Facebook, Google vet Ben Ling on what he's tackling at Khosla

Ben Ling joined Khosla Ventures about two months ago.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Ben Ling joined Khosla Ventures in May but he isn't a novice at startup investing. During his years at Facebook, Google and Badoo, he was an active angel with more than 80 investments.
So he already had a track record before he joined one of Silicon Valley's premier venture firms. Ling talked to me about his past investments and why he joined Khosla in a conversation that is excerpted here.
At Facebook and Google, Ling was a product executive. At Badoo he was chief operating officer, a post he vacated last fall.
How long have been with the firm now?
I have been with the firm for a little over I think, just around two months.
You probably haven’t made any investments yet, right?
Actually to the contrary, we have made several investments.
Who have you invested in and why?
I would love to share with you, but it has not yet been announced by the portfolio companies.
Can you talk about the areas that you are investing in then?
Let me talk a little bit historically about what I have done and then I can walk you through the transition between that and what I am doing now.
I invested personally for the last four years. This came mainly in two-sided or three-sided networks because a lot of my background was in those type of networks.
In commerce, it was consumers and merchants. At Facebook it was developers, consumers and advertisers. When I was running partnerships at YouTube, it was content partners, consumers and advertisers. When I was running research product at Google, it was publishers, consumers and advertisers.
One major theme that I invested in quite a bit and I still will do going forward was flash marketplaces. The second is in many of the content areas that I have worked in. And the third is just investing in extraordinary great people, you know and in great talent, so that will continue as well.