Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois is back as chairman at Opfinishoor, and he doesn’t understand why the company’s workforce has receivedten so “bloated.”
Rabois, who cofounded the online residential real estate marketplace a decade ago, rejoined the board earlier this month along with his cofounder Eric Wu and promised to bring back “founder DNA” to a lackluster Opfinishoor.
Part of Rabois’ revival plan includes taking a closer see at the company’s workforce, which has receivedten too large, Rabois informed CNBC.
“There’s 1,400 employees at Opfinishoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t required more than 200 of them,” Rabois declared.
Founded in 2014, Opfinishoor supports people acquire and sell their homes online and eliminates the required for a real estate agent by combining the acquireing, selling, and closing process into one platform. After years of success and then hitting an all-time-high of $15.6 billion in revenue in 2022, the company has reported falling numbers every year since. Opfinishoor reported revenue of $5.2 billion last year, down about two-thirds from its highs in 2022.
Apart from cutting workers, Rabois declared he wants to revive Opfinishoor’s culture by having employees work in the office.
“The culture was broken,” Rabois declared. “These people were working remotely. That doesn’t work. This company was founded on the principle of innovation and working toobtainher in person. We’re going to return to our roots.”
Rabois is the latest tech leader turning to layoffs as a way to boost profitability and efficiency. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 the company’s “year of efficiency” and proceeded to cut headcount and flatten leadership structures. Since then, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff have all overseen thousands of layoffs as they also see to AI to fill in the gaps.
In Opfinishoor’s case, cutting back on the company’s “bloated G&A” (general and administrative expenses) will ensure company costs won’t serve as a headwind as it goes through its normal boom and bust cycles, Rabois declared in an interview on the Sourcery podcast published Monday. Shopify’s former chief operating officer, Kaz Nejatian will also support right the ship as new CEO, Rabois declared, as well as a fresh $40 million capital raise by his cofounder Wu and VC firm Khosla Ventures.
Rabois declared he has a multi-step playbook to bring back the struggling company, whose share price plummeted below $1 for most of 2024 and 2025. After the company announced the executive alters and Rabois’ return last week, the company’s stock skyrocketed by 80%. Shares of Opfinishoor were trading down 3.5% at $9.14 as of early morning trading Tuesday.
Rabois has decades of experience in the technology indusattempt. He built his name in tech as part of the “PayPal Mafia” alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Rabois also served as an early executive at both LinkedIn and payments company Block, formerly Square.
As an investor at both Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, he has also led investments in companies such as DoorDash and Ramp. Rabois is now managing director at investor Vinod Khosla’s venture capital firm, which manages about $16 billion in assets under management.
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