Partner at Khosla Ventures
Check 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.
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.
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.
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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