Longtime investor Keith Rabois is joining Founders Fund as a general partner, the firm let us know today. He brings its total number of partners to 9.
According to Founders Fund, Rabois will invest across sectors and stages, like all members of its investment team.
The move is wholly unsurprising in ways, though the timing seems to suggest that another big fund from Founders Fund is around the corner, as the firm is also bringing aboard a new principal at the same time, Delian Asparouhov, and firms tend to bulk up as they’re meeting with investors.
Rabois, like the founders of Founders Fund, is a member of the so-called PayPal mafia, working an EVP of business development, public affairs and policy at the payments company between late 2000 and late 2002.
Others to launch Founders Fund include Peter Thiel, who’d cofounded PayPal and served as its CEO, taking it public in 2002: Luke Nosek, who’d cofounded PayPal and was its VP of business strategy; Ken Howery, who’d cofounded PayPal and was its CFO from 1998 through 2002; Peter Thiel, and Chief Financial Officer between 1998-2002. The firm’s fourth cofounder, Sean Parker, left in 2014. (Parker was not part of PayPal’s earlier days, as he was busy running Napster, then a short-lived contacts management company Plaxo, at the time).
Rabois had spent the last six years as a managing director with Khosla Ventures, after spending 2.5 years as the COO of Square. Rabois said he resigned from that role due to accusations of sexual harassment made against him by a Square employee that he denied. (Square added at the time that it hadn’t found evidence to support any claims, but that Rabois “exercised poor judgment” nevertheless.)
At Khosla, Rabois sat the boards of the soon-to-be-public video conferencing company Xoom and on the board of Yelp, whose founder, Jeremy Stoppleman, was also an early PayPal employee, serving as its vice president of engineering.
Rabois had resigned that seat in 2014 to focus on the privately held startups he was working with at Khosla, ultimately leading the Series A round of the lending company Affirm (started by, yes, another PayPal cofounder, Max Levchin), participating in the seed round of the food delivery company DoorDash, and seed funding and coming up with the idea and seed funding the real estate company OpenDoor, which is reportedly raising a new round at a $3.7 billion valuation.
