The marketing expert who helped turn Khosla Ventures into an AI powerhouse is moving forward

Shernaz Daver is small in stature but big in influence. Over three decades in Silicon Valley, she’s mastered the art of getting anyone to pick up 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-ever CMO, Daver could be an indicator of where the tech world is headed. Her career has been a remarkably accurate barometer of the next big thing in the industry so far. She was at Inktome During the search wars of the late 1990s (dot.com Highflier was valued at $37 billion before it came back down to earth). She joined Netflix when people laughed at the idea of ​​ordering DVDs online. It helped Walmart compete with Amazon in technology. She worked with Guardant Health to demonstrate liquid biopsies before Theranos made the blood test infamous. Even Steve Jobs once made fun of it for marketing the Motorola microprocessor (which could be its short story).

KV founder Vinod Khosla describes his work with Daver this way: “Shernaz has had a strong influence at KV as she helped me build our KV brand and was a valuable partner to our founders. I am grateful for her time here and know we will remain close.”

When asked why she left the company, Dever usually responded matter-of-factly. “I came to do a job, and the job was to build the KV brand, build the Vinod brand, and help create a marketing organization so that our companies and portfolios would have someone to go to. And I did all that.”

Certainly, when founders think of top AI investors, two or three venture firms come to mind, and one of them is KV. This is a major shift for a company that for a while was better known for Khosla’s legal battle over beach access than his investments.

Duffer effect

Duffer says her success at KV is down to finding the essence of the company and working on it relentlessly. “At the end of the day, a VC firm doesn’t have a product,” she 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, the VC firm is actually the people. They’re the product itself.”

KV had already defined herself as “bold, early and influential” before her arrival. But she says she took those three words and “pasted them everywhere.” Then I found companies to prove each claim.

The breakthrough came with that middle word: early. “What is the definition of early?” she asks. “Either you create a category, or you’re the first to check in.” When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Daver asked Sam Altman if it was okay to talk about KV being the first venture capital investor. He said yes.

“If you can have the investor’s first narrative, that helps a lot, because what sometimes happens in venture capital is that it takes 12 or 15 years for any kind of liquidity event, and then people forget. If you can say it right from the beginning,” she says, people remember.

She repeated the formula over and over again. KV was Square’s first investor. He was the first investor in DoorDash. She says it took two and a half years of continuous effort behind the scenes for this message to stick. “For 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 the first investor in OpenAI.

Which brings us to perhaps the most important lesson Dever teaches the people she works with: In order to get your point across, you have to repeat yourself more often than you feel comfortable.

“You’re on mile 23, and the rest of the world is on mile five,” she tells founders who complain that 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 dealing with people who are immersed in daily operations and always feel like they are more important. “Founders tend to be very driven and they tend to move very quickly in their heads, and they’re already (on their way to the next thing). But the rest of the world is (coming back) here,” she explains.

Duffer also makes every company she works with do what she calls an “equity practice.” You draw an equal sign, then test how clear the target is. “If you say ‘search,’ you say ‘Google.’ If you say ‘shopping,’ you say ‘Amazon.’ If you say ‘toothpaste,’ you probably say ‘Crest’ or ‘Colgate.'” She tells her clients, “What’s the thing that when I say, they automatically think of your company name?”

It appears to have worked for some of KV’s portfolio companies, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems (nuclear fusion) and Replit (biocoding). “Whatever word someone says, you automatically think of it,” she explains. “Let’s take streaming for example — the first thing you think of is Netflix, right? Not Disney or Hulu.”

Why doesn’t “direct approach” work?

Some startup advisors, at least on social media, in recent years have called on startups to bypass traditional media and “go direct” to customers. Duffer 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 straight.’ Well, who will even hear you? Because they don’t even know you exist.” She likens it to moving to a new neighborhood. “You’re not invited to the neighborhood barbecue because no one knows you’re there.” You see that the way to exist is for someone to talk about you.

Dever doesn’t think the media is going anywhere, though, and she doesn’t want to. Her approach includes traditional media mixed with video, podcasts, social media, and events. “I look at each of these tactics as infantry, cavalry, and if you can do all of those things well, you can become a gorilla,” she says.

Duffer also has some strong thoughts about the increasingly polarizing and performative nature of social media, and how much more founders and VCs should share publicly.

She sees X as “a way to make people more vocal and more controversial than they might be in person.” It’s like a bumper sticker: a great shot you can fit into a small space, she says.

She believes inflammatory posting is mostly driven by the need to stay relevant. “If you have nothing to sell and it’s just you, you have to be relevant.”

At KV, she controls the company account, but has no control over what Khosla posts on his personal account. “There has to be some freedom of expression,” Duffer says. “And at the end of the day, his name is on the door.”

However, its policy is clear and straightforward: “Do you want to share about your kids’ soccer game? Or not? Go ahead and do it. If you share anything that hurts the company or hurts our prospects for partners, that’s not okay. As long as it’s not hate speech, you should do whatever you want.”

The road to Khosla

Deaver’s career has been a masterclass in being in the right place before the obvious place becomes. She was born at Stanford University (her father was a doctoral student there), grew up in India and returned to Stanford on a Pell Grant. She went to Harvard to study interactive technologies, hoping to work on Sesame Street, bringing education to the masses.

But it didn’t work: I sent out 100 resumes and received 100 rejections. She came close to getting a job at Electronic Arts (EA) under founding CEO Trip Hawkins, but “at the last minute, Hawkins nixed the job.”

A woman there suggested Deaver try public relations instead. This led to the commercialization of semiconductors, including a memorable meeting with Jobs, who was then running his own computer company, NeXT. Deaver was the lowest-ranking person in a meeting about the Motorola 68040 chip. Jobs showed up 45 minutes late and said, “You did a terrible job marketing the 68040.”

She defended her team (“But we did all these great things,” Dever remembers him saying), “and he said, ‘No, you have no idea what you did.’” “No one defended me.” (She says she would do 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 McNeely and Eric Schmidt on the Solaris operating system and the Java programming language. After that, she rejoined Tripp Hawkins for his second video game company, 3DO; Then it moved to Inktomi, where she was its first and only CMO. “We were further ahead than Google” in search, she says. Soon after, the dot-com 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 Khosla. She didn’t recognize the number and took a week to listen to the voicemail. “I called him, and that’s what convinced me to come and work with him, and tell him all the reasons why working together was so bad for us.”

After nine months, “contrary to what most people say not to” (Khosla is known to be demanding), “just like the rest of my life, I took it.”

The real deal

She hasn’t looked back. Conversely, Dever describes one of the challenges she has to deal with in Silicon Valley (but not with Khosla): everyone looks the same. “Everyone is committed to a script,” she says of corporate communications and executives. “They all look the same. That’s why Sam (Altman) is so refreshing to a lot of people.”

She tells a story about the day Khosla appeared last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, then went to another event. “The organizer said something like, ‘Oh my God, I heard what Vinod said He said on stage. You must have been shrinking. And I’ll say: No, what he said was great.

Where will Duffer land next? She doesn’t say that, she just describes her future as “different opportunities.” But given its track record – always arriving just before the crest of the wave – it’s worth a look. It was early in research, early in streaming, early in genomics, early in artificial intelligence. She has the gift of seeing the future before most others.

She knows how to tell that story so others will follow.