for taking a quick demo. Check them out now at navan.com/20vc. You have now arrived at your destination. Keith, I am so excited for this. My word, you decided to save some of the biggest VC news for the start of the year, so thank Thank you so much for joining me today first.

It's a pleasure to be with you again.

Talk to me, Keith, moving back to Coe. I guess the first question is, why did you decide to make the move back from Founders Fund to Coe again?

Well, you know, in some ways, so I spent six years just so everybody has some context, spent six years from 2013 to 2019 as an MD at Coe Ventures. And we had a really successful run together. KB4, KB5, and KB6 were the funds I was a partner in. And we produced you know, really stellar returns working as a collaboration team between Vinod, Samir, Cole, David Widen and Sven. I never really left in some senses because after I left, I stayed in really significant contact with Vinod, Samir, David particularly. We co-invested almost every quarter together. So Samir invested and led a financing round in the company I run as CEO, Open Store. Samir led the series A for a company that you're familiar with, Trauma. We worked together there. I led a growth round for one of Samir's favorite companies called Ultima, Ultima Genomics. Samir also led an investment round in Varda, Delian's company. I worked very closely with David Weiden on a bunch of companies, including Fair, Bungalow. So I felt like I was actually seeing more of Samir and David than I did when I was at KV for six years in the last five years at Founders Fund. Basically, when I was at KV, I would see them every Monday. for hours at a time. But I didn't really see them Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So we were all go going meeting with Founders, doing one-on-one with Founders, attending board meetings, take pitches, Etc. Whereas over the last five years, actually, I was working with Samir and David basically every single week. The bridging and bonding got stronger over the last five years. And in the six years we were just debating at partner readings, the recombination made a lot of sense. I even spoke at the kv CEO Summit, you know, last May. I've stayed So I'm extremely excited to be able to work with them.

What you said there about kind of the things that you missed that were in inherent in kv4, kv5, and kv6, and then the personal, if we just take those two, what was it that you missed that was kind of central to the success of those funds that you wanted to return?

We had very extensive partner meetings every Monday. for hours at a time. And we vigorously debated new investments as well as the impact and a potential upside of the current portfolio. And these were very unstructured and very vigorous debates, particularly with Vinod and Samir, David, and sometimes Sven. And I felt that they made me a sharper investor, a smarter investor, even though it was ultimately my decision on what to do with the companies that I was championing. , or the companies that I was on the board of, they made my brain work better by listening to them. And occasionally I made the mistake of over listening, but it was always my mistake. I was doing my job better listening to the stereo surround, Vinod's perspective, Samir's perspective, David's perspective. I even carried it with me to FF in my brain for the first year where I could hear their voices every time I was thinking about an investment. I'd hear David whispering about the financials, the calculation of the contribution margin. And I'd hear Samir talking about certain things about the founder. I would definitely think about Vinod talking about the option value upside and the team and we need to get more data science talent in the company. So I was like wandering around with their voices in my head, but I actually think that made me a better investor. And so I missed out. And on the personal side, as you know, KV is significantly branded successfully in the deep tech hardcore technology investing space. And even though that's not my forte and it's not my comparative advantage in life, I felt I was learning something new about the world every week. So for example, after six years of education, I learned a lot about robotics. I learned a lot about the fundamentals of AI. I learned about liquid biopsy to detect cancer. So I learned so much and I felt like I was becoming broader as a person, even if it didn't really translate to the day to day investment decisions I was making. I really missed that. It was like getting a free education in the world of technology every week, learning by going to partner meetings. And so that was a free benefit of doing my job.

You mentioned the Monday partner meetings there and the rigorous debate. That's what we think of with venture partnership discussions. That's not the way that founders fund structures it.

No, founders fund, especially when I joined, was very much people running their own investment strategies. Think of it as like a PM running their own investment strategies. And there's a way of sinking and getting a certain number of critical mass and votes to support investment at different thresholds of dollar figures. But it really wasn't designed for the most part for that kind of analytical rigor. But KB had the conventional paradigmatic old school partner meetings every week. They were quite substantive, quite dense. Even the preparation for those meetings on Sunday, Sunday for me used to be when I was the operating executive at let's say Square or LinkedIn. Sunday would be the day that I would kind of do brainstorming and strategy, pull out my big large notebook and kind of redesign or charts and things like that. Sunday at KV was a full dead day of writing substantive memo emails, reading other people's Dax and analysis. I didn't have time to let my brain wander at all on Sundays because there was so much preparation that that was going into each Monday partner meeting.

You also didn't have time to do Barry's, my friend.

I know I definitely did Barry's. Don't worry about that.

Can I ask that? I obviously spoke to Vinnod before this and he said in particular, no one really runs the firm partner to work closely together, each MD can decide to make an investment, even if the others disagree. How do you think about listening to people at KV without letting it impact your mindset and decision making process negatively to the extent where you could say no to something that could be great?

The way it really works, the way the rubber kind of beats the road is sort of like a certain amount of social capital. So I have a certain amount of social capital within the firm. If I want to do something that's very non standard or very controversial, or not expected, I'm kind of burning and consuming some social capital. Now if I make the right call that gets paid back with interest and, you know, the next time I want to make a cultural decision, it's actually even easier. But Vinod's right in the sense of there were times at KV where I wanted to do X, Y, or Z in my six years there, and there was some critical feedback and maybe I listened to it, but it was always my decision to listen to it. So there are times that maybe I regret me like actually listening to it. they should have, you know, had more confidence and more conviction. And then there's times actually counterintuitively, and people sometimes forget this, there are times that I would actually champion an investment, champion a company, and the reaction afterwards would not be critical or be more enthusiastic than even I was. The reaction in the room was like, do not lose this investment. It doesn't matter if you have to, you know, invest at a higher valuation than we normally typically would. This is actually really good. So sometimes it actually cut the other way. It wasn't just like critical, like, what the hell are you thinking? It was like, oh, no, no, this, this one's really special. You're right. And double down right now. Like, sign that term sheet today. I remember when we were considering the first institutional investment in Max Selections company at a firm. And their uniform reaction was, Keith, make this happen. And then, so, you know, then the only question was, you know, Max and I had to work out, like, what a fair valuation would be. But the reaction was like that, war, when I brought in, open door, we're incorporating open door. and Eric came in to present, people were familiar and people knew that I wanted to incubate it. So there was a default kind of leaning in. But afterwards, everybody was like, this is a no brainer. We absolutely should do this. Close this.

Is there an example where they persuaded you not to and you regret it?

