KHOSLA VENTURES - Key Persons
Adina is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, where she focuses on software, AI, and financial services at the Seed - Series B stage. She has led the firm's investments in Aven, Homebase, Danswer, CloudTrucks, Limbic, SketchPro, Tortus, Ravenna, Stuut, Luzia, and Respin, among others that haven't yet been announced.
Job Titles:
- Investor
- Partner
- Investor With California's Khosla Ventures, Talks New Mexico 's Tech Potential, Venture Market
Alice is a Partner at Khosla Ventures interested in sustainability, food and agriculture, manufacturing/supply chain, and education. She has worked with multiple startups in robotics, IoT, retail, consumer, and STEM education, and has run mechanical, electrical, and app development teams in the US and Asia. She has also established and managed manufacturing operations at factories in China and Taiwan.
Prior to KV, Alice was founder and CEO of Roominate, a STEM education company helping girls learn engineering concepts through play. Founded in 2012, Roominate's products were distributed in more than 5000 retail outlets across the US, Canada, and Australia and it was acquired by Playmonster in 2015. Earlier, Alice worked at Nest in hardware.
Alice holds a bachelor of science degree from MIT and master of science degree from Stanford, both in mechanical engineering; she also holds an MBA from Harvard.
Alice Brooks, investor with California's Khosla Ventures, talks New Mexico's tech potential, venture market
Avisha is a Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, where she works closely with founding teams and executive leadership across the fund's diverse portfolio on key executive and board hires. She also focuses on talent and leadership advisory, and enjoys building a global network of high caliber talent for the portfolio.
Betty is a Vice President of Talent at Khosla Ventures where she focuses on technical executive talent.
Prior to joining KV, Betty spent 20 years working for Goldman Sachs, Apple, Dropbox, Cruise, and most recently Coinbase. During this time, she led functions such as university relations, recruiting strategy & operations, technical recruiting and executive recruiting, working in Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York.
Originally from Australia, Betty completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in organizational psychology from The University of Western Sydney.
Job Titles:
- Vice President of Talent Acquisition
Brad is Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Khosla Ventures where he works with healthcare companies on executive search and talent strategy.
Prior to joining KV, Brad served as the associate director of talent at Roivant Sciences where he focused on wide-ranging leadership searches at Roivant and its portfolio companies.
He worked as a principal at The Bowdoin Group, a Boston-based executive search firm. Brad was responsible for leading searches from C-level roles to strategic hires within Bowdoin's life sciences and digital health practices.
Brad received his bachelor's degree in Educational Studies from Colby College.
Brett is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures where he focuses on helping companies with growth marketing.
Prior to KV, Brett was an operating partner and helped build the Growth Marketing function at Andreessen Horowitz. At a16z, he advised portfolio companies on go-to-market strategy, paid and organic growth, lifecycle marketing, marketing technology, and team-building. He partnered with companies such as ElevenLabs, Character.ai, Luma.ai, Poe, Udio, Hebbia, SpotOn and Headway to help drive growth and scale.
Before a16z, Brett was a marketing leader at Ethos and Bungalow. He was an early employee at both Opendoor and Square, where he founded and led their growth marketing teams. Previously, he worked in investment banking covering technology companies and spent time running user acquisition at Kabam, a social gaming startup.
Brett holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance with a minor in Economics from the University of Southern California.
Brian is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures with a focus on B2B software including developer, data, security, cloud infrastructure and AI-driven applications.
Prior to joining KV in 2014, Brian was an executive at VMware where he led product, marketing and partnership functions as it scaled more than 50X in employees and revenue. He led the diversification of VMware from a single server and workstation product to an enterprise portfolio of datacenter, availability, management, desktop suites. In addition, he built out the technology and OEM ecosystem and led corporate strategy, M&A and new product incubation that formed many of VMware's post-datacenter business lines.
Earlier, Brian held engineering, consulting and product management leadership roles in security, e-commerce, consumer web, servers and databases at startups and industry incumbents including Rhapsody Networks Brocade, AOL, and Netscape.
Brian holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.
Bruce is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on enterprise technology and digital healthcare companies. Bruce serves or has served on the boards of Arevo, Big Switch (Arista), Caption Health (GE Healthcare), Cylance (BlackBerry), D2IQ, Fireflies, GitLab (IPO 2021), Headspace, Helium, Hello Heart, Invoy, Korbit, Limbic, Metamarkets (SNAP), Panzura, PolyAI, Rad AI, Scaled Inference, SingleStore, Sword Health, Theatro, Vectra and Vista.
