Shernaz Daver is small in stature but big in influence. Over three decades in Silicon Valley, he has mastered the art of getting anyone on the phone with a simple text: “Can you call me?” or “Let’s talk tomorrow.” And they do.
Now, as she prepares to leave Khosla Ventures ( KV ) after nearly five years as the company’s first CMO, Daver could be an indicator of where the tech world is headed. Her career has been an extremely accurate barometer of the industry’s next big thing to date. It was in Inktomi during the search wars of the late 90s (highflier dot.com hit a $37 billion valuation before coming back down to earth). He joined Netflix when people laughed at the idea of ordering DVDs online. It helped Walmart compete with Amazon in technology. He partnered with Guardant Health to explain liquid biopsies before Theranos made the blood tests infamous. She was even once worn by Steve Jobs to market a Motorola microprocessor (which could be its own short story).
KV founder Vinod Khosla describes his work with Daver as follows: “Shernaz has had a strong impact on KV as she has helped me build our KV brand and has been a valuable partner to our founders. I am grateful for her time here and know we will remain close.”
Asked why she is leaving the company, Daver was usually on the subject. “I came to do a job and the job was to build the KV brand and build the Vinod brand and help build a marketing organization so that our companies and portfolios have someone to go to. And I’ve done all of that.”
It’s certainly true that when founders think of top AI investors, two to three venture firms come to mind, and one of them is KV. It’s a major turnaround for a company that, for a time, was better known for Khosla’s legal battle over beach access than for its investments.
The Daver effect
Daver says her success at KV is down to finding the essence of the company and forging it relentlessly. “At the end of the day, a VC firm doesn’t have a product,” he explains. “Unlike any company—pick one, Stripe, Rippling, OpenAI—you have a product. VCs don’t have a product. So at the end of the day, a VC firm is really the people. It’s the product itself.”
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KV had already defined herself as “bold, precocious and impressive” before she arrived. But he says he took those three words and “plastered them all over the place.” He then found the companies to substantiate each claim.
The discovery came with this middle word: early. “What is the definition of early?” she asks. “Either you’re creating a category, or you’re the first to check in.” When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, Daver asked Sam Altman if it was okay to talk about KV as the first VC investor. He said yes.
“If you can own that investor-first narrative, it helps a lot,” he says, “because sometimes what happens in VC is that it takes 12 years or 15 years for any kind of liquidity event, and then people forget. If you can say that from the beginning,” people remember.
He repeated the formula, over and over. KV was the first investor in Square. He was the first investor in DoorDash. Behind the scenes, it took two and a half years of persistent effort to get that message to stick, he says. “To me, that’s fast, just because the industry moves so fast.” Now, when Khosla appears on stage or elsewhere, he is almost uniformly described as an early investor in OpenAI.
Which brings us to perhaps Daver’s most important lesson for the people she works with: To get your point across, you need to repeat yourself far more than you’re comfortable with.
“You’re at mile 23, the rest of the world is at mile five,” he tells founders who complain they’re tired of telling the same story. “You have to repeat yourself all the time and you have to say the same thing.”
It’s harder than it sounds, especially when you’re dealing with people immersed in day-to-day operations who always feel more judgmental. “Founders tend to be so driven and tend to move so fast [that] in their head, it already is [on to the next thing]. But the rest of the world is [back] here,” he explains.
Daver also makes every company she works with do what she calls “the equivalency exercise.” He draws an equal sign and then tests their clarity of purpose. “If I say ‘search’, you say ‘Google.’ If I say ‘shopping’, you say ‘Amazon’. If I say “toothpaste”, you probably say “Crest” or “Colgate”. She tells her clients, “What is it that when I say it, you automatically think of your company name?”
He seems to have hit it off with some KV portfolio companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems (nuclear fusion) and Replit (vibe coding). “It’s just that whatever word someone says, you automatically think of them,” he explains. “Get streaming – the number one thing you think of is Netflix, right? Not Disney or Hulu.”