I knew that I was on the edge of consensus and I was going to burn a lot of social capital mostly on should I increase the valuation of a particular offer? So it wasn't like, should we proceed or not? It was like these terms feel rich, you know, and make sure the risk rewards there. So for example, I can think of two or three where I knew that I was at the edge of the valuation range of what coastal ventures would typically accept. And there was enough criticism and concerns about the company that really was taking a lot of liberties to go further. And once in a while I did decide to pay whatever the valuation was required. And once in a while I went out. One of the examples and probably the one I'd lose most sleep about after almost 11 years being a VC is Rickling. So Rickling came in, Parker came in and we gave a term sheet, obviously controversial at the time for the seed and Gary Tan initialized also gave a term sheet. And at the time there was about a $10 million gap I probably offered 5 to 25 plus or minus for memory. And I think Gary was at like 35. And Parker really wanted me to increase the offer. And I felt like there was just enough consensus to get the offer out that if I really moved the needle, that I might be burning a lot more capital than I thought I should. And obviously it's turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for me. Fortunately, it's worked out really well for Parker, so, you know, he probably doesn't care very much. And then there was, there's a moment also where I had already, like, locked in a term sheet to lead the series seed for Robinhood to Lane at 20 post, which was pretty expensive, but they came back and really wanted me to join the board in the seed round. And this was in maybe my second year at KV. So I asked, you know, Vinod and Samir at the partner meeting, can I join the board? And the uniform reaction was like, no way you can't be joining like all these boards of seed, like that just won't work. So we decided to part ways very friendly. You know, I just said, I can't join the board and they wanted to find the other investors, obviously another sort of unmitigated disaster. But, you know, they were right for the most part that you cannot be an institutional investor in a multi stage fund constantly joining boards at seed. So it'd be very judicious. So the feedback wasn't wrong. It was just wrong as applied to that company. It was totally up to me. I would have joined the board. Interestingly enough, when the same thing happened four years later, I met another company that I had strong conviction about, and I was going to lead the seed. This company called Fair. Fair came back and said, Max said to me, I talked with my co-founders and we'll say yes, but you have to join the board. And having learned and been burned by the Robinhood experience, I never really told my partners that I was going to join the board. I just said yes. They're probably happy with me now, but I probably kept that a little quiet for about a year.

So I want to unpack a couple of elements that you said about price sensitivity, especially with Rippling 35 versus 25. Which firm would you say is more price sensitive? KV or Founders Fund? And just pause. Is it even good to be price sensitive?

Historically, I'd say KV has been more price disciplined than Founders Fund, but I think Founders Fund is actually more price sensitive. and more discipline than most people give them credit for. Like, I actually noticed this when I joined the discipline internally was much stronger than I thought from afar, you know, watching the firm. KB has historically been maybe the most price disciplined of any large institutional fund. I think they have, have relaxed out of it. When I was at Founders Fund, I actually saw some term sheets that KB extended. I was looking back and say, wow, where that's probably like that's happened would have happened my day. But I think of the major firms, maybe KB and Founders Fund may be the two most disciplined. I think Sequoia has also historically been very price disciplined to their credit. They've also relaxed that a bit, I think very top down and consciously, but I think historically those three might be the most price disciplined. Interestingly enough, the more important topic is should you be, should you care, how much should you care, etc. and I still remember this episode you recorded with Peter Fenton when Peter said, price is always a trap. You know, this was early in my career, but maybe it even be recorded before I started as VC. But I listened to it, and I didn't totally Grok it when I listened to that episode that you recorded with Peter over the Arc of my 11 years. The wisdom behind Peter is Insight has stuck with me even more and more. especially for what I do, which is primarily seed in series a. When Peter, when Fendon was saying the price is always a trap, that's really an excuse for not having conviction. That's basically translated your whole episode with him. The short version of that is he's mostly right that when I'm seed round or a series a round, when you're walking away at price, it is a bit of lack of conviction, and you really should be looking in the mirror and say, why don't I have conviction? because if you call, if you make the right call at seed, you're going to wind up in a pretty good place. If that company is iconic. And even at a, if you make the right call at almost any price, you're going to be pretty happy at price series B. That's not true. At series B, you could pick a good company and invest in it, but you pay the wrong price. The risk reward is totally out of the, totally out of whack. You may not even make real money, but I'm primarily leading seed, the first institutional round in companies is you know, my goal in life is to be the first institutional investor. So I paid a relatively high price for fail. Like 20 million post was actually higher than 22, but I haven't looked back since then.

I totally agree with you. Listen, if it all goes plan, you won't regret it. But when you actually look back at portfolios and see average entry price being 12 and a half and then five years later, average entry price being 25 or 30, you've just halved your returns.

Well, yeah. So people have forgotten this. And, you know, one thing that Peter Thiel is really disciplined about is he totally understands this, these Dynamics really well and is always pointing this out internally, sometimes externally, that your returns are not going to be the same as what you expect when that's what's going on in the macro environment. And so you can't follow the same strategy with a different kind of entry price on average at all. But, you know, once in a while, nobody went astray. So when I invested in the ramp, the seed round, which obviously has proven to be a very good investment. The pricing on that was extraordinarily high for a seed round.

What was the price?

Probably it might have been 40 posts, but it was more than 30.

Wow. And respectfully, I remember Eric did Powerhouse before, but it wasn't a hugely unicorn founder.

No, you know, in fact it was quite controversial. I sometimes think that it might have been the most courageous investment I made as a VC. because everybody was so addicted to this brass, you know, nonsense. And, you know, typically not the best strategy to fast follow, you know, another startup that has traction. But I knew. I knew that space cold. I knew exactly what brex was going to do wrong. And I knew that if we could find the right Founders, we could absolutely dominate. And that's proven to be the case. Ramp is absolutely going to be the winner. Probably will be two, three, four, five.

Ten times more valuable. so when you invest at seed state, do you and you're concerned about price? Do you ask yourself, do I really have enough conviction?

I'm trying. I try to do that. I really try to apply Peter fenton's, you know, sort of adage now much more frequently. I do think about, though, capitalization over time. You do have to take into account what kind of company is this? How much capital is it going to require to achieve certain Milestones? And, you know, it depends on what the company is aspiring to do. because if your capitalization is going to require so much and your first entry price is so high, that company may not be set up for success and that may decrease the overall probability of being successful, which is a material problem. So in certain variables, like there may be a step functions that you have to achieve as opposed to a kind of a continuous curve of progress. And in those step function ones, if you slightly miss in your valuation entry price is too high, that company's dead. And that's a real problem.

