Partner
Khosla VenturesCheck size: No personal check range is published. Khosla's Seed Fund finances science and business-model experiments, while its Main Fund invests from early to later stages; historical firm commentary described many seed investments around $1M–$2M. These are firm-level guideposts, not Alice's authority.
Alice invests in deep technology and sustainability, informed by mechanical engineering, consumer hardware, and her experience taking a physical product from idea to thousands of retail locations. She is positioned to evaluate whether a scientific or engineering advance creates a meaningful economic advantage, can be manufactured and distributed, and has a low-cost path through its critical technical and market risks.
Bold founders with a genuine engineering or business-model advantage, a very large societal or commercial problem, an explicit experimental path through technical risk, and the ability to turn deep technology into a product people can manufacture, distribute, understand, and adopt.
Khosla's criteria imply weak fit for me-too hardware, small markets, science without a path to commercial scale, teams that cannot name the top failure modes, capital plans disconnected from risk-removal milestones, or founders seeking funding without hands-on company-building help.
Explain the physical principle, what has been demonstrated, what remains unproven, and why the advance produces a step-function economic or sustainability benefit. Map manufacturing, bill of materials, supply chain, reliability, certification, distribution, and scale-up. Name the three largest failure modes and the cheapest milestones that retire them. Show a billion-dollar market and why incumbents cannot copy the advantage quickly.
Trace a deep-tech product from core scientific proof through engineering, manufacturing yield, unit cost, certification, distribution, and end-user adoption; a break in any link can dominate the outcome.
Rank scientific, manufacturability, reliability, supply-chain, and market risks, then attach each financing tranche to a measurable experiment that removes the most existential uncertainty.
Compare the technology with the incumbent on total cost, energy or material intensity, performance, deployment friction, and lifecycle impact; require a large enough advantage to overcome physical-world switching costs.
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Alice founded and led Roominate, a STEM-education company whose products reached more than 5,000 stores across the US, Canada, and Australia before PlayMonster acquired it in 2015. She previously worked in hardware at Nest and has supported startups across climate, robotics, consumer hardware, and STEM education in the US and Asia. She holds mechanical-engineering degrees from MIT and Stanford and a Harvard MBA.