Shernaz Daver is short in stature but has great influence. Over thirty years of working in Silicon Valley, she has mastered the art of persuading a phone call with a easy text message: “Can you call me?” or “Let’s talk tomorrow.” And so it is.
Now, as he prepares to go away Khosla Ventures (KV) after nearly five years as the company’s first-ever CMO, Daver might be a marker of where the tech world is headed. Her profession was an extremely accurate barometer of the next big events in the industry. It was at Inktomi during the exploration wars of the late Nineteen Nineties (highflier dot.com achieved a $37 billion valuation before returning 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 demystify liquid biopsies before Theranos made blood tests famous. She was even once criticized by Steve Jobs for marketing a Motorola microprocessor (which might be a separate story).
KV founder Vinod Khosla describes his partnership with Daver: “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.”
When asked why he left the company, Daver often answered matter-of-factly. “I came to do a job, and the job was to build the KV brand and the Vinod brand, and also help set up a marketing organization so that our businesses and portfolios had someone to turn to. And I did all of that.”
It’s actually true that when founders think of top AI investors, two or three enterprise firms come to mind, and one of them is KV. That’s quite a change for a company that for a time was higher known for Khosla’s legal battle over beach access than for his investments.
The Daver effect
Daver says her success at KV was about finding the essence of the company and always improving it. “At the end of the day, the VC firm doesn’t have a product,” he explains. “Unlike other companies – pick one, Stripe, Rippling, OpenAI – you have a product. VCs don’t have a product. So at the end of the day, a VC company is really about the people. It’s the product itself.”
KV had already established herself as “bold, early and influential” even before her arrival. But she says she took those three words and “pasted them everywhere.” She then found firms that substantiated each claim.
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The breakthrough got here with that middle word: early. “What is the definition of early?” – he asks. “You either create a category or you are the first person to check in.” When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, Daver asked Sam Altman if KV might be said to be the first VC investor. He said yes.
“If you can get that first investor narrative out there, it helps a lot,” he says, “because sometimes in VC what happens is that any liquidity event takes 12 or 15 years and then people forget. If you can say it right at the beginning,” people remember.
She repeated the formula over and once again. KV was the first investor on the Square. He was an early investor in DoorDash. He says it took two and a half years of constant effort behind the scenes for this message to stay. “For me it’s fast, just because the industry is growing really fast.” Now, every time Khosla appears on the scene or elsewhere, he is almost uniformly known as an early investor in OpenAI.
Which brings us to perhaps the most significant lesson Daver teaches the people he works with: to get your point across, you have to repeat much more often than you’re feeling comfortable with.
“You’re at mile 23, the rest of the world is at mile 5,” he tells founders who complain that they are uninterested in telling the same story. “You have to keep repeating yourself and saying the same thing.”
This is harder than it sounds, especially when dealing with people immersed in their each day activities who invariably feel more critical. “Founders are often very determined and move in a short time [that] in my head, they are already there [on to the next thing]. But the remainder of the world does [back] here,” he explains.
Daver also forces every company he works with to make use of what he calls “equal-peer exercises.” Draws an equal sign and then checks their clarity of purpose. “If I say “search,” you say “Google.” If I say “shopping,” you say “Amazon.” If I say “toothpaste,” you’ll likely say “Crest” or “Colgate.” He tells his clients, “What’s going on that when I say this, you automatically think of your company’s name?”
It has apparently been successful with some of the KV portfolio firms comparable to Commonwealth Fusion Systems (nuclear fusion) and Replit (vibrational coding). “It’s just that no matter what word someone says, you automatically think of that person,” he explains. “Let’s take streaming – the most popular solution you think of is Netflix, right? Not Disney or Hulu.”
Why “going direct” doesn’t work
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 believes this is the opposite approach, especially for early-stage firms.