You said there about kind of dilution concerns and sensitivity. The way you protect against that is obviously by continuing to invest. KV obviously have continuous funds now. We'll get into the separate structures. I don't like reserves, Keith. And I don't like reserves. And please educate me, because it's traction investing. If I had done reserves, I would have put money into Hoppin' Clubhouse. That would not have been a good set of... So, How do you think about that and bluntly proactively allocating ahead of time, especially when you don't know what's coming?

There's like three or four things in venture that nobody knew, nobody does super well, honestly. It's much more art than science. How to do reserves is one of those topics. At K& D, there is a more disciplined, let's say, approach to reserves. That doesn't mean better, by the way, just it is more top down. Like what are our reserves? How much are we going to allocate to company X, Y, and Z? how much total allocations do we have? Should we shape this one, increase this one, et cetera? Whereas at Founders Fund, there's no explicitly a policy of not reserving and every investment decision is on an ad hoc case by case basis. And there's strong merits to that actually, even though most of my investment style may be closer to KB, I think I'm closer to the Founders Fund style of you're probably better off not reserving and then making ad hoc decisions. based upon the quality of that particular opportunity, which includes who's the investor, what's the traction of the company, what do we believe about the founder, what do we learn about the founder's abilities and traits, and then what's the valuation?

Do you worry that with the second model, being founders fund's model, when founders say, hey, what's your approach to reinvesting? And you say, it's a dogfight for it. You've got to prove yourself and it's that to be earned. It's not as enticing and saying, oh, we allocate X amount of reserves when we invest.

I worry that- I think in theory, there might have been some truth to that, but in practice, just observing founders before I joined, working there five years, I never saw it be- you never translated into a practical problem with a founder.

Going back to SEED, but before we kind of move away, you said about kind of risk and Series B being in a challenging place in terms of risk and not being paid for it. I don't think you're paid for the.

Risks that we take at SEED, Keith. We're not, we're not at all. But the outliers are, I think the seed range of let's assume a seed range these days is, I don't know, 8 million post to 20, probably lower on that spectrum now.

I still see 5 on 25 daily with Andrew.

Oh God, yeah. So those I would not be doing absolute extraordinary reasons. So one of the metaphors I learned, I forget who actually taught me this, it might have been someone at KV, but Scott Nolan at Founders Fund also applies this. It's basically, it's like playing poker and every round is like a card. You're being dealt and there's different informational content and there's a different price point for that round. So what's the information you get from that new card? And then what's the price? 525 from scratch. That card is very expensive for a certain amount of informational content. So that's probably a very rare opportunity that you want to say yes to. Now, I will say it's not like a whole year. No, I've definitely done that. As I said, I gave a term sheet to Rippling with those terms exactly. So I will do it, but you want to know why you're doing it because that card price point is not smart, generally speaking. The question is how is that five calculated? Is the founder reverse engineering from a valuation expectation, which in that case I'm usually going to barf, or is five the correct dose to achieve certain accomplishments that will unlock the next round? And there are some times, some markets where really sub five, you can't achieve those milestones. So you're kind of fooling yourself. You can give a term sheet at two or three, you know, at a lower valuation, but the company's not going to achieve what it needs to achieve.

You said that's what they need. Truth be told, we're seeing a lot of rounds that are 15 to 30, 40 even, especially in kind of AI with pedigreed founders. What do you make of those? Because when we see those, you probably don't need 15, 20, 30 to get started. Mid journey is a bootstrap company. How do you feel about those?

One of the most important pieces of feedback a really good VC can give a founder is what do you need to achieve where the rest of the world will appreciate you? So that capital is unlocked. Some point capital will be easy to raise. But one of the things I try to do is calibrate that. right away. Okay, for this kind of company with this team, if we can achieve two of the following three things, people are going to appreciate us, whether it's my firm or someone else's firm, let's dial in how much time and how much money is it going to take to get there. And let's make sure you have the sufficient resource. It's a little bit like the driving the car metaphor of, like, there's some destination you need to get to, certain amount of fuel that's required to get to that destination, but I don't want to over fuel you. That doesn't work. It's like a plane when you over fuel, you're just , like bogging the plane down and it sort of creates more resistance. So for example, let's talk about Open Door. We raised 10 on the seed for Open Door. That was actually the correct dose. Buying homes, you really can't prove that you can buy cohorts of homes accurately, like priced accurately and resold properly for less than about 10 million. Maybe you can make it eight, but eight to 12. Otherwise it's not, it's really not worth trying for less than 10. Like you're fooling yourself. So 10 million was the proper sized round. for that particular shibboleth goal.

Do you think that Series A is the best place to be investing today?

I think the risk reward can be really strong. It's hyper competitive. So one of the other lessons you kind of take from zero to one and is globally true is you want to be careful about like hyper competition. My belief is I like to lead seed rounds. The reason why I like to lead seed rounds is they're less competitive, first of all. because what I'm working with typically is a keynote deck in a team. Most investors are terrified of assessing a team in a keynote deck and handing over 1-2-3-4-5, you know, a million dollars. I actually think that's my comparative advantage is doing that. So I want to do it as often as possible. Secondarily, because I believe I can have some impact in the company, the earlier I get involved, the less I inherit things that might have been avoidable. You know, I've used this metaphor with you about concrete. early stage companies, it's kind of like liquid concrete. It's very malleable and then solidifies post series B. It's totally solidified. And if you want to change something, you know, that's concrete, you have to mold this jackhammer, which is incredibly painful, expensive, noisy. So I don't want to be manipulating solidified concrete. I want it while it's liquid and malleable. So the earlier I can get involved, the better. That's where I want to be competing. Series A, the risk reward, generally speaking, can be pretty strong. but you're competing with other people who are very good at what they do. Benchmark's pretty good at what they do. Sequoia has been historically very good at what they do. You're running right down the middle of some of the best investors on the planet versus seed, you're not, and series.

B, maybe you're not. Do you think that still though, when you see the multi-stage firms move so aggressively into seed, and then you look at a lot of the partners who led $20 million series A checks in years prior go, oh, I'm underwater with ball commitments. I need to fire sale a load of shit companies. I don't want to do new deals. I almost think A is better because they're just saying to all the young ones, go do seed.

