Keith Rabois, a well-known angel investor and senior executive at social gaming company Slide, is leaving the company and joining Square, a company founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Rabois is joining Square as a general manager, reports The Los Angeles Times.
“The opportunity to work with a world-class entrepreneur was impossible to resist,” he wrote in an email to me. “And the prospect of innovating successfully in payments is rare, and Square has a great plan.” Slide and Square are both backed by Khosla Ventures. Gideon Yu, formerly of Facebook and YouTube and now at Khosla Ventures, played matchmaker for Rabois and Dorsey.
Google recently acquired Slide for $ 182 million (plus $ 46 million in retention bonuses.) As Google tries to graft social DNA into its engineering heavy culture, someone like Rabois would have been a good strategist for the search giant to keep around. Rabois recently discussed what Google should do to become more social on ideas-exchange community, Quora.
“I prefer to be in an operational role and wanted to be an entrepreneur one more time,” he said in an email. Well, he will have his hands full. Dorsey is trying to build an ambitious money exchange platform and having someone with the experience of Rabois, a former PayPal and LinkedIn executive, in his corner will be important. Square is facing a lot of competition from deep-pocketed rivals.
Here is a video interview we did earlier this year with Keith.
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