Shernaz Dever may be small in stature, but big in influence. Over 30 years in Silicon Valley, she has mastered the art of calling anyone with a simple text: “Can I call you?” or “Let's talk tomorrow” and they do.
Now, as he prepares to leave Khosla Ventures (KV) after nearly five years as the company's first CMO, Dever could be an indicator of where the tech industry is headed. Her career has been an incredibly accurate barometer of what's next in the industry. She was at Inktomi during the search wars of the late '90s (the dot-com high-flyer reached a valuation of $37 billion and then went back on track). She joined Netflix when people laughed at the idea of ordering DVDs online. She helped Walmart compete with Amazon on the technology front. She worked with Guardant Health to explain liquid biopsies before Theranos made blood tests infamous. She even once got dressed down by Steve Jobs over the marketing of Motorola's microprocessors (which could be a short story in itself).
Vinod Khosla, founder of KV, describes working with Devar as follows: “Shernaz has been a huge influence on KV and a valuable partner to our founders as she helped me build the KV brand. I am grateful for her time here and know we will continue to have a close relationship.”
When asked about his reasons for leaving the company, Mr. Daver was as matter-of-fact as ever. “I came to do a job, and that job was to help build the KV brand and the Vinod brand and set up a marketing organization where someone could rely on our company and our portfolio. And I did all that.”
Indeed, when founders think of top AI investors, a few venture companies come to mind, one of which is KV. It's quite a turn for a company that was at one time known more for its legal battles over beach access than for Mr. Khosla's investments.
davor effect
Daver says her success at KV was due to finding the essence of the company and relentlessly pursuing it. “At the end of the day, VC firms don’t have a product,” she explains. “Pick one: Stripe, Rippling, OpenAI. It's different than any other company. You have a product. VCs don't have products. So at the end of the day, VC firms are actually people. They're the product.”
Even before they arrived, KV knew they were “bold, early, and impactful.” But she says those three words were “pasted everywhere.” She then found companies to back up each claim.
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The breakthrough was brought about by the middle word “early.” “What is the definition of early?” she asks. “You either create a category or you're the first to check in.” When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Daver asked Sam Altman if he could talk about KV being the first VC investor. he said so.
“If you can own the original investor story, that helps a lot, because in VC, any liquidity event can take 12 or 15 years and then people forget. If you can say it from the beginning, people remember,” she says.
She repeated the formula over and over again. KV was Square's first investor. We were the first investors in DoorDash. It took two-and-a-half years of persistent behind-the-scenes work to make that message stick, she says. “To me, that's fast, because the industry is moving so fast.” Now, when Khosla appears on stage or elsewhere, he is almost universally described as OpenAI's original investor.
This brings us to perhaps the most important lesson Daver has for the people he works with. It means you have to repeat yourself more times than you feel comfortable to get your point across.
“You’re at 23 miles, the rest of the world is at 5 miles,” she tells founders who complain they’re tired of telling the same story. “You always have to repeat the same thing and say the same thing.”
This is more difficult than it sounds. Especially when dealing with people who are always busy with day-to-day tasks that feel more important. “Founders tend to be very motivated and move very quickly.” [that] In their heads they are already [on to the next thing]. But the rest of the world [back] Here it is,” she explains.
Daver also makes sure that every company she works with has what she calls an “equality movement.” She draws an equal sign to test clarity of purpose. “When I say 'search,' you say 'Google.' When I say 'shopping,' you say 'Amazon.' If I say “toothpaste,'' you'll probably say “Crest'' or “Colgate.'' ” she tells her clients. “When I say that, what automatically comes to mind for your company's name?”
She appears to have success with certain KV portfolio companies, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems (fusion) and Replit (vibe coding). “Whatever someone says, you automatically think of that person,” she explains. “Think about streaming. The first thing you think of is Netflix, right? Not Disney or Hulu.”
Why “direct action” doesn’t work
Some startup advisors, at least on social media, have been advocating in recent years for startups to bypass traditional media and go “directly” to customers. Daver believes this is a setback, especially for early-stage companies.