“You have a seed investment, no one has heard of you, and then you say, ‘Go direct.’ Well, who will even hear you? Because they don’t even know you exist. He compares it to moving to a new neighborhood. “You’re not invited to the neighborhood barbecue because no one knows you exist.” He says the solution to get noticed is to have someone talk about you.
Anyway, Daver doesn’t think the media is going anywhere – and she would not want it to. Her approach includes traditional media combined with video, podcasts, social media and events. “I look at each of these tactics as infantry, as cavalry, and if you can pull it all off [these things] you can become a gorilla in a good way,” he says.
Question “X”.
Daver also has some thoughts on the increasingly polarized and performative nature of social media and how much founders and VCs should share it publicly.
He sees X as “a vehicle that makes people louder and more controversial than they might be in person.” It’s like a bumper sticker, it says: a hot take that may fit into a small space.
He believes that inflammatory posts are mainly driven by the have to stay relevant. “If you have nothing to sell and it’s just you, you must 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 degree of freedom of speech,” Daver says. “And ultimately, his name is on the door.”
Still, its rules are easy: “Want to share information about your kids’ soccer game? PTA? Go ahead and do it. If you’re sharing something that hurts the company or your prospects for finding partners, it’s not okay. As long as it’s not hate speech, you should do whatever you want.”
The road to Khosla
Daver’s profession has been a masterclass in being in the right place before it becomes the obvious place to be. Born at Stanford (her father was a graduate student there), she grew up in India and returned to Stanford on a Pell Grant. She went to Harvard to review interactive technologies, hoping to work for Sesame Street, bringing education to the masses.
It didn’t work out: she sent 100 CVs and got 100 rejections. She got here closest to working at Electronic Arts (EA) under founder CEO Trip Hawkins, but “at the last minute, Hawkins dropped out of the recording.”
The woman suggested Dave try PR as an alternative. This led to the introduction of semiconductors, including a memorable meeting with Jobs, who was then running his computer company, NeXT. Daver was the lowest-ranking person at a meeting about Motorola’s 68040 chip. Jobs showed up 45 minutes late and said, “You did a great job promoting the 68040.”
She defended her team (“But we did so many great things,” Daver remembers), “and he just said, ‘No, you have no idea what you did.’ And no one defended me.” (She says she would do anything to work with Jobs, despite his repute as a taskmaster.)
From there she went to Sun Microsystems in Paris, where she worked with Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt on the Solaris operating system and the Java programming language. She then rejoined Trip Hawkins in his second video game company, 3DO; then she got here to Inktomi, where she was the first and only marketing director. “We were further down in search than Google,” he says. Shortly thereafter, the dotcom bubble burst and inside a few years Inktomi was partially sold out.
Consulting and full-time positions will follow, including at Netflix in the DVD-by-mail era; Walmart, Khan Academy, Guardant Health, Udacity, 10x Genomics, GV and Kitty Hawk.
Then I got a call from Khosla. She didn’t recognize the number and it took her a week to hearken to the voicemail. “I called him and that started the process of convincing me to come and work with him and giving him all the reasons why it would be really, really bad to work with us.”
After nine months, “despite what most people tell me not to do” (Khosla is known for being demanding), “very much like the rest of my life, I embraced it.”
The real deal
Daver describes one challenge he faces across Silicon Valley: Everyone sounds the same. “Everyone is programmed that way,” he says of corporate communications and CEOs. “They all sound the same. That’s why it’s Sam to a lot of people.” [Altman] It’s very refreshing.”
She tells a story about the day last month when Khosla showed up at TechCrunch Disrupt and then went to a different event. “The organizer said something like, ‘Oh my God, I heard what Vinod said on stage. You must have shrunk.’ And I said, “No, that was great what he said.”
So where will Daver land next? He doesn’t say this, describing his future only as “various possibilities.”
But given her track record – all the time arriving just before the crest of a wave – it’s value watching. She began searching early, she got into streaming early, she got into genomics early, and she got into artificial intelligence early. He has a knack for seeing the future right before anyone else. And he knows how one can tell that story until the remainder of us catch up.