Shernaz Daver is small in stature but big in influence. Over three decades in Silicon Valley, she has mastered the art of getting anyone on the phone with a simple text like “Can you call me?” or “Let’s talk tomorrow.” And they do. Now, as she prepares to leave Khosla Ventures after nearly five years as the firm’s first-ever Chief Marketing Officer, Daver could be an indicator of where the tech world is headed. Her career has been a remarkably accurate barometer of the industry’s next big thing to date.
She was at Inktomi during the search wars of the late nineties, when the dot-com high-flier hit a thirty-seven billion dollar valuation before spiraling back to earth. She joined Netflix when people laughed at the idea of ordering DVDs online. She helped Walmart compete with Amazon on technology. She worked with Guardant Health to explain liquid biopsies before Theranos made blood testing infamous. She was even dressed down once by Steve Jobs over the marketing of a Motorola microprocessor.
Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla portrays his work with Daver thus. He said Shernaz had a strong impact at the firm as she helped him build their brand and was a valuable partner to their founders. He is grateful for her time there and knows they will stay close.
Asked about why she is leaving the firm, Daver was typically matter-of-fact. She said she came to do a job, and the job was to build out the Khosla Ventures brand and Vinod’s brand, and to help set up a marketing organization so their companies and portfolios have somebody to go to. She stated she has done all of that.
It is certainly true that when founders think of top AI investors, two to three venture firms spring to mind, and one of them is Khosla Ventures. This is quite a turnaround for a firm that, for a period, was better known for Khosla’s legal battle over beach access than for his investments.
Daver says her success at Khosla Ventures came down to finding the firm’s essence and hammering it relentlessly. She explains that at the end of the day, a VC firm does not have a product. Unlike any company, you have a product. Venture capital firms do not have a product. So a VC firm is actually the people. They are the product itself.
The firm had already identified itself as bold, early, and impactful before she arrived. But she says she took those three words and plastered them everywhere. Then she found the companies to substantiate each claim.
The breakthrough came with that middle word, early. She asks what the definition of early is. Either you create a category, or you are the first check in. When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Daver asked Sam Altman if it was okay to talk about Khosla Ventures being the first VC investor. He said yes.
She says if you can own that first investor narrative, it helps a lot, because sometimes what happens in venture capital is it takes twelve years or fifteen years for any kind of liquidity event, and then people forget. If you can say it right from the start, people remember.
She repeated the formula, time and again. Khosla Ventures was the first investor in Square. It was the first investor in DoorDash. Behind the scenes, she says it took two and a half years of persistent effort for that message to stick. To her, that is fast, just because the industry is moving really fast. Now when Khosla appears on stage or elsewhere, he is almost uniformly described as the first investor in OpenAI.
This brings us to perhaps Daver’s most important lesson for the people she works with. To get your point across, you have to repeat yourself far more than feels comfortable. She tells founders who complain they are tired of telling the same story that they are on mile twenty-three, and the rest of the world is on mile five. You have to repeat yourself all the time, and you have to say the same thing.
She explains it is harder than it sounds, especially when dealing with people mired in day-to-day operations that invariably feel more critical. Founders tend to be so driven and tend to move so fast that in their head, they are already on to the next thing. But the rest of the world is back here. And because founders tend to be so driven, they tend to underestimate how long others will take to catch up.
Daver also makes every company she works with do what she calls the equals exercise. She draws an equal sign, then tests their clarity of purpose. If she says search, you say Google. If she says shopping, you say Amazon. If she says toothpaste, you probably say Crest or Colgate. She tells her clients to identify the thing that when she says it, you automatically think of your company’s name.
She has seemingly succeeded with certain Khosla Ventures portfolio companies, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems for nuclear fusion and Replit for vibe coding. She explains it is just that whatever the word is that somebody says, you automatically think of them. Take streaming, the number one thing you think of is Netflix, not Disney or Hulu.