Because “going direct” doesn’t work
Some startup advisors, at least on social media, have argued in recent years that startups should bypass traditional media and “go direct” to customers. Daver believes this is counterproductive, especially for early-stage companies.
“You have an initial investment, no one has heard of you, and then you say, ‘go direct.’ So, who will listen to you? Because they don’t even know you exist.” He likens it to moving to a new neighborhood. “You’re not invited to the neighborhood barbecue because no one knows you exist.” The way to exist, he argues, is to have someone speak for you.
Daver doesn’t think the media is going anywhere, under any circumstances — and she wouldn’t want it to. Her approach includes traditional media layered with video, podcasts, social media and events. “I look at each of these tactics as infantry, as cavalry and if you can do it all [these things] in a good way, you can manage to be the gorilla,” he says.
Daver also has some powerful insights about the increasingly polarized and performative nature of social media and how much founders and VCs should be sharing publicly.
He sees X as “a vehicle for people to be louder and more controversial than they might be in person.” It’s like a bumper sticker, he says: a hot shot you can fit into a small space.
He believes the incendiary post is mostly driven by the need to stay relevant. “If you don’t have anything to sell and it’s just you, you have to be relevant.”
At KV, he controls the company account, but has no control over what Khosla posts on his personal account. “There has to be some piece that is free speech,” says Daver. “And at the end of the day, it’s his name on the door.”
But its policy is clear: “You want to share your kids’ soccer game? PTA? Go ahead and do it. If you’re sharing something that hurts the company or hurts our prospects of getting partners, that’s not OK. As long as it’s not hate speech, you should do whatever you want.”
The path to Kosla
Daver’s career has been a masterclass in being in the right place just before it became the obvious place to be. Born at Stanford (her father was a PhD there), she grew up in India and returned to Stanford on a Pell grant. He went to Harvard to study interactive technologies, hoping to work for Sesame Street, bringing education to the masses.
This didn’t work: He sent out 100 resumes and got 100 rejections. He came very close to a job at Electronic Arts (EA) under founding CEO Trip Hawkins, but “at the last minute, Hawkins turned down the rec.”
A woman there suggested Daver try PR. This led to semiconductor marketing, including this memorable meeting with Jobs, who was then running his NeXT computer company. Daver was the lowest ranked person in a meeting about Motorola’s 68040 chip. Jobs appeared 45 minutes late and said, “You did a terrible job marketing 68040.”
She stood up for her team (“But we did all these great things,” Daver recalls saying), “and just said, ‘No, you have no idea what you’ve done.’ And no one defended me.” (He says he would have done anything to work with Jobs, despite his reputation as a taskmaster.)
From there, he headed to Sun Microsystems in Paris, where he worked with Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt on the Solaris operating system and the Java programming language. He then rejoined Trip Hawkins at his second video game company, 3DO. then moved to Inktomi, where she was the first and only CMO. “We were ahead of Google” in search, he says. Soon after, the Internet bubble burst, and within a few years, Inktomi was sold 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 Kosla. He didn’t recognize the number and it took a week to hear the voicemail. “I called him and that started this process of him convincing me to come work with him and telling him all the reasons it would be very, very bad for us to work together.”
After nine months, “unlike most people who tell me not to” (Khosla is known to be demanding), “I took it very much like the rest of my life.”
The real deal
He hasn’t looked back. Instead, Daver describes a challenge she faces throughout Silicon Valley (but not with Khosla): Everyone sounds the same. “Everyone is so scripted,” she says of corporate communications and CEOs. “They all sound the same. That’s why, for many people, Sam [Altman] it’s very refreshing.”
He tells a story about the day Khosla showed up at TechCrunch Disrupt and then went to another event. “The promoter said something like, ‘Oh my God, I heard what Vinod said on stage. You must have shrunk.’ And I’m like, ‘No, that was great what he said.’
So where will Daver land? She’s not saying, describing her future only as “different opportunities.” But given her track record – always arriving just before the peak of the wave – it’s worth watching. It was early for search, early for streaming, early for genomics, early for artificial intelligence. He has the ability to see the future just before most others.
And he knows how to tell that story until the rest of us catch up.
