Founding Partner and Managing Director
Khosla VenturesCheck size: No personal check-size range is published. Khosla Ventures invests from seed through growth, but fund assets and portfolio round sizes are not David's personal minimum or maximum.
David backs internet software and services with the potential to become large, durable businesses. His operator writing emphasizes product-management accountability, quantitative decision-making, and proving genuine product-market fit before scaling sales or spend. He is especially credible where category ambition can be paired with disciplined product, go-to-market, and unit-economics execution.
Founders with a sharp customer problem, accountable product leaders, a product that can become a profitable business, repeatable evidence of product-market fit, honest metrics, quantitative decision-making, and the ambition to create or dominate a large software category.
His published operating guidance argues against scaling before product-market fit, vanity metrics, payback calculations detached from cash, product teams without a single accountable owner, and companies that spend their way around weak retention or unclear customer value.
Show the product insight, named customer pain, why the category can be very large, and exactly what proves product-market fit. Bring cohort retention, usage, sales-cycle, gross-margin, cash-payback, and expansion data; separate facts from assumptions; name the owner of each critical hypothesis; and explain what you will nail before adding headcount or acquisition spend.
Define the decision, decompose it into weighted factors, assign owners to gather evidence, score each factor, expose disagreement, and update the model as facts change.
Require strong retention, customer pull, repeatable sales evidence, defensible cash payback, and understood unit economics before materially increasing headcount or acquisition spend.
Label every important claim as observed fact, modeled inference, or unresolved assumption and specify the next test that can change the decision.
Startups should prove authentic product-market fit, understand cash payback and real unit economics, and know their numbers before scaling sales and spending.
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Before Khosla Ventures, David spent five years as VP of Marketing and Business Development at Tellme Networks, where the RIFLE quantitative framework supported growth beyond USD 100 million in revenue before Microsoft's acquisition. Earlier he led AOL communications, community, and instant-messaging products past 50 million users, worked in product management at Netscape, and started in sales at McCaw Cellular. He graduated magna cum laude with highest honors in organizational behavior and economics from Harvard.