“You're doing seed investing and no one's heard of you, and you say, 'Go invest directly.' Now, who's going to even listen to you? Because they don't even know you exist.” She compares it to moving to a new neighborhood. “You don't get invited to the neighborhood barbecue because no one knows you exist.” The way to make a living, she argues, is to get people talking about you.
Daver doesn't think the media is going anywhere anyway. And she doesn't want that to happen either. Her approach includes traditional media layered with video, podcasts, social media, and events. “I look at each of these tactics as infantry, cavalry. And if you can execute all the tactics, [these things] “You can become a gorilla, in a good way,” she says.
“X” question
Dever also has some strong thoughts about the increasingly polarizing and performative nature of social media, and how much founders and venture capitalists should share publicly.
She sees X as “a way to make people more noisy and controversial than in person.” It's like a bumper sticker, she says. A hot take that fits into a small space.
She believes that inflammatory posts are primarily driven by the need to remain relevant. “If you don’t have something to sell and it’s all about you, you need to make it relevant.”
At KV, she manages the company's account but has no control over what Khosla posts on his personal account. “There's definitely a freedom of speech aspect to it,” Daver said. “And at the end of the day, his name will be engraved on the door.”
Still, her policy is straightforward. “You want to share about your kid's soccer game? About the PTA? Go ahead and do it. If you want to share something that hurts your company or hurts your prospects for getting a partner, that's fine. As long as it's not hate speech, you should do whatever you want.”
road to kosla
Dever's career has been a masterclass in being in the right place right before it becomes the right place. She was born in Stanford (her father was a doctoral student there), grew up in India, and returned to Stanford after receiving a Pell Grant. She wanted to work on Sesame Street, bringing education to the masses, and went to Harvard University to study interactive technology.
That didn't work. She sent out 100 resumes and received 100 rejections. She came closest to getting a job at Electronic Arts (EA), which was led by founding CEO Trip Hawkins, but “at the last minute, Hawkins rescinded his resignation,” she said.
The woman there suggested Daver try PR instead. This led to semiconductor marketing, including a memorable encounter with Mr. Jobs, who at the time was running the computer company NeXT. Daver was the last person in the meeting about Motorola's 68040 chip. Mr. Jobs showed up 45 minutes late and said, “You did a terrible job marketing 68040.”
She defended her team (“But we did all this great stuff,” Daver recalls saying), “and he just said, 'No, you don't know what you did.' And no one defended me.” (She said 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 Solaris operating system and the Java programming language. She then returned to Trip Hawkins' second video game company, 3DO. She then moved to Inktomi, where she became the company's first and only CMO. “We were way ahead of Google” in search, she says. The internet bubble burst shortly thereafter, and within a few years Inktomi was partially sold off.
Consulting and full-time roles will follow, including at Netflix in the DVD-by-mail era. Walmart, Khan Academy, Guardant Health, Udacity, 10x Genomics, GV, Kitty Hawk.
At that time, I received a call from Khosla. She didn't recognize the number and it took a week to hear the voicemail. “I called him, and from that he convinced me to come and work with him, and I told him all the reasons why it would be really, really bad for us to work together.”
Nine months later, “despite most people telling me not to” (Khosla is known for being demanding), “very much like the rest of my life, I accepted it.”
the real deal
“Everyone sounds the same,” Daver says of one of the challenges Silicon Valley as a whole has to deal with. “Everyone is so scripted,” she says of corporate communications and CEOs. “They all sound the same, so for a lot of people, Sam is [Altman] It's very refreshing. ”
She talked about the day last month when Khosla appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt and then went to another event. “The host was like, 'Oh my God, I heard what Vinod said on stage. You would have cringed.' And I'm like, 'No, what he said was great.' ”
So where will Daver land next? All she says about her future is “another chance.”
But given her track record of always arriving just before the crest of a wave, it's worth keeping an eye on. She was early on in search, streaming, genomics, and AI. She has a talent for seeing the future before others. And she knows how to tell that story until we catch up.