Silicon Valley is losing another tech heavyweight: Keith Rabois, prolific startup investor, early exec at powerhouses such as Square, LinkedIn, Yelp, and PayPal, and longtime Bay Area resident. He tells me he is "moving imminently."
Rabois revealed his decision to decamp during our conversation at the Meridian conference, an event hosted by the cryptocurrency-focused group Stellar Development Foundation. (Rabois, an investor in Stripe, joined Stellar's board after Stripe made an investment in Stellar six years ago.)
"I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it's impossible to stay here," Rabois said. He believes he is not alone in giving up on the Bay Area, a place he has called home for two decades. He cited anecdotal evidence about many people in his social circles leaving, and noted, "COVID sort of masks this stuff. It's not quite as obvious where people are moving to and if they've actually moved since everybody's working remotely."
Rabois is one of many Bay Area forsakers. His planned departure follows the flight of Peter Thiel, Rabois's old Stanford buddy and PayPal partner, to Los Angeles in 2018. (Rabois joined Thiel's venture capital firm Founder's Fund last year.) In a much-read IPO prospectus this year, Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, a PayPal spinout and Rabois investment, also said he was relocating the company to Colorado after laying into the Valley's tech firms, calling them unpatriotic for pooh-poohing military contracts. And Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, where Rabois worked as chief operating officer for three years, planned to move to Africa before the pandemic struck.