I think when you get, I do think a long funds get nervous in risk of burst and let these go when the market's not particularly attractive. But I think the really best investors, which are really the people I compete with, don't do that. The world of venture is more stratified that tier two investors are very different than tier one. And I think this is true on the series A dimension. You don't want to pull your foot off the gas in series A if you're a really strong investor. but the natural reaction of most firms and most partnerships is to do that, which is generally a mistake. I think in series A, if you think about the pricing, let's assume that the median valuation for seed round is between 10 and 20 these days. And let's say a series A, it's like 30-40, maybe 50. I agree with you that I'd rather pay 30-40 for all the learnings versus 15 to 20 for no learnings often, but then I have to compete with more people. Like, so, you know, one of the other things I pointed out is in about 11 years of doing this, I think there's somewhere between five or six or so term sheets I've extended where I didn't close them. Like, I lost to somebody. And the reality is that four of the six or two-thirds of them are in the same or to the same people. It's like it looks like it's a very hyper competitive world, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, I'm competing with like one or two other people. And so if I wait to the series A, I know that there's a decent chance that these people have taste, like my taste, and they're actually pretty good at what they do and they can close, they know how to close and they have, you know, good references, all those things. So if I go seed, most of these people do not love to do seed and I can get involved before they figure out what the hell is going on. That's much better for me, even if I have to pay a slightly disproportionate skewed price. to do that.

Keith, you know, I love you and think the world of you. You're a competitive. Why didn't you just beat them at a? Like, have you must reflect?

Well, I tried, but, like, you're. Even if you're great at what you do, you're gonna win. Call it 50, 60, 70. You're not going to close 100 at seed. I can probably close a hundred percent of the things I want to invest in if I want to. There's no way that go head to head with the top two or three other investors at series a. You're gonna have a hundred percent win rate period.

We mentioned seed there being less competitive but harder and people shying away. We mentioned A being the best risk reward. Growth is pretty dead, as I think we're both seeing. Do we think it'll stay that way? And are you excited to be more active in growth or not?

I think that growth is pretty broken. I think most growth funds were pretty bad at what they were doing.

Why were they bad? Because they were just price insensitive.

Chasing momentum, not really understanding fundamental company building, thinking spreadsheets dictate results. you know, not understanding the inputs versus the outputs that these companies are built by people, not by math. At the end of the day, so I think most growth funds are either dead or dying. So I think there's a zone there that's pretty non-competitive is not what I do for a living. You know, you have to figure out what your comparative advantage is in life. And I don't think growth investing is mine. I've made a few growth Investments over the last three years and three or four years. Unfortunately, they worked out, but I'm extremely careful. if I'm leading a growth route, then I think I have some alpha, some comparative advantage. Like, so for example, back in my KB days, one of the better investments I made was co-leading the series C for Stripe. You know, I worked at PayPal, Square, I understood financial services pretty well. There's a reason why I was dialed into that price, being willing and comfortable investing at that price. At the time at KB, when we invested in Stripe series C, it was an order of magnitude more expensive. than the entry price for any investment in the history of KV. Back to the point though about the partner meetings being sometimes counterintuitive. One of the things that was most valuable was Samir was pushing me. He's like, you should do this. And then David said to me, look, I know this is not normally my style to be like price insensitive, but you need to be able to make this call. Like you should be better situated to make this call than anybody else on the planet. Just decide, don't worry about what my normal feedback is. So Samir and David being very enthusiastic that I should lead in if I wanted to. gave me more courage and more conviction because this was pretty early in my career. It's either the first or second year there. So that's why sometimes the partner meeting can be exciting and, like, give you more conviction and confidence. I don't know that I would have proceeded had they been more cynical, actually, because it was so early in my trajectory. But they were like, nope, this is where, this is what we hired you to do. This is the area you should know better. Make a call translating stock. That's fine. It could be very successful in growth. because I think most other growth funds are basically not able to compete. And Founders Fund has great talent in the growth side.

When I put on Twitter that we were doing this show, I got a load of DMs and they were saying, $3 billion in KV fund. How can you make money on a fund that size? So I'd love to put that to you so you can kind of break that down and debunk that.

Properly sizing a venture fund is one of these other complicated arts in the industry. I think the key is there's a couple of inputs. One is what stage are you investing in? How many opportunities are likely to be? And then see what's the team composition, your internal team. So let's walk through this. So KD, although that's a sounds like a big number, 415 million of that is for seed investing. 1.5 billion or so is for venture and only about eight or 900 million is for growth. So as a firm in a set of partners that really enjoy seed investing, that's the node right down the middle, Samir right down the middle of what he likes to do, probably my comparative advantage in life. You have three to five partners that all really strongly like to lead seed rounds. So $400 million isn't unreasonable at all for a seed fund, a high conviction, high ownership seed fund. Then you look at the venture side, okay, you have 1.5 billion. if you're really doubling down proratas and reinvesting or leading A's in the portfolio of seed, you can consume a decent amount of that. And let's say you compete in the external world for another half of it. It's not that far off the sizing when you have five MDs plus a team of partners like Nikita and Alex Morgan, who are really good at what they do. You could see with like seven, eight kind of lead investors, a $1.5 billion venture fund being moderately appropriately sized actually. You have to combine all these and triangulate a bit.

When you look at 400 though, Keith, take out fees, we're at 320 investable. So we can do a hundred checks and what are they? 3.2.

Yeah, well, I think you probably want to be a little less than a hundred. A hundred might be a little bit much to make a little bit more dollars per, but...

But if we were doing reserves to initial, you could do 50 and still have a one to one. 50 is a pretty diverse portfolio.

That's what you want. I mean, the guidance I learned I don't know if this is as rigorous as many things, but lawfully a good portfolio for a fund should be about 50, 30 to 50. So you're in the zone of like what most people would advise. You're certainly not outside of it, but it does come down to how many barrels are shooting through. Like I have this metaphor, he's company building about barrels and ammunition. Venture works that way too. How many people are going to be high quality investors? Do you have at any given time in a fund? It's usually a smaller number than you think, almost like a micro power law within a power law. And so if you have two, three, four, five, six quality investors, you can size the fund significantly greater than if you have two or three. Ultimately, your fund size does affect your strategy or should. It has to be a recursive dialogue. So founders fund, which has more total assets under management, let's say, or more current funds are probably closer to four bill than three. The allocation is very different though. It's 900 million or so in FF eight. and about 3.2 billion, I think, in the growth fund growth too. It's a different weighting. So you need to have a strategy that's coherent around the people, the team, and the weighting of your fund sizes.

When we spoke last time and I said, what would you change about Founders Fund? You said we could be younger. Could Coe Slater be younger? Would the same apply here?

You know, good question. I don't know yet. The four people that are most senior at or MDs, you know, the official MDs at KV, the same people I worked with, when I was there. I haven't worked with most of the people that are not at the partner level at KV. I have worked with Nikita before. I mean, that's one of the reasons I recruited them. I've worked closely with Alex Morgan, lots of interesting dialogues and debates. So I know those two pretty well. The rest of the team, I don't know very well, so I shouldn't really apply yet.