Prior to joining KV, Bruce was the president and CEO of PivotLink, a leading provider of SaaS business intelligence applications (SmartFocus). Previously, he served as chairman and CEO of Kickfire, a pioneer in next-generation data warehouse appliances for MySQL (Teradata). Bruce also was the president and CEO of publicly-traded KNOVA Software, the leading provider of search and analytic applications for unstructured data.
Earlier, Bruce was the executive vice president of sales and marketing of publicly-traded Broadbase Software, where he helped create the analytic application category for customer relationship management. He also was vice president and general manager of the server products group at Sybase, where he ran the company's enterprise database management business. Bruce began his career as one of the first 20 employees at Teradata Corporation. After the company's successful IPO and subsequent acquisition by AT&T/NCR, he was named vice president and general manager of the enterprise solutions division, president of Teradata and an AT&T corporate officer.
Bruce holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.
Job Titles:
- Founding Partner
- Managing Director
David is a Founding Partner and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on internet software and services. A number of his investments have led to significant exits, including Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA), RingCentral (NYSE: RNG) and Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST). David has also been recognized by Fortune and Forbes as one of the top technology investors.
Prior to joining KV, David spent five years at Tellme Networks as VP of marketing and business development. Using the quantitative decision making framework RIFLE, the company drove revenue to over $100 million, and was ultimately acquired by Microsoft for more than $700 million. Previously, he led AOL's communications, community and instant messaging product divisions as they surpassed 50 million users worldwide. After being told by his employer Morgan Stanley that email would never be used for business, David jumped at the chance to join Netscape, where he learned many lessons in product management. David's career began in door to door sales, where one sales pitch led to his new career in technology via McCaw Cellular, now AT&T.
David holds a bachelor's degree magna cum laude with highest honors in organizational behavior and economics from Harvard University.
Ece is a Principal at Khosla Ventures with a special interest in consumer, fintech and application software businesses.
Previously, she was an early- and growth-stage investor at Bain Capital Ventures. Prior to that, Ece worked at BlackRock, where she was a portfolio manager working on restructuring public equity portfolios for large institutional clients. She has also held positions at Papaya Payments, Google, and Morgan Stanley.
Ece graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in economics and a secondary concentration in government. She completed her MBA at Stanford as an Arjay Miller Scholar. While at Stanford, she led the Tech Club and the Venture Capital Club.
Eric is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures where he focuses on helping portfolio companies across every sector create, scale, and optimize their engineering functions.
Most recently, Eric was CTO of GitLab where in five years he helped onboard over 13,500 customers, increase revenue 30x, and grow the engineering team from 100 to 800 culminating in a successful IPO in 2021. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation and was an independent advisor to CEOs and engineering leaders at multiple startups.
Prior to his work in DevOps, Eric worked for four enterprise technology startups in varied industries: drones, streaming video (Brightcove IPO in 2012), localization/translation, and marketing technology.
He has a bachelor's degree in Continental Philosophy from Villanova University where he concentrated on Ancient Greece and German existentialism.
Ethan is a Partner at Khosla Ventures with a focus on growth-stage companies.
Prior to KV, Ethan was a partner at Accel where he focused on growth investments across AI, enterprise software, e-commerce, and fintech infrastructure companies, including Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO), Pismo (Visa), 1Password, Nuvemshop, and commercetools, among others.
Before Accel, he was at Spectrum Equity where he made investments in Lynda.com (LinkedIn), ExamSoft (Turnitin), PicMonkey (Shutterstock), Headspace, and Lucid Software.
Ethan studied information systems and economics at the University of Sydney before serving a two-year mission for his church, after which he earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from Brigham Young University.
Hal is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures focused on healthcare and life science companies. He has served as a senior executive and board director in the provider, payor and pharmaceutical-medical device industries.
His track record includes strategically transforming and providing operational leadership as executive vice president and chief medical officer of CVSHealth/Aetna. He launched AetnaCare, a first of its kind ecosystem of personalized health solutions, beginning in the home, through a series of partnerships that brought together accountable care organizations, health systems, pharmaceutical and device companies, including Merck and Medtronic, through value-based contracts.
Hal also served as CEO of the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center where he led innovative partnerships with companies including One Medical, Dispatch Health, Alternate Health Solutions and Teladoc Health. As CEO of Penn State Health, he led the creation of innovative joint ventures and partnerships with Select Medical, United Surgical Partners International (USPI) and Highmark.
