The StrictlyVC New York event lands on Thursday, 10 September, when TechCrunch’s boutique evening series returns to Manhattan’s West Village for the first time in two years. The lineup spans venture capital’s thorniest debates, the business of professional sport, and the question a growing number of founders are wrestling with: what gets rebuilt when AI takes something away?
Keith Rabois on Capital, OpenAI, and the StrictlyVC New York Event
The evening opens with Keith Rabois, the investor who recently relocated from Silicon Valley to the East Coast. Rabois has backed Ramp four times and invested repeatedly in State Affairs, an AI-and-local-journalism outfit tracking statehouse policy across all 50 US states.
One topic on the agenda: Khosla Ventures’ early OpenAI bet. The firm wrote a $50 million cheque in 2019, when OpenAI had no clear business model and was valued at $1 billion at the time of that funding round. According to Fortune, that stake amounted to roughly 5% of the company, and Vinod Khosla later described it as ‘the largest bet by a factor of two of any initial investment I’ve made in 40 years.’
Khosla has not stepped back since. TechCrunch reported that the firm subsequently raised $405 million for OpenAI via a special purpose vehicle, representing at least 6% of OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding round that valued the company at $157 billion. Rabois will also address the prevailing narrative that OpenAI faces more competitive pressure than its rivals, a claim he is unlikely to leave unchallenged.
Expect him to hold forth, too, on founders who raise more capital than they need simply because the market will let them.
Sports, Founders, and the Business of Community
The second conversation brings together Craig Shapiro, whose venture firm Collaborative Fund is co-hosting the evening, and Jason Levien, chief executive of D.C. United. The subject is sports organisations as investment vehicles, and the increasingly layered relationship between fandom, commerce, and community ownership.
Tristan Walker follows. Walker founded Walker & Company Brands in 2013, building Bevel, a grooming line for men with coarse or curly hair, and Form, a label for women with textured hair, both aimed at consumers of colour. Procter & Gamble acquired the company in 2018, though the exit was less than straightforward: BeautyMatter, citing Recode, reported that investors recouped the majority but not all of the nearly $40 million they had put in, suggesting P&G paid somewhere between $20 million and $40 million. Walker’s current project, Heirloom Craft, is focused on reshoring American fine craftsmanship, training artisans and rebuilding the supply chains behind them.
Brynn Putnam joins Walker on stage. She founded Mirror, a connected-fitness company launched in 2018 that had raised $72 million from investors before Lululemon came calling. The acquisition was announced on 29 June 2020 at a price of $500 million, with Lululemon paying cash and Mirror operating as a standalone unit within the parent. The deal closed on 7 July 2020, with approximately $57.1 million of the purchase price allocated to continuing employees subject to vesting over up to three years. Putnam remained as MIRROR’s chief executive following completion, reporting to Lululemon’s CEO.
Her current company, Board, blends physical play with AI-powered creation tools: a game business positioned, in Putnam’s framing, as a corrective to the social isolation that technology has helped produce.
Rounding out the evening is Deven Parekh, who has co-run Insight Partners for more than 25 years. The New York firm rarely grants press access, but Parekh has agreed to discuss how Insight thinks about a landscape where the lines between asset classes have blurred and the largest funds have grown to a scale that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. The central question: how does a firm compete when capital is cheap but the potential returns on outsized bets have also never been higher?
The night takes place in the West Village, with drinks, food, and networking before and after the fireside chats. Collaborative Fund is co-hosting. Tickets are available now.
For Rabois, Walker, and Putnam, the evening is something of a New York homecoming. The harder conversation, on how founders and investors make decisions when AI is reshaping every cost assumption they built their models on, starts at the first bell.