What do you think KV can learn from Founders Fund?

I think the rigor around growth investing, I actually, I learned this personally, I think FF is very strong at figuring out how to value a growth stage opportunity. And that translates the reason why I care.

What makes them good at it? Whether growth investors we mentioned before sucked.

That's a great question, actually. And I'm not sure I know the answer other than just watching who produces successful Investments or not. But the one thing that was most relevant to me to learn is you have to make all these pro rata decisions. in your best companies. So, you know, I say I need a seed for DoorDash and the series A, probably that's easy, not difficult. But then C, D, E, you know, at different prices are open door, 400 million, 500 million, 600 million. Do you do these rounds? How do you think about them? And I don't think back in my day at KB, that we had a lot of analytical rigor to those late stage, prorata decisions. Whereas the founders fund, the growth team is very dialed in. to evaluating those opportunities. And so I felt like I learned a lot about how they do their work that would make me sharper about my own Prorata decisions on the companies I'm most involved with. Peter Thiel often says about the decision.

Not to do, I think the B of Facebook or the A of Facebook being his most costly mistake.

Yeah, I mean, it's easy to make a mistake. I actually think that, you know, I have my own coherent version of this. I actually, you know, have my own set of views about whether or not to do Prorata as applied to the companies I'm involved in. But I learned a lot from working with Napoleon and his team at Founders Fund.

I spoke to Mike, but you're like, how the fuck did you speak to so many people before this show? How we agreed it last night? But I also spoke to Mike at Truba and he asked the question, why would founders prefer working with one firm versus another?

Yeah, well, I think it's a matchmaking exercise. At the end of the day, the right founder paired with the right investor increases the probabilities of success for the company. in my view. And so every founder who's successful, every founder who has a shot of being really successful is different. Like Mike is definitely different than other founders. Mike and Jack Dorsey, for example, very, very different. Both extreme going to be extremely successful. The correct pairing for different founders is who's complementary to you? Who can you work with and add value but be on the same page with? So for example, Mike has very strong views on culture, how to run a company, how to build a company. being in line with his views allows me to be more effective because when I'm channeling feedback, we're not debating first principles ever. But once in a while, I may see something or, you know, in this cartoonish mirror, I can play back to him his decisions or what I see and say, Hey, just applying your own principles, your own philosophy, does this make sense versus debating whether his philosophy is correct. He would be a horrible pairing with someone who doesn't agree with his philosophy. they would just have like constant thrashes. It would be useless. Or so let's take another example, Jack. Jack is very design driven and he wanted to build Square in a design driven culture, which is, you know, let's say, jargonistically like Apple asked. Most of them know what that really means, but like fundamentally a design driven culture. Perry Jack was someone who doesn't appreciate design would be an unmitigated disaster. Like the investment in a design, the quality of design, the thoughtfulness, the crafting, the perfectionism across so many different dimensions would just be almost unfathomable to someone who grew up in a bottom up empirical, you know, everything's not qualifying, AB testing. So you have to be careful. That's why I think speed dating during COVID was a disaster for everybody. It wasn't good for founders to do Zoom based investing. It wasn't good for investors. And so I think it's healthier to take your time as a founder and find someone who can be insightful, but is directionally aligned with your ambition, with your prioritization. That's when you get a match that really works for like a decade.

Do you think FF and KV have the same type of founder? When I look at like Mike, he fits the founder mold for what I think a founders fund founder would be. Run through walls, very opinionated, very hard, and shares a lot of traits with a lot of other FF founders I know. Do you think KV has an archetype like that?

Yeah, I actually do. I mean, I think one of the reasons why you see such a high portfolio overlap is like the proof sign of the break. KV and FF have almost exactly the same ownership in Tramba. I believe in open store, we have the same preferred ownership. KV and FF, I think in Aven, FF and KV have very similar ownerships. A lot of people at KV are founder driven. I wouldn't say that's the only criteria at KV. Sometimes KB can be technology driven, innovation driven, whereas FF is mostly founder driven. But the Venn diagram overlap of a successful founder is pretty high, which is why the portfolio overlap, H sleep, you know, more portfolio overlap, Varda, more portfolio overlap, high portfolio overlap. So obviously the criteria is clearly similar because you're seeing the manifestation of that in the portfolios.

When you were thinking about just this option. Always other options come to mind. Did you consider other options?

Not with a pre-existing fund. I felt that at KBD, I knew why we were successful. We were successful. I knew why, or at least I think I know why. And I thought that that would be helpful. I think every other fund, the grass may be a little bit greener kind of problem of like they have their own bodies. There's more mess somewhere else. Don't want to fix other people's messes kind of like lesson. you know, over the years, and I'd say over the 15-year time rise and last 15 years of my life, I have occasionally thought about, should I start a fund? There's definitely a lot of drag coefficient associated with that that I was not particularly excited with, which is why sort of my definition. I haven't started a fund. I did look at it very seriously in 2010 or so, in 2013 before joining KB. I had a pretty specific idea about a fund. But for lots of reasons, what I like to do is most importantly find undiscovered founders, give them the opportunity to be successful with advice, counsel and capital, and then work with those founders and help them shift the probabilities of success so that they can achieve the ambitions for their company. That's what I want to do. Everything else is drag coefficient to me.

Why did you not think you could get rid of the drag coefficient? I was the same.

I don't think you can get rid of the drag coefficient. certainly from scratch. I mean, they say the first six months, let's say heavy drag coefficient, can you later reduce it's like a high fixed cost. The way one very successful founder described it to me, as I was asking for a little bit advice, the fixed cost is very high. And once you get over the fixed cost, maybe the marginal cost is more tolerable. But that first fixed cost is really painful. And I like what I do. And the reason why I work is I really enjoy meeting these founders. Discovering these people and saying, yeah, this person's got a shot. And they're working with them in helping unlock their brain once in a while and watching their eyes light up. That's what motivates me every day.

Do you ever think about money?

No, not really, honestly.

This was another question that I have, which is you have more cash than Rockefeller. So what motivates you today?

One of my good friends who I work with had his 30th birthday recently. And at the dinner for his 30th birthday, the question the question at the table is, what do you want people to kind of say it? You're eulogy, you know, eulogy, somewhat morbid, but whatever. Um, and I thought about it and it occurred to me, what I want to say, what I want people to say is, I can't imagine my life without Keith in it. You know, like that had that much impact in some ways and there's different ways you can have impact, obviously. But I was like, fundamentally, I really want to have impacted people's lives and that they really think about it, that it was that impactful, that their life would have been completely different. And so this is a business version of that, you know, the entrepreneur's version of that.