He is on the board of directors of Envision Healthcare and Research America, and was a board member of Select Medical, USPI and Vyteris, as well as seven health systems. In addition, he is a member of the Curai Health advisory board and was on the advisory boards of Johnson & Johnson and USPI. He has served on committees of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and Health Evolution.
A former medical school dean and a researcher in septic shock, ARDS and medical devices, Hal has published over 100 papers, abstracts, book chapters and commentaries. He received his bachelor's and medical degree from the University of Rochester and has a master of science in life science engineering from Tufts University. He completed his residency at Northwestern University Medical Center and was a Eudowood fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and also a post-doctoral fellow in environmental health science at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.
Hari is a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he invests and partners with entrepreneurs across sectors, particularly in areas that advance our intelligence (AI), our security (cyber, infrastructure), and our health.
Hari is returning to KV after five and a half years as Cofounder and President of Bold, a health tech company that is closing the gap between healthspan and lifespan through personalized, evidence-based exercise. Hari founded the company with his wife, Bold's CEO, after their shared experience caregiving for her grandmother, and has scaled partnerships with many of the largest Medicare organizations in the country, helping to prevent falls and improve physical activity for those who most need it.
Prior to Bold, Hari was Vinod Khosla's chief of staff, where he worked closely with Vinod and the team investing and supporting the KV portfolio.
Hari began his career as an engineering and product lead at Palantir Technologies, where he built products and led partnerships with some of the company's largest customers, spanning financial services and healthcare.
Hari graduated with distinction from Stanford University in 3 years with a bachelor's degree in computer science, focused on computational biology.
Ian is an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Khosla Ventures where he focuses on climatech companies. His primary interest is in developing carbon technologies that can significantly reduce emissions to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
Before joining KV, Ian was a Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), developing research programs for high-risk, high-reward energy technologies. Specifically, he developed Direct Air Capture (DAC) of CO 2 to make carbon neutral fuels and chemicals, DAC for carbon storage, advanced bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), carbon negative construction materials (ARPA-E's HESTIA program), carbon-neutral iron and steel production, advanced EV battery materials that eliminate reliance on critical materials, and alternative uses (beyond electricity) of nuclear energy.
Ian received his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Maryland (UMD), as well as his B.S. degree. His Ph.D. research involved developing new materials for low-temperature solid oxide fuel cells, which led to multiple co-authored publications and patent applications. He also enjoyed mentoring both graduate students and undergraduate students during his time at UMD.
Irene is a Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, where she works with early-, mid-, and late-stage startup CEOs. She is dedicated to raising the value of design and user research within software companies through better methods, practices, processes, leadership, and talent. Through her mentorship of the next generation of designers, she helps companies build an empathetic understanding of user needs which inspires and informs product design and experiences.
Irene is an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University where she teaches product design in the mechanical engineering department. She also serves as a trustee for the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design.
Jai is a Partner at KV where he works across sectors with an emphasis on growth-stage opportunities.
Prior to joining KV, Jai was a founding partner at Flight Deck Capital, a technology-focused hedge fund, - where he led fintech and software investing for the team across the United States and Latin America. Earlier in his career, Jai was a principal at NEA, where he worked across the firm's enterprise and fintech practices. Jai has led private investments in Divvy (BILL), DriveWealth, and Narmi and supported companies including Databricks, Automation Anywhere, and Plaid among many others.
Jai holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. During his time as a student Jai worked on a variety of technological endeavors ranging from research on brain computer interfaces to software for drone and telemedicine applications.
Jessy is a Partner at Khosla Ventures focused on investments in climate tech and non-obvious methods of mitigating climate change.
Prior to KV, Jessy ran the cleantech practice at Xerox PARC, where she founded and managed internal startups in areas including air conditioning, methane pyrolysis and battery manufacturing, and oversaw a research portfolio that spanned ocean carbon capture, food freshness sensing, automotive recycling, and transparent insulation. Jessy also worked as an engineer at Evergreen Solar manufacturing string-ribbon silicon wafers, and at The Molecular Foundry modifying the surface chemistry of battery electrodes and characterizing the size-dependence of crystallographic phase transitions at the nano-scale.
Jessy holds a bachelor's degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, both in mechanical engineering.
