Former Square COO Keith Rabois Joins Square Investor Khosla Ventures As Partner

Keith Rabois is going to be a full-time investor after more than a decade in operating roles. And fittingly, he’ll be doing that as a partner at Khosla Ventures — a high-powered firm as feisty, contrarian, and entrepreneur-focused as he is. Rather than being put off, Silicon Valley had jumped at the chance to hire him after he left his COO role at Square over an employee’s sexual harassment claim in January. Sources say that, while he was weighing offers from Khosla and a new executive role at Airbnb?in recent days, he also fielded serious inquiries from a large handful of other venture firms and tech companies. Firm founder Vinod Khosla has had one of the better views of the situation. He sits on Square’s board, and so is privy to the details of the claim. When I asked him for comment on the matter during a phone interview yesterday, he only pointed me to the supportive statements from the company, as well as Rabois’ own post on the matter?– but the hiring reads like a big “he’s not guilty” sign. Rabois and Khosla have been working together as investor and startup executives since 2007 and through other difficult situations — a theme Khosla hits on in a separate post for us today. In it, he explains how his firm is focused on hands-on “venture assistance” to entrepreneurs they invest in, helping them through the inevitable highs and lows of building big-league tech companies. Khosla put money into app developer Slide in 2006, shortly before Rabois joined it from LinkedIn. The company ultimately sold to Google in 2010 for $228 million?after a long journey building a variety of social apps designed around self-expression. At times it had major hits like a slide-show widget on Myspace and the famous sheep-throwing app SuperPoke! on Facebook, but it never found a truly big business in that fast and loose industry. Rabois’ move to Square after the sale marked a return to his roots in the payments business. He’d been an early leader at PayPal during its ride to public offering and eventual sale to eBay. A formative member of the PayPal Mafia, he’s been actively investing for years (we currently count around 40 investments in CrunchBase). He currently sits on the boards of money-transfer service Xoom,?since 2003, which just had a successful IPO?this month, and reviews site Yelp, since 2005, which went public

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