You've definitely had a huge impact on Dallian's life. How did Dallian take it?

Well, you should ask him. I shouldn't speak for him. Yeah, I think, you can ask him his opinion on lots of things. He's very strong-willed and very opinionated.

He certainly is opinionated. Can I ask, I spoke to Samir before and he said, what does it take for an investor and a firm to win today after 10 years of Bull Run?

First of all, I said this several years ago on your 20-minute DC. You have to have a comparative advantage, period. And you need to isolate it for you and your fund. Like, why me and why us? So, for example, like our mutual friend, Mike, when he meets a new investor, he always asks them this question. He loves doing this. He's great at it. Why should I top to your founder, like me? take your money and you need to have a sharp differentiated answer to be successful. And the more differentiated, the more true that is, the better. And I think most investors either don't have that answer or forget. And so you don't want to be a commodity. You need to be special and you need to be treated special. You need to have, you know, either difference, like comparative advantage somewhere. I remember I posted publicly my investment criteria probably in 2017 and, you know, on Twitter. and the last one that confused a lot of people was the last question was, do I have a comparative advantage? And I take that pretty damn seriously. Like, why me? Why am I investing in this company? Because the general returns in Venture are not strong at all. The general returns in 75 80. And if you normalize against, like, the two hot periods of the last 50 years, like 1996-99 and take out, like, 2019 and 21, the returns are horrific, except in maybe the top two to five, maybe 10% of venture. If you don't have a strong answer to why you have a comparative advantage, you're going to regress to the middle of the bell curve. In the middle of the bell curve returns are just not acceptable, period. And so I always take that very, very, very seriously. It will often pass if I can't look in the mirror and say, this is why I've been very bad. So, like, we talked about a couple companies. Fair. The CEO and COO worked for me. I should be able to assess their abilities better than anybody else on the planet, period. And if I can't do that, I don't know why I'd be a VC. Stripe, we talked about, you know, I helped build PayPal. I ran a large fraction of Square. I need to be able to understand Stripe pretty much pretty damn well, or it shouldn't be a VC. You know, Mike was my best friend, is and was my best friend before he started the company. I definitely knew the traits that would lead to the way he runs his company, the intentional culture, the tenacity, the resourcefulness. that was all there from maybe the first day I met him.

What if you're not the best for it, but you know it is incredible? Are you not going to do that deal?

Great question. I think at a fund, the first instinct is do I have a partner who would be a really good pairing? And at KV, we did do this. I would consciously think, oh, David Widing may be a really good partner for this specific, both market and founder, or Samir might be. There are times when Samir would be a much better partner, for example, than I would be to a specific founder. It depends again, or Vinod, Vinod Mehta, or Senn, it really depends what the company's doing and the founder skill set. So the first instinct would be, okay, I don't really feel I have a comparative advantage, but our fund may or someone else at the fund may. Let's introduce them and see if that kind of partnership can work really well. So this does work. Now, the answer may be within our fund, whether it's found funds.

Do you think funds actually do that though? I mean, dude, we know Midas lists the forms by this.

Yep. We absolutely do that all the time. Like, like every week, like instantly. At Founders Fund, we do, we did it too, but more on an ad hoc basis, not systematic. But at KB, it's very systematic, like top down. Even Vinod sometimes would say, let's say something came in to me, he might say, Hey, don't you think like Sven or Samir or David would be a better partner? The way we usually resolve it, if like, for example, it wasn't Clear. Sometimes we'd actually tell the founder, Hey, you get a choice. And honestly, like, we might say, Hey, you get a choice. Why don't you meet with three or four people and see who you think would be most useful and who's the right parent? So that's my normal default is if not me, is there somebody else I have conviction about? And then if not our fund, then it's a much more complicated decision of what to do.

Do you worry about the weight of your words? You look at, and I loved Mike and I think he's great. But you look at someone like Mike, he's younger than you. He's a lot less experienced than you. When you say, no, this is what I think, do you worry that you have too much impact at points?

You have to be... Well, I'll say globally, a VC and a board member absolutely needs to worry about this all the time. I've learned from some of the best Vinod Rolland taught me some lessons. I'll articulate a few. Pierre Lamond taught me early in my career. how to do some of these things. So I think well off taught me as a board member, one of the best ways is to ask things in terms of questions, not in terms of answers. So you probe by questions because then you're never leading, you may be leading a little bit, but you're never prescribing and it's a very big difference. So you try to get out. The second thing I've learned is to describe intentionally, carefully and calibrated your level of conviction. So I will sometimes say it is something like Mike, like my instinct is to do X, but actually I don't have that much confidence that I'm right. Like if you forced me to make a decision, this is how I would make the decision here of why, but it's a close call in my mind. I'm not sure. Or there's sometimes when I might say to somebody, whether Mike or someone else, I have about 80% confidence. I know the right answer here. So the, you know, being able to communicate the level of conviction can help them dis challenge or, you know, solve it. Some founders also, the other thing I do pretty well is reverse engineering the logic. not always, but sometimes it's actually hard to understand how you got to a conclusion. Sometimes you have this intuitive reaction and then trying to decompose, okay, what's the logic behind that decision? For example, I work with Saudi at Haven. It's a really great company. He's a phenomenal founder. He always wants to know the why. It's always why, why, why, why, why. And he does that internally. He does it with me. It's great. So I can walk through the logic underneath it, and then he could say, oh, I buy that logic or I don't buy that logic. That's another, you know, sort of instantiation of it. And then the final point is, and I'll give you a kind of an amusing anecdote about this, I almost never, ever tell a founder what they really should do. Like I almost never say, you must do this. That the one example that always occurs to me is there was a time when Mike was building his company in Miami that he's incredibly frugal. The company's incredibly financially disciplined. and in Miami, the buildings charge a surcharge for running air conditioning past certain hours. And he was hesitant to pay the air conditioning, even though they're working like 99 plus. And there was one point in time when I said to him, like, well, how much is the incremental air conditioning? He was like $6,000 or something. I was like, Mike, you should pay for the air. Yes, that's about the most direct I've ever been with a founder.

You mentioned there about venture not being necessarily a great asset class in terms of returns. I totally agree with you. Actually, when you look at the historical data on distributions, There's very small windows where liquidity is apparent and strong. And if you don't take advantage of them, it's quite crap, even for the best. How do you think about when to sell?