John is General Counsel at Khosla Ventures. He joined the firm in 2016 and has worked with investors and entrepreneurs since 2007. Previously, he spent nine years at WilmerHale, where he represented investors and entrepreneurs in hundreds of financing and acquisition transactions. He has also served as an adjunct professor and guest lecturer at several Bay Area law schools on the topic of venture capital transactions.
Earlier in his career, John held sales and marketing positions at two Bay Area venture-backed companies, had a brief career in local radio, and worked at his family's commercial transportation business.
John received CORE certification from Harvard Business School Online after graduating J.D. cum laude from the University of San Francisco School of Law. He also earned a bachelor's degree in communications from Boston College.
As a Principal on the investment team, Jun focuses on life sciences and healthcare investments. He continually pushes the needle towards a more equitable and healthier future by investing in and operating with founders.
Jun has dedicated more than 10 years to bench and clinical research in areas such as immuno-oncology, microfluidics, iPSCs, rare diseases, and clinical trials. His research has generated numerous peer-reviewed publications and has been funded by many university awards as well as NIH research fellowships (IRTA and MRSP).
Previously, Jun worked for Oshi Health and Octant Bio in business development and new product opportunity roles. While pursuing his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, he cofounded biotech pre-accelerator, Bio Launch (now Nucleate Philly), to move innovative ideas from academic labs to market. He later tied these operational experiences together at an early-stage VC firm, AlleyCorp, where he worked on incubations and investing around digital health and life sciences opportunities.
He obtained an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
Kanu is a Partner at Khosla Ventures where she invests in enterprise applications and infrastructure that leverage advances in AI, as well as robotics and autonomous systems. She has led, and helps manage investments in companies including PolyAI, Kognitos, Moonhub, Regie, Zendar, Nomagic and Waabi among others. Kanu has more than 10 years of operating experience as a research scientist at Intel and Cadence, and founding / early engineer Heavy.ai (hardware-accelerated analytics solution), Spyglass (predictive analytics for design, acquired by Synposys) and Nascentric (fast-circuit simulation tool, acquired by Cadence). She was awarded the Nvidia Graduate Fellowship for her work in hardware acceleration.
Kanu has co-authored three books; authored 35+ peer-reviewed publications; and holds a US patent. She obtained a Ph.D. and master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Delhi. Kanu also earned her MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was co-president of the annual Venture Capital and Private Equity Conference.
Katie is an Associate at Khosla Ventures passionate about accelerating AI impact on enterprise applications and infrastructure.
Prior to KV, Katie was Co-Founder and CEO of Kangaroo, a celebrity gaming startup she created with Mad Men's Kiernan Shipka. For the company, Katie raised $3.3M, brokered deals with movie studios and Hollywood agencies, recruited a 12-person team, and built an AI-narrative game engine and cross-platform app. Prior, she was a software engineer at Meta on a NLP research team. Most recently, Katie served as the first product manager at Astrocade, an AI startup co-founded by Fei-Fei Li.
Katie holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science with a concentration in AI, from Stanford University, where she led the student satellites team and won the BASES Undergrad Startup Challenge.
Keith is a Managing Director at Khosla Ventures. Keith invests across sectors and stages and brings his unparalleled experience as a world-class founder, operator, and investor to the portfolio. Based out of Miami, Florida, he also co-founded and serves as CEO of OpenStore, an e-commerce company backed by Khosla Ventures.
Kelly is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where she leads the talent team to advise our portfolio companies and helps recruit senior executives.
Prior to joining KV, Kelly was the Talent Partner at Battery Ventures, where she managed talent globally across the 125+ venture/growth companies in their portfolio.
Previously, she was the executive leadership recruiter for the president of Oracle, and recruited 50 senior technology executives at the VP/SVP/EVP level and above to lead the company's cloud efforts. Earlier, she did executive search for the retained search firms Riviera Partners and SPMB, both of which represent venture capital-backed and emerging growth companies working with the most promising portfolio companies of top-tier VC firms.
Kelly graduated from Whittier College and studied in Denmark and Italy.
Luis is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures where he focuses on strategic transactions and special projects across the portfolio. He has a deep background in the legal and business matters affecting high technology startups throughout their life cycle.
Job Titles:
- Investor
- Principal on the Investment Team
Nabeel is a Principal on the Investment Team at Khosla Ventures and is passionate about equitable and sustainable technology.
Nessan is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures focused on life science companies with an emphasis on nucleic acid editing, novel delivery systems, gene and cell therapy, novel target identification and data analytics for drug discovery and development.
