Vinod Khosla trashed a portfolio company — and the startup world has thoughts

Vinod Khosla trashed a portfolio company — and the startup world has thoughts Vinod Khosla has got some heat from the startup world over his comments about Factory AI. Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference In Silicon Valley, investing in competitors is increasingly standard practice. Publicly trashing one of them is not.Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, sparked a wave of criticism on Wednesday after publicly taking sides in a spat between Factory AI and Cognition — two rival AI coding startups — even though his firm has invested in both of them. Khosla sided emphatically with Cognition, calling Factory a “struggling second tier competitor” and accusing its founder of lying out of "desperation."Khosla's comments came after Factory CEO Matan Grinberg said the company was terminating Chris Degnan, its board observer and advisor, for "unethical conduct involving Cognition." Degnan said he had resigned before any termination and disputed sharing Factory information with Cognition.Degnan announced shortly afterward that he was joining Cognition as its chief revenue officer. Cognition CEO Scott Wu denied the company had asked employees to gather information about competitors “under-the-table.”All of this played out in the very public arena of X, and Khosla's comments were met with disagreement from startup founders and investors.You are a struggling second tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation. Straight out lying about if Chris being fired I thought would be below even you. https://t.co/5pyZlYcry8— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) September 30, 2026 "If they are struggling second-tier losers, why did you just invest in them a few weeks ago at a multi-billion dollar valuation?" wrote Palmer Luckey, the cofounder of defense technology company Anduril, in a Thursday reply on X.Khosla Ventures was a key investor in Factory's $200 million funding round that it announced last month.Khosla Ventures did not respond to a request for comment. Spenser Skates, the CEO of product analytics company Amplitude, wrote that it was “another great reason not to raise from Vinod." He called Khosla “one of the biggest bullies of founders in the VC ecosystem” and added that the investor was doing so to “one of his own portfolio companies no less.”Khosla Ventures' managing director, Keith Rabois, appeared to take the side of Factory AI. "To even sit for an interview while having access to board-level information and without resigning is absolutely insane," Rabois wrote on X.Nathan Lands, an entrepreneur and angel investor in Factory, said Khosla had “clearly crossed a line,” adding that founders should not let VCs tell them that conflicts of interest do not matter. The spat and Khosla's comments also opened the meme floodgates. Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, joined in with a meme captioned: “VCs ‘adding value.’”The backlash puts a spotlight on an awkward yet increasingly common practice in the AI boom: venture firms spreading bets across rival startups. What do startup spats on X usually have in common? Memes. X Cognition, the maker of the AI coding agent Devin, is valued at $48 billion after raising more than $2 billion in September. Factory AI, which hit a $5 billion valuation last month, sells AI "Droids" designed to automate work across the software-development process.At the frontier-lab level, Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund are among the firms that have backed both OpenAI and Anthropic, despite the companies' fierce competition for talent, customers, and computing. In June, a Wired analysis of PitchBook data found that roughly 90 investors hold stakes in both labs. Salesforce Ventures has also invested in competing AI labs, Cohere and Mistral AI. Read next Shuby is a senior reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau, where she writes about tech, with a focus on AI training and vibe-coding startups.She previously interned for Bloomberg News and CNBC. She studied communications and business at the National University of Singapore. In 2026, she won the Singapore Press Club Tech Journalism Award for her work on the hidden human cost of Meta's chatbot training program and an exposé on the black market for AI gig-work accounts.Have a tip? Contact her via email at sgoel@insider.com or on secure messaging app Signal at @shuby.85. We can keep sources anonymous. Startups Venture Capital Silicon Valley More Vibe Mode