I'm not sure I have a great answer to this, by the way. And one of the benefits of being a super early stage investor is you don't have to be perfect. I've watched other people make these decisions and I've seen brilliance sometimes. So for example, KB before my days invested $10 million or roughly $10 million in Sea grounds for Square. And after I joined KV, there was always a question after, you know, obviously Square in public when sell, the market didn't really appreciate Square fairly for a long time. So there's lots of debate internally. And Vinod had a very strong perspective that proved out to be incredibly valuable, incredibly prescient, predicated on a couple of key dimensions. I won't, I won't show the exact logic, but fundamentally he had a very strong view that KV should absolutely not sell period. and it turned out to produce meaningfully different results based upon his insight. And I remember listening to those debates, I wasn't able to participate because I had my own shares as an executive, so I was completely recused from deciding what to sell. But the logic in his insight was incredibly penetrating and it led to significantly better returns for KB3. Understanding how to think about that is a real superpower. But I think it's very rare and I certainly haven't mastered it.

Klas, what makes Vinod so special? Him and his brand are like on the ascent again.

There's a couple of ingredients. First, he is a technologist at heart. He really does see the implications of a new technology way before other people do and can see the implications in society, implications of business, the disruptive elements, a decade often before other people. He was on the AI crusade before I even joined KPMG in 2013. he published papers about, you know, how AI was going to replace doctors and medicine. And this is like before I joined KD, so way ahead of the curve, really understand, understood the implications, potential of AI and really masters like how the dots connect and spends lots of time with all the leading practitioners, both in academic, academia, and on the ground, you know, companies. So that's one second thing is just pure input. He still works hard. He loves his craft. He loves working with founders. I've seen him work 8 a.m. to midnight on Sundays sometimes, like taking meetings. You do that for 50 years, it adds up. Like, Vinduq still takes meetings, still outworks.

Most people who are less than half his age.

What do you think drives Vinduq? He really does love changing the world through technology. It really motivates him. Sometimes he's so good at seeing the implications that you have to find the founder who can actually take advantage of the insight, which is, there's only so many founders who are amazing. And sometimes you can't take all your ideas and get them in the hands of world-class founders. That's probably the only thing that frustrates.

When you think about reflecting on your time with Founders Fund before we do a quick fire, what's your biggest takeaway from that time and how it impacted your investing style?

I think you learned... Well, I've had the advantage of being a senior person at two different funds. And I think what you learned from that experience is what's endemic to venture. There are fundamentals about our business. that are basically baked into the business. And then what are, what are optional decisions around culture, decision making, hiring, and then how can you tease those out to be more successful? So I think having two different vantage points, I hopefully will lock in my brain and allow me to manipulate either those decisions to be ideal, you know, ideal to produce the best possible outcome and produce the best possible happiness for me. It's very rare to have, like, those kind of unique vantage points. So that's my takeaways. I mentioned, like, for example, I learned significantly more about growth investing and how to be disciplined about figuring out the valuation for a high potential company, Etc. That I'll take with me. But just how do you make decisions? What's the best way to make decisions? How much time should you spend in a partner meeting versus not? What are the benefits of spending eight hours a week in a partner meeting versus spending 30 minutes a week? Where's that fly?

You know, where's the diminishing marginal returns?

Et cetera.

Did kids change your mindset, Keith, becoming a father?

I think there's a couple of epiphanies you have at a minimum. I strongly believe but have watched it already, my kids are two and a half years old, that people are much more baked and impressionable at earlier ages that dictate how they are when they grow up at much earlier ages than people realize. They absorb so much. even if they can't communicate back to you what they're absorbing, they are absolutely absorbing their brain. It's like, you know, in the kind of any world, their inputs are kind of like training their brain in a kind of machine learning sense. And so you ought to be very careful and very thoughtful about what those inputs are, even though most parents are not incredibly conscious about that and just watching what they've already been able to learn and absorb that started almost like from day one.

Do you feel the weight of that responsibility?

Oh, absolutely. Like, for example, the downside of having access to resources, like, you know, money, et cetera, is I feel the weight of anti-entitlement. I think about this every day of how do we have kids that are not entitled? Because it's natural, like they have a lot of benefits. I want them to have the work ethic of someone who has nothing.

How do you think about doing that? I chatted with David at Nubank, and he was like, It's the hardest thing I think I have to deal with.

I've actually discussed this with a lot of people who have seen, you know, people that have watched race kids that I think are really, you know, successful and inspiring and ask them very specifically, what'd you do? What'd you not do? What'd you think about? What'd you not? And try to borrow some ideas. But it's a complicated topic, but I'm stressed out about it basically every day.

I worry with kids that I will not be present. Like, if I want to do what I do, to the best and I want to win just like you. You have to fucking give it everything and you have to be an absolute monster.

Well, I think there's definitely important ingredients to success. You need to be thoughtful about what's most important to you in achieving success. But people have irrational success. Top 10 basis points, one basis point in any field are absolutely making trade off decisions, hopefully intentionally.

You can be like 8 out of 10 good and be there for dinner, I think. But if you want to be like 9.9 out of 10, which you have to be in venture, I don't think you can be home for dinner every night.

I think there are some VCs who might have been able to somehow do that, but I think they offset it at other times in other ways. And I don't believe there's shortcuts to success. One of the benefits of just, you know, people knowing me in other fields is I get to watch really successful people in music, politics, and sports. And the traits of each success are shockingly common, and a lot of it is just pure input. Right.

Are you ready for a quick fire, my friend?

Let's go.

Okay, so one from Samir. What do you think about Bitcoin going forward?

Major question. So my theory was always from 2013 or 14 that the adoption of Bitcoin would globally be inversely correlated to the rule of law in a specific market or specific country. I think that's proven to be true. And in fact, I think even in the United States, Bitcoin really took off in terms of valuation, market cap, et cetera, after the election of Trump. And that was perceived by the market as instability or less rule of law. You debate whether that's true or false, but there's perception. And so I think what happens is in 2024 is somewhat dictates the answer. If people believe the world is more stable, the role of law is likely to be more robust. Bitcoin doesn't appreciate. But if the world is more tumultuous, the rule of law takes steps back in major markets, then I think Bitcoin appreciates.

Keith, which way do you think the world is going to go?

Well, I think 2024 is going to be pretty tumultuous. It's certainly off to that start.

Is Trump going to win?

No. As you've probably seen on Twitter, I don't even believe he's going to be.

The Republican nominee for president.

Okay. Do you think he'll go to prison? I don't know. One of the things you learn to do when you focus your time, and I focus my time on investing, and working with founders and barries, I've had to subtract out of my brain a lot of legal interests. Like I used to be a pretty damn good lawyer or litigator, and I used to have intellectual curiosity about a lot of topics a lot. I haven't read all the complaints. I haven't focused on them. I know they exist, et cetera. I know the general Arc of them, but I don't have a strong opinion.