Having founded multiple companies in the life sciences realm, Nessan is a serial biotech entrepreneur and investor. Most notable among his companies are Intellia Therapeutics, a top-10 biotech startup in 2014, Triplet Therapeutics, and Korro Bio. At Intellia, Nessan served as president and CEO from inception through 2017, leading the company from concept through partner deals, multiple financing rounds and an IPO prior to its second anniversary.
Nessan also held investment roles at Atlas Venture and Omega Fund Management, where he successfully invested in and managed multiple investments across the United States and Europe. He is currently the executive chair at Everyone Medicines, Korro Bio and Stylus Biomedicine. He also currently sits on the board of Deep Genomics, Liberate Bio, Ochre Bio and Focal Medical and is a board observer with CHARM Therapeutics and Eligo Bioscience.
Previously he was a member of the equity research team at UBS, an independent advisory board member of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and MerckSerono KGaA. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Imperial College London, and was a Howard Hughes Associate Fellow at Baylor College of Medicine.
Nicole is Chief of Staff to Vinod Khosla.
Prior to KV, Nicole completed a DPhil in cancer and viral immunology through the Rhodes Scholarship and NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. As part of her graduate work, she identified how antiviral immune responses can be co-opted to mount robust immune responses against Glioblastoma, the most common malignancy of the Central Nervous System. Outside of the lab, Nicole started a lab-grown diamond brand.
Previously, Nicole was an investment associate at Bridgewater Associates and a Venture Fellow at life sciences VC firm Vida.
Nicole graduated from Johns Hopkins with a degree in Neuroscience.
Job Titles:
- COO
- Managing Director
- Partner
Peter is a Partner, Managing Director and COO at Khosla Ventures, with more than 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley advising founders, entrepreneurs and technology companies. Peter works closely with the investment team and spearheads the firm's fundraising efforts. He also manages the firm's operations, including talent, finance, IR, and legal.
Prior to joining KV, he was a partner at WilmerHale LLP, a leading international law firm, where he led the firm's emerging growth technology practice and built its West Coast corporate practice. During that time he guided the firm's technology clients through hundreds of financings (public and private), sales, acquisitions and other strategic transactions.
Peter started his career with positions at law firms including Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison and Weil Gotshal & Manges.
Peter holds a bachelor's degree from the University of California-Santa Barbara and a J.D. (magna cum laude) from the University of San Francisco.
A Partner at Khosla Ventures, Rajesh has two decades of experience assisting and investing in deep tech startups. He manages many of the firm's investments across renewables generation, storage, hydrogen, industrial decarbonization, plastics, foodtech, healthcare and advanced manufacturing.
Previously, Rajesh was the head of Applied Ventures LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, where he managed a portfolio of 85 deep tech startups globally, as well as two deep-tech funds in Korea and Taiwan. He led investments and helped build companies, many of which had strong exits, including Enphase Energy, Solid Energy, Rockley, Infinite Power Solutions, Adaptive3D, Tango, Inpria, PlayNitride and Norsk Ti. Rajesh was recognized amongst the top 100 global CVCs on the Global Corporate Venture (GCV) Powerlist.
Earlier, he worked at Third Point Ventures and at Lucent's Bell Labs, where he drove technical assessments and partnerships for several optical, MEMS, and RF device startups, and also led DFR programs for the successful deployment of Lucent's 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s systems.
While pursuing his MBA at Harvard Business School, he worked on Deutsche Bank's cleantech banking team, and also worked with KV on companies in solar and water. Previously, Rajesh earned a master of science degree from the University of Maryland and a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, where he was awarded the Shankar Dayal Sharma (President of India) Medal for overall excellence.
Reze is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures where he focuses on communications for the firm and its portfolio companies.
Before joining KV, Reze was a partner at Social Capital, where he led all external affairs - including communications, media, and public affairs - for the firm, its founder, and the portfolio.
Prior to Social Capital, Reze spent nearly a decade at Sard Verbinnen & Co (now FGS Global), a strategic and financial communications firm. During that time, Reze worked on a number of IPOs and public listings (Alibaba Group, Snap, DiDi, Grab, Ant Group), transformative M&A (Tesla/SolarCity, DiDi/Uber, HTC/Google), and other major corporate events (PG&E Chapter 11, Tesla SEC settlement, Twitter CEO transition). He was based in the firm's San Francisco office, but regularly spent time in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Reze graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.