Sven Strohband

Sven Strohband is a partner and managing director at Khosla Ventures, and led the firm’s early investments in Berkshire Grey, GitLab, Hermeus and Rocket Lab among others. An engineer at heart, Sven is passionate about technologies that forge new industries and accelerate novel user experiences. Previously, he spent six years at Mohr Davidow Ventures, where he led technical diligence for the infrastructure IT and sustainability practices and worked with the portfolio to recruit technical talent, run product-market fit experiments and develop fundraising strategies. Prior to that, Sven was a project manager for the Electronics Research Lab of Volkswagen, where he led technical projects for Volkswagen brands ranging from LED front lighting and electrochromic glass to driver- assistance systems and robotics. He was also lead engineer and project lead for the Stanford racing team’s autonomous car, Stanley, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Now on display at the Smithsonian Museum, Stanley was the foundation for Google’s self-driving car efforts. He co-founded and was CEO of AI company Metamind, which is now a part of Salesforce and a key component of Salesforce Einstein. Sven sits on the boards of numerous companies including Berkshire Grey, Rocket Lab, Velo3D, Waabi and ThoughtSpot. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in mechanics and computation from Stanford University. In his spare time, Sven enjoys teaching his children to code, machining and welding, and flying autonomous drones.