The woman who turned institutional skeptics into believers - one $400 million commitment at a time.
She didn't start in venture capital. She started on the healthcare banking floor at BMO, then went to pitch kitchen gadgets at the Home Shopping Network, then raised $5.7 billion for a late-stage fund almost nobody had heard of. That path matters.
Jen Kha is the Operating Partner and Head of Investor Relations and Fundraising at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In the firm's internal lexicon she runs "Global Partnerships" - which is a precise way of saying she is responsible for every dollar that enters the fund before a single investment is made.
Over a career that spans healthcare banking, corporate strategy at a television retailer, and two of the highest-profile VC firms in Silicon Valley, she has been involved in raising more than $55 billion in limited partner capital. That is a number larger than the GDP of many countries - and she has moved it by building relationships, not spreadsheets.
In 2023 she did something no a16z executive had done before: she registered as a California lobbyist. Not to influence legislation, but because California law requires anyone soliciting commitments from public pension funds to do so. Within months, the state's largest pension fund, CalPERS, committed $400 million to a16z's California Innovation Opportunities fund. The first time in the firm's 14-year history that major California pension capital flowed in.
AI companies are expanding 2.5 times faster than traditional software while spending considerably less on sales and marketing.
- David George, a16z GP - hosted by Jen Kha on State of Markets, Feb 2026
There is an unusual throughline in Jen Kha's career: she has always been the person connecting money to ambition. At BMO Capital Markets, that meant helping healthcare companies understand what Wall Street would pay for them. At HSN - the Home Shopping Network - it meant M&A strategy for a company that sold products to millions of American living rooms via television. At Technology Crossover Ventures, the late-stage growth firm that backed Netflix, Facebook, and Spotify, she ran investor relations and helped raise $5.7 billion across the firm's growth funds.
Each stop looks like a detour on a resume. Together they form something rare: a person who understands capital allocation from the inside (banking), operational complexity (HSN), and the specific demands of institutional LPs who need to believe in a firm before they write a nine-figure check.
When she joined a16z in October 2018, the firm was already famous - Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had built one of the most recognizable brands in venture. But brand does not automatically translate into LP relationships with pension funds. Those relationships require patience, compliance expertise, and the willingness to navigate regulatory regimes that most VC firms actively avoid.
Kha navigated them. In 2023, as a16z prepared to launch its California Innovation Opportunities fund, she filed as a placement agent lobbyist in California - the formal step required to approach CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the UC Regents. It is a registration that most VC firms quietly skip rather than pursue. Kha pursued it. The result: CalPERS became an a16z LP for the first time, committing $400 million to a fund focused on California-based innovation.
California has a rule: if you want to solicit capital from California's public pension funds, you file as a placement agent lobbyist. The law is designed to prevent the pay-to-play scandals that plagued pension investing in the 2000s. Most venture capital firms, including a16z for most of its existence, simply avoided California pension money rather than navigate the compliance requirements.
That calculus changed when a16z wanted to launch its California Innovation Opportunities fund - a vehicle specifically designed to invest in California companies and, in theory, to attract California institutional money. Kha filed the registration. She would, as the documents stated, "attempt to influence" CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the UC Regents.
The language sounds aggressive. The reality was simpler: she was doing her job - making the case for a16z's track record, fund strategy, and alignment with California's economic interests. CalPERS wrote the check. Four hundred million dollars, in a fund that brought Silicon Valley's biggest VC firm into the public pension system for the first time.