Sarah Altabet

The Person Between You and Your Dream Startup Job

There's a moment most startup founders dread: the company just closed a Series A, the board wants headcount in 60 days, and nobody on the team has ever hired a new grad before. That's precisely the moment Sarah Altabet walks in. Not with a pitch deck. With a pipeline.

As the Early Career Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, Altabet does something quietly rare in the VC world: she builds the systems that connect promising students and early-career candidates to the portfolio companies that need them most. Khosla Ventures - the firm Vinod Khosla built on the belief that technology can solve the world's hardest problems - doesn't just fund companies. It helps them hire. And Altabet is how that happens at the entry level.

Her job title says "talent." Her actual job is closer to architecture. She's designing the infrastructure that will determine which students end up inside the companies reshaping healthcare, energy, AI, and space - and which ones never find the door. In a world where the right first job can change the entire trajectory of a career, the person building those on-ramps matters enormously.

From D&I to VC: A Career Built on Opening Doors

Altabet didn't start in venture capital. She started at a company that makes hard drives. Western Digital, with its tens of thousands of employees and sprawling tech campus, is about as far from a scrappy VC-backed startup as you can get. But it's where she learned the core skill that defines her career: finding people who don't yet know they belong somewhere, and convincing them they do.

She joined Western Digital in 2016 as a Diversity and Inclusion Specialist - supporting business resource groups, running unconscious bias training, building the kind of programs that make a large organization slightly less homogeneous. By 2018 she had moved into university recruiting. By 2019 she was Senior Supervisor, running full-cycle recruiting for new grads, interns, and co-ops, developing sourcing strategies designed to create diverse talent pipelines from campus to offer letter.

Then March 2020 happened. When the world shut down and corporate America started canceling internships, Altabet's team went the other direction. They confirmed interns would keep their positions, then built a virtual internship infrastructure from scratch - resources for participants, guides for supervisors, new ways to onboard remotely. The program earned ongoing recognition. RippleMatch nominated her for a Talent Innovator Award at their 2021 Campus Recruiting Choice Awards. Not because the program was flashy. Because it worked when other programs fell apart.

After Western Digital came Rivian - the electric vehicle company that was, at the time, one of the hottest startups in the country. Then Sierra. Each move brought her closer to the startup world, sharpening her instincts for what early-stage companies actually need from their talent function (which is usually: everything, fast, with no playbook).

By the time she joined Khosla Ventures, Altabet had something most VC talent professionals don't: she had actually done the unglamorous work of hiring at scale. She knew what a good intern program required. She knew how to build pipelines. She knew what students needed to hear to take a bet on a company they'd never heard of. That's the knowledge she's now deploying on behalf of a portfolio that spans AI diagnostics to space infrastructure to nuclear fusion.

What "Talent Partner at a VC Firm" Actually Means

The title is deceptively simple. In practice, Altabet sits at the intersection of two worlds that rarely speak directly to each other: the university system, where millions of smart people are trying to figure out what to do next, and the Khosla Ventures portfolio, where dozens of ambitious companies are trying to hire people who haven't been jaded yet.

She builds the recruiting program. That means relationships with campus career centers, showing up where students actually are, creating the infrastructure for portfolio companies to recruit effectively without wasting their engineering time doing it. When a KV portfolio company needs a first engineering intern or a new grad product manager, Altabet's program is the reason they have candidates at all.

She also shows up and talks. In February 2025, she spoke at V1 @ Michigan - a community for ambitious student builders - and covered three things: the KV framework for evaluating founders, how early-stage VC firms assess companies, and (the part everyone came for) how students can actually break into the industry. The session was described as "high-signal." In a world full of vague networking advice, Altabet apparently offers specifics.

She's also hosted AMAs on how startups hire - demystifying a process that trips up even strong candidates who don't know what early-stage recruiting looks like versus big-tech recruiting. These aren't thought-leadership moments for the sake of LinkedIn engagement. They're the kind of straightforward knowledge-sharing that changes what a 22-year-old does with their Tuesday afternoon.

The Firm Behind the Program

Khosla Ventures was founded by Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder who became one of Silicon Valley's most unconventional investors. The firm backs what it calls "black swan" bets - companies doing things considered technically impossible until they suddenly weren't. The portfolio includes names in AI, biotech, climate tech, fintech, and space exploration. The firm manages billions and employs around 180 people from its Menlo Park base on Sand Hill Road.

Working in talent at a firm like this means Altabet's recommendations land at companies that are, genuinely, trying to change the world - or at least a meaningful piece of it. A student she places in a KV portfolio company might end up working on fusion energy, or AI diagnostics, or electric aviation. That's not nothing. It's actually the entire point.

Khosla Ventures' approach to portfolio support is hands-on by design. The firm doesn't just write checks - it provides operational guidance, strategic input, and, via Altabet's program, talent infrastructure. For early-stage companies, having access to a pre-built recruiting pipeline for entry-level and early-career roles is a genuine competitive advantage.