Inktomi<\/a> during the search wars of the late \u201990s (the dot.com high-flier hit a $37 billion 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 (which could be its own short story).<\/p>\nKV\u2019s founder Vinod Khosla portrays his work with Daver thus: \u201cShernaz had a strong impact at KV as she helped me build our KV brand and was a valuable partner to our founders. I\u2019m grateful for her time here and know we\u2019ll stay close.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about why she is leaving the firm, Daver was typically matter-of-fact. \u201cI came to do a job, and the job was to build out the KV brand and to build out Vinod\u2019s brand, and to help set up a marketing organization such that our companies and portfolios have somebody to go to. And I\u2019ve done all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s certainly true that when founders think of top AI investors, two to three venture firms spring to mind, and one of them is KV. It\u2019s quite a turnaround for a firm that, for a period, was better known for Khosla\u2019s legal battle over beach access than for his investments.<\/p>\n
The Daver effect<\/p>\n
Daver says her success at KV came down to finding the firm\u2019s essence and hammering it relentlessly. \u201cAt the end of the day, a VC firm doesn\u2019t have a product,\u201d she explains. \u201cUnlike any company \u2014 pick one, Stripe, Rippling, OpenAI \u2014 you have a product. VCs don\u2019t have a product. So at the end of the day, a VC firm is actually the people. They are the product itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
KV had already identified itself as \u201cbold, early, and impactful\u201d before she arrived. But she says she took those three words and \u201cplastered them everywhere.\u201d Then she found the companies to substantiate each claim.<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The breakthrough came with that middle word: early. \u201cWhat is the definition of early?\u201d she asks. \u201cEither you create a category, or you\u2019re the first check in.\u201d When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Daver asked Sam Altman if it was okay to talk about KV being the first VC investor. He said yes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you can own that first investor narrative, it helps a lot,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause sometimes what happens in VC is it takes 12 years or 15 years for any kind of liquidity event, and then people forget. If you can say it right from the start,\u201d people remember.<\/p>\n
She repeated the formula, time and again. KV was the first investor in Square. It was the first investor in DoorDash. Behind the scenes, it took two and a half years of persistent effort for that message to stick, she says. \u201cTo me, that\u2019s fast, just because the industry is moving really fast.\u201d Now when Khosla appears on stage or elsewhere, he is almost uniformly described as the first investor in OpenAI.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to perhaps Daver\u2019s most important lesson for the people she works with: To get your point across, you have to repeat yourself far more than feels comfortable.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re on mile 23, the rest of the world is on mile five,\u201d she tells founders who complain they\u2019re tired of telling the same story. \u201cYou have to repeat yourself all the time, and you have to say the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s harder than it sounds, especially when dealing with people mired in day-to-day operations that invariably feel more critical. \u201cFounders tend to be so driven and tend to move so fast [that] in their head, they\u2019re already [on to the next thing]. But the rest of the world is [back] here,\u201d she explains. <\/p>\n
Daver also makes every company she works with do what she calls \u201cthe equals exercise.\u201d She draws an equal sign, then tests their clarity of purpose. \u201cIf I say \u2018search,\u2019 you say \u2018Google.\u2019 If I say \u2018shopping,\u2019 you say \u2018Amazon.\u2019 If I say \u2018toothpaste,\u2019 you probably say \u2018Crest\u2019 or \u2018Colgate.\u2019\u201d She tells her clients: \u201cWhat is the thing that when I say it, you automatically think of your company\u2019s name?\u201d<\/p>\n
She has seemingly succeeded with certain KV portfolio companies, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems (nuclear fusion) and Replit (vibe coding). \u201cIt\u2019s just, whatever the word is that somebody says, you automatically think of them,\u201d she explains. \u201cTake streaming \u2013 the number one thing you think of is Netflix, right? Not Disney or Hulu.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why \u2018going direct\u2019 doesn\u2019t work<\/p>\n
Some startup advisors, at least on social media, have in recent years advocated for startups to bypass traditional media and \u201cgo direct\u201d to customers. Daver thinks that\u2019s backwards, especially for early-stage companies.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have a seed investment, nobody\u2019s heard of you, and then you say, \u2018go direct.\u2019 Well, who\u2019s going to even hear you? Because they don\u2019t even know you exist.\u201d She likens it to moving into a new neighborhood. \u201cYou\u2019re not invited to the neighborhood barbecue because nobody knows you exist.\u201d The way to exist, she argues, is to have somebody talk about you.<\/p>\n
