Rabois: The CMO is the top AI token consumer at Opendoor
Keith Rabois · Hard truths about building in the AI era | Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures) · Apr 12, 2026 · at 33:41
Keith Rabois, Managing Director at Khosla Ventures and co-founder of Opendoor, discusses non-technical executive adoption of AI tools across his portfolio companies.
0:00 / 0:27exact quote · 27.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What I've noticed in some of the best organizations is the number one consumer of tokens is the CMO. Because these people are intellectually curious. And so they're like, wow, there's all these cool things I can do now with my hands. Either I had to rely on other teams or never got access the way I wanted and blah, blah, blah, or lag, and they just do it. This is actually true at Opendoor. It's true in another great company that I'm on the board of that's incredible.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Keith Rabois
Rabois: I refuse to let colleagues talk to consumer customers
“I refuse to allow colleagues of mine to talk to customers.”
Rabois: Criticizing employees publicly optimizes for the system over the individual
“When you give people feedback negative individually, you're optimizing for the atomic unit, not the system. The reason why to do it in public is it's more important for all the colleagues to understand that there's an issue it's being addressed.”
Rabois: High-performance teams do not have psychological safety
“No, no, I don't believe in that at all. Like high performance machines don't have psychological safety. They're about winning.”
Rabois: Lack of corporate data creates recruiting alpha in younger talent
“Like one of the reasons why, you know, sometimes it's controversial to say this, but one of the reasons why the net impact of by higher undiscovered talent is you wind up skewing younger. It's not because you need young people. It's that younger people have by…”
Rabois: Conventional PM roles make no sense in the AI era
“Well, I saw this podcast, or listen to this podcast that Peter Fenn did, and he convinced me that the idea of a PM makes no sense, basically, in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic, is what does a PM usually do? They take these inputs from cus…”
Rabois: Consumer interviews give misleading data due to subconscious buying decisions
“Customers don't know what They want, and they're very bad because it's a subconscious decision, especially for consumers. Like what I purchased, what I wear is not a conscious decision. And when you're consciously trying to answer a subconscious decision, you …”