Some startup advisors, at least on social media, have in recent years advocated for startups to bypass traditional media and go direct to customers. Daver thinks that is backwards, especially for early-stage companies. She points out that if you have a seed investment and nobody has heard of you, and then you say go direct, who is going to even hear you, because they do not even know you exist. She likens it to moving into a new neighborhood. You are not invited to the neighborhood barbecue because nobody knows you exist. The way to exist, she argues, is to have somebody talk about you.
Daver does not think the media is going anywhere, in any case, and she would not want it to. Her approach includes traditional media layered with video, podcasts, social media and events. She looks at each of these tactics as infantry, as cavalry, and says if you can manage to do all of these things in a good way, you can manage to become the gorilla.
Daver also has some strong ideas about the increasingly polarized and performative nature of social media, and how much founders and venture capitalists should share publicly. She sees the platform X as a vehicle that makes people be more loud and more controversial than they might be in person. She says it is like a bumper sticker, a hot take you can fit in a small space.
She thinks inflammatory posting is driven mostly by the need to stay relevant. If you do not have something to sell and it is just you, you have to be relevant. At Khosla Ventures, she controls the firm’s account, but has no control over what Khosla posts on his personal account. She says there has to be some part that is freedom of speech, and at the end of the day, it is his name on the door.
Still, her policy is straightforward. She says if you want to share about your kids’ soccer game or PTA, go ahead and do it. If you share anything that hurts the company or hurts the prospects for us getting partners, that is not okay. As long as it is not hate speech, you should do what you want.
Daver’s career has been a masterclass in being at the right place just before it becomes the obvious place to be. Born at Stanford while her father was a PhD student there, she grew up in India and came back to Stanford on a Pell Grant. She went to Harvard to study interactive technologies, hoping to work for Sesame Street and bring education to the masses.
That did not work out. She sent out one hundred resumes and got one hundred rejections. She got closest to a job at Electronic Arts under founding CEO Trip Hawkins, but at the last minute, Hawkins nixed the opening. A woman there suggested Daver try public relations instead. That led to marketing semiconductors used by Electronic Arts, including that memorable meeting with Steve Jobs, who was then running his computer company NeXT. Daver was the lowest-ranking person in a meeting about Motorola’s 68040 chip. Jobs showed up forty-five minutes late and said they did a terrible job of marketing the chip.
She defended her team, saying they did all of this great stuff, and she recalls Jobs just went, no, you have no idea what you did. And nobody defended her. She says she would have done anything to work with Jobs, despite his reputation as a taskmaster.
From there, she headed to Sun Microsystems in Paris, where she worked with Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt on the operating system Solaris and the programming language Java. Afterwards, she rejoined Trip Hawkins at his second video game company, 3DO; then it was on to Inktomi, where she was the first and only Chief Marketing Officer. She says they were further ahead than Google in search. Soon after, the internet bubble burst and within a few years, Inktomi was sold off in parts.
Consulting and full-time roles would follow, including at Netflix during the DVD-by-mail era; Walmart, Khan Academy, Guardant Health, Udacity, 10x Genomics, GV, and Kitty Hawk. Then came the phone call from Vinod Khosla. She did not recognize the number and took a week to listen to the voicemail. She called him back, and that started this process of him convincing her to come and work with him, and her telling him all the reasons it would be really, really bad for them to work together.
After nine months, and contrary to most people telling her not to do it because Khosla is known as demanding, she took the job, very similar to the rest of her life.
Daver describes one challenge she has to deal with across Silicon Valley: everyone sounds the same. She says everybody is so scripted when it comes to corporate communications and chief executives. They all sound the same. That is why, for a lot of people, Sam Altman is very refreshing.
She tells a story about the day last month that Khosla appeared at a TechCrunch event, then went to another event. The organizer said something like they heard what Vinod said on stage and asked if Daver must have been shrinking. And Daver said no, that was great, what he said.
So where will Daver land next? She is not saying, describing her future only as different opportunities. But given her track record of always arriving just before the wave crests, it is worth watching. She was early to search, early to streaming, early to genomics, and early to AI. She has a knack for seeing the future just before most others. And she knows how to tell that story until the rest of us catch up.