Daver doesn\u2019t think the media is going anywhere, in any case \u2014 and she wouldn\u2019t want it to. Her approach includes traditional media layered with video, podcasts, social media and events. \u201cI look at each of these tactics as infantry, as cavalry, and if you can manage to do all of [these things] in a good way, you can manage to become the gorilla,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The \u201cX\u201d question<\/p>\n
Daver also has some strong ideas about the increasingly polarized and performative nature of social media, and how much founders and VCs should share publicly.<\/p>\n
She sees X as \u201ca vehicle that makes people be more loud and more controversial than they might be in person.\u201d It\u2019s like a bumper sticker, she says: a hot take you can fit in a small space.<\/p>\n
She thinks inflammatory posting is driven mostly by the need to stay relevant. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have something to sell and it\u2019s just you, you have to be relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n
At KV, she controls the firm\u2019s account, but has no control over what Khosla posts on his personal account. \u201cThere has to be some part that\u2019s freedom of speech,\u201d says Daver. \u201cAnd at the end of the day, it\u2019s his name on the door.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, her policy is straightforward: \u201cYou want to share about your kids\u2019 soccer game? PTA? Go ahead and do it. If you share anything that hurts the company or hurts the prospects for us getting partners, that\u2019s not okay. As long as it\u2019s not hate speech,you should do what you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
The path to Khosla<\/p>\n
Daver\u2019s career has been a masterclass in being at the right place just before it becomes the obvious place to be. Born at Stanford (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, bringing education to the masses.<\/p>\n
That didn\u2019t work out: she sent out 100 resumes and got 100 rejections. She got closest to a job at Electronic Arts (EA) under founding CEO Trip Hawkins, but \u201cat the last minute, Hawkins nixed the rec.\u201d<\/p>\n
A woman there suggested Daver try PR instead. That led to marketing semiconductors, including that memorable meeting with Jobs, who was then running his computer company NeXT. Daver was the lowest-ranking person in a meeting about Motorola\u2019s 68040 chip. Jobs showed up 45 minutes late and said: \u201cYou did a terrible job of marketing the 68040.\u201d<\/p>\n
She defended her team (\u201cBut we did all of this great stuff,\u201d Daver recalls saying), \u201cand he just went, \u2018No, you have no idea what you did.\u2019 And nobody defended me.\u201d (She says she would have done anything to work with Jobs, despite his reputation as a taskmaster.)<\/p>\n
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 CMO. \u201cWe were further ahead than Google\u201d in search, she says. Soon after, the internet bubble burst and within a few years, Inktomi was sold off in parts.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Then came the phone call from Khosla. She didn\u2019t recognize the number and took a week to listen to the voicemail. \u201cI called him, and that started this process of him convincing me to come and work with him, and my telling him all the reasons it would be really, really bad for us to work together.\u201d<\/p>\n
After nine months, \u201ccontrary to most people telling me not to do it,\u201d (Khosla is known as demanding), \u201cvery similar to the rest of my life, I took it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The real deal<\/p>\n
Daver describes one challenge she has to deal with across Silicon Valley: everyone sounds the same. \u201cEverybody is so scripted,\u201d she says of corporate communications and CEOs. \u201cThey all sound the same. That\u2019s why, for a lot of people, Sam [Altman] is very refreshing.\u201d<\/p>\n
She tells a story about the day last month that Khosla appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt, then went to another event. \u201cThe organizer said something like, \u2018Oh my gosh, I heard what Vinod said on stage<\/a>. You must have been shrinking.\u2019 And I\u2019m going, \u2018No, that was great, what he said.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\nSo where will Daver land next? She\u2019s not saying, describing her future only as \u201cdifferent opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n
But given her track record \u2014 always arriving just before the wave crests \u2014 it\u2019s worth watching. She was early to search, early to streaming, early to genomics, 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shernaz Daver is small in stature but big in influence. Over three decades in Silicon Valley, she\u2019s mastered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,52327,85301,80,53619],"class_list":{"0":"post-150640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-khosla-ventures","14":"tag-shernaz-daver","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-vinod-khosla"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}