About the quality of the cases and the likely outcome.

Did figma kill M&A in 2024? Well, I don't think it's Figma qua Figma. I think Figma in some ways was easier case for the government in the FTC, which has been very aggressive than many other cases. You know, Figma is competitive with Adobe's products. Like at the end of the day, that's not like a stretch where the FTC has been taking some crazy positions based on, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80 years of American jurisprudence. They've been really confronting some acquisitions that really don't have market overlap. This one seems down the much more down the middle. as did Plaid and Visa. I think that one, a normal conservative antitrust lawyer like me, like I grew up as an antitrust lawyer, I could see bringing that case. I can also see bringing the Adobe Figma case. Most of the other stuff you have to see does seems like ridiculous.

Will IPO windows open again in 2024?

Oh, absolutely. So I don't believe IPO windows really close or open. I think just the criteria for success is different in that, you know, what the bar is on, let's say, Revenue or what the bar is on your unit economics.

As a founder, do you think you want to go out? You mentioned, John, like, as a stripe, why would I go out in 24?

I'm gonna get. I believe most companies are better off going public early, period. And so I still prescribe that. I still advise that. I hope, you know, a lot of the companies I work with will take advantage of that advice.

Where would you, could you get better as an investor? Keith, you.

Oh, to my biggest. Wow. and, you know, if you have any Solutions, I'm all yours because it's very persistent. It is the hardest part for me is deciding which first meetings to take. And, you know, you get a large amount of inbound interest, introductions, Etc. And deciding of that pool, you can't take them all. It's like not possible in, like, C to literally meet every company, whereas the growth people can meet every company that's ready for a growth round. You have to decide, and I have made several bad mistakes historically as an angel investor, as a professional VC in declining some meetings. Once you get me in the room with founders, I've made those calls really, really well. Like I was mentioning the other day that I'm not sure I've ever passed on somebody that's turned out to be building a multi-billion dollar company, but I have definitely declined meetings for companies that turned out to be good. I don't know how to solve this. Like that's the problem is you can try like take more meanings, but then is your brain really sharp? You can try to delegate it, but if your founder taste is off, like the person you delegate to isn't really helping.

I say yes for two things. One, like, I mean this in the nicest way, if someone I hugely respect or like sends me something, I'll jump on it that day and do it myself. Or if it's something where I love it, where like you may do with fintech or payments or whatever that may be specifically related to your experience. I'll jump on it and kind of everything else. I just have, this sounds awful, but like a person in the team who just meets everything else. And that way I feel no guilt on like, will we miss it? Because if it's great, yeah, send it back to me.

But I have guilt. I definitely try to find, I'm trying to find like a better way to do it. But, you know, and Roloff mentioned this to me. I remember talking to him a year after he joined Sequoia. It's probably like 2004. And we had coffee and I said, what's the hardest part of the job? and he said deciding which first meetings to take.

Where would you send your kids to college? Samir again.

Teal Fellowship. We're definitely on the Teal Fellowship crusade. I've been tweeting about it. I mentioned Peter recently that I think that was probably the most important thing he's done. I think hopefully they want to achieve in their own way. And I think Teal Fellowship is a great way to cultivate those values.

Do you think Europe is descending into a retirement home?

You know, Larry Summers quote is still pretty good. That Europe's a museum. I think that's probably pretty apt.

Is there anything I could do better, Keith? You've known me for a few years.

Oh, wow. Seems like the combination of, you know, content plus investing is working really well. It is differentiated, as we talked about. There's not that many people who do it period. And so I It's a cohesive, coherent, unique strategy, which is I think how you get alpha in venture. So that's great. The guest quality is obviously awesome. So yeah, I would keep going. Like if you have a strategy, keep doing, you know, keep chasing it. Eventually all strategies in venture, people learn that they're effective and can reverse engineer them, but you may have a five or 10 year window before that's the case.

Final one for you, my friend. If we think about Keith 10 years out, Is Keith at KV then? Is Keith doing his own fun then? Is Keith chilling? What's Keith?

I think the two most obvious components to answer are I will definitely not be chilling and I will not do my own fund. Will I do something outside technology? That's a, you know, open question. Should I, when I, will I, when I one day do something that's very different at some point in my life, maybe.

Did the KV LPs know that you were joining when they invested.

Oh, definitely not. The funds were all closed.

Oh, they must be happy then.

I know. So I don't know them all, but it, you know, obviously there's a good group from six years ago. There's a good overlap, actually, with FFL pieces that I know pretty well, too. So hopefully, hopefully they're happy. I actually enjoy meeting with LPs and brainstorming with them.

Keith, I so enjoyed this. Thank you so much for doing it. And I always love our chats.

Pleasure to be back.

I mean, what a fantastic discussion that was. If you want to see the full video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, there's no shortage of helpful AI tools out there, but using them means switching back and forth between yet another digital tool. What was supposed to simplify your workflow just made it way more complicated. Unless, of course, you're in Notion. In Notion, you can automate the tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps. really freeing you up to do the deep work that we all want to do. And that's why Notion is used by over 50% 50% of Fortune 500 companies and teams that use Notion send less emails, cancel more meetings, and reduce spending on tools. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/20vc. And speaking of amazing products like Notion there, I'd like to talk to you about a company called Digits. They're a full service AI accounting company. and if you're in need of an accountant or looking to switch, there's no better solution than digits. Starting at just 350 a month, which is less than half of what you'd pay a traditional firm, digits is the most accurate, most efficient solution on the market. They've developed proprietary AI technology that automates tedious Financial tasks and delivers reports to the actual close of the month, not two to three weeks later, as always. And they also allow you to keep track of key metrics like revenue burn, cashflow and runway in an incredible live dashboard. The best part of all of it, this is vetted and signed off by their in-house CPAs. If you're interested, visit digits.com/20vc to claim your special offer today. That's digits.com/20vc. And finally, travel and expense are never associated with cost savings, but now you can reduce costs up to 30% and actually reward your employees. How? Well, Navan rewards her employees with personal travel credit every time they save their company money when booking business travel under company policy. Does that sound too good to be true? Well, Navan is so confident you'll move to their game-changing all-in-one travel corporate card and expense super app that they'll give you $250 in personal travel credit just for taking a quick demo. Check them out now at navan.com/20vc. As always, I so appreciate your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode this coming Monday with I'm not sure what you're referring to. Could you provide more context or clarify what you'd like me to transcribe?