Nikunj Kothari
Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures
Nikunj Kothari
Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Venture Partner
2024 - Current
Investing in early stage startups
Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance to entrepreneurs in AI, sustainability, enterprise, consumer, health and frontier technologies.
Raised $1,500,000.00 from Raj Sareen.
Advisor | Angel Investor
2018
Investing and advising early stage startups (more details at https://www.nikunjk.com/) Grateful to learn from venture firms like Sequoia (as a scout, 2022-2024) and First Round (Angel Track, Spring 2023)
Product / Partnerships lead
2021 - 2024
We believe that internet & WiFi is a fundamental utility - like water or electricity. Like any other utility, businesses should be able to simply turn on their internet and WiFi and not worry about it. Joined as the first PM when the company was 15 people. We built and scaled our second product Meter Connect from $0 -> $xM GMV with xx% monthly growth. In addition, helped scale our GTM team by wearing many hats - customer success, interim head of marketing, inbound sales person and most recently led partnerships. Left to pursue a break!
Meter builds internet infrastructure tailored for businesses, delivering secure and easily accessible networks.
Raised $85,000,000.00 from Sequoia Capital, John Bicket, Lachy Groom, Sanjit Biswas, Diane Greene, Sam Altman, Lachy Groom, Tishman Speyer, Sanjit Biswas and John Collison.
Head of Growth
2017 - 2021
Opendoor's mission is to empower the world with the freedom to move. To accomplish this mission, I worked on a lot of different areas at Opendoor: 2017: Responsible for all our internal tooling for our sales, support teams and managing transactions 2018: Focused on making closing a seamless transaction. Built a closing tool for sellers to make it completely self-service and internal tools to automate the transaction 2019: Scaled our trade-in program for sellers that were also looking to buy 2020: Seller lead responsible for acquiring customers who want to sell and finance their next home 2021: Managed the Growth team at Opendoor scaling from 0 transactions post-COVID to XXXX a month when I left in May '21
Opendoor is a real estate technology company that simplifies the process of buying and selling homes.
Raised $1,887,930,000.00 from BlackRock and Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP).
Consumer Product Lead
2015 - 2017
Worked as a Product Lead on a lot of different areas of Shyp. Some of the things I worked on: * Led launch of our Rebrand + Address Free Shipping effort (Oct 2015) * Growing eBay sellers on Shyp through our eBay Partnership (Jan 2016) * Increased courier efficiency by building routing optimizations (May 2016) * Launched Shyp Web in under two months for business customers (November 2016) * Focus on growing SMB on Shyp (Jan 2017)
Shyp provides shipping services that ranges from picking-up the package to delivering it to the destination.
Raised $62,100,000.00 from Aslanoba Capital, Draft Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Slow Ventures, Jennifer Hyman, Homebrew, ZenStone Venture Capital, Machine Shop Ventures, Kevin Rose and Designer Fund.
Head of Product
2014 - 2015
As the Head of Product, I led overall product development, growth and data analysis across all platforms. During my time at Hall, we revamped the Hall Web and Desktop App interface leading to 3x engagement and retention. We updated our versions of the Hall mobile Apps (iPhone/iPad + Android Material Design) which were featured in the App Store and Play Store with 4.5+ star reviews. Our Apple Watch app was featured as the top productivity app on the Watch App Store. We also built enterprise features such as Admin Tools, Single Sign-On, Salesforce integration to help businesses onboard employees as soon as possible. Integrations with other apps such as Asana, Google Hangouts and JIRA helped grow our user base significantly and moved us closer to our goal of having all team communication in one place. Acquired by Atlassian in May 2015. Joined the product team at HipChat post-acquisition focused on growth.
Hall helps teams and companies communicate on business messaging platforms.
Raised $6,080,000.00 from Signia Venture Partners, Felicis, Inventures Group, PivotNorth Capital, 500 Global, Eric Hahn and Sand Hill Angels.
Product Manager
2012 - 2014
Responsible for leading product development and revenue line for LinkedIn Ads, our self-service advertising product and Sponsored Updates, our mobile monetization play. We build the self-service advertising platform that marketers use to advertise to potential members interested in their offering. In this role, I owned $XXX million/year in self-service revenue as part of our broader Marketing Solutions revenue line. During my time at LinkedIn, I helped release Sponsored Updates (LinkedIn's first mobile advertising product), Direct Sponsored Content, LinkedIn Ads & Sponsored Updates API, Video Ads and other ad optimization & expansion initiatives (led to double digit eCPM increases). I was an Associate Product Manager till March '14.
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Product Manager Intern
2011 - 2011
Developed a long term strategy on how to incorporate social media into new and existing Branded Content products Launched a ‘Social Brackets’ module which increased user engagement and monetization on Yahoo! properties. Organized multiple intern events - Foosball tournaments, Intern Open House for all interns in the Bay Area and others. Only undergraduate PM intern among 20 MBA interns. Youngest PM intern (at 20 years) Yahoo! has hired yet.
Yahoo is a technology and media company that serves users through its portfolio of digital platforms, products, and services.
Raised $6,800,000.00 from Visa, SoftBank Capital, Sequoia Capital and Reuters Venture Capital.
Engineering Intern
2010 - 2010
Designed and implemented test automation of a file sharing service on Steelheads; a WAN optimization device for Windows Workgroup and Domain Environments. Development of library code to include feature and model classes for the file sharing service.
Riverbed Technology is an information technology company that develops network and application performance software.
Raised $28,400,000.00 from TA Capital, La Maison Compagnie d'Investissement, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, Accel, BYU Cougar Capital, Meritech Capital Partners and Pelion Venture Partners.
Research Assistant
2010 - 2010
Fabricated different boards for new types of antennas using the milling machine. Assisted in taking measurements of different antennas using a network analyzer.