Photo: Jim Willson-The New York Times/Redux He’s now starting a new, similar company. RULE BREAKER: Parker Conrad’s startup Zenefits admitted violating state insurance rules. (Hampton Creek has denied wrongdoing, describing the buybacks as quality-control testing. It would be another year before Bloomberg Businessweek revealed the scheme, in an article featuring an animated GIF of founder Josh Tetrick’s face covered in squirts of mayonnaise. And what Khosla didn’t know was that Hampton Creek’s employees and contractors had been covertly buying its jars of eggless mayo from grocery stores for more than a year, allegedly as a way to make the product appear more popular to its retail partners. “Here’s a journalist,” he said, “who doesn’t know what’s going on, has an opinion, just like he does, to make interesting stories.” He turned back to Shieber: “I know a lot more about how they’re doing, excuse me, than you do.” Khosla cut him off with a “talk to the hand” motion and turned to the audience with a wide, this guy amirite? grin.

“Debatable,” the journalist, TechCrunch’s Jonathan Shieber, needled before beginning his next question.

Despite media reports of shoddy science at the company on things like shelf-life testing, and an FDA battle over misleading labeling, Khosla declared Hampton Creek was “doing awesome.” Khosla, a legend in Silicon Valley, was a Hampton Creek investor, alongside Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff. But of course the journalist had to bring up Hampton Creek, the vegan-food company that had fashioned itself-and more important, valued itself-like a tech company.

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