Shernaz Daver is small in stature but big in influence. Over three decades in Silicon Valley, she’s 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 firm’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 industry’s next big thing to date. She was at Inktomi during the search wars of the late ’90s (the dot.com highflier 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). KV’s founder Vinod Khosla portrays his work with Daver thus: “Shernaz had a strong impact at KV as she helped me build our KV brand and was a valuable partner to our founders. I’m grateful for her time here and know we’ll stay close.” Asked about why she is leaving the firm, Daver was typically matter-of-fact. “I came to do a job, and the job was to build out the KV brand and to build out Vinod’s brand, and to help set up a marketing organization such that our companies and portfolios have somebody 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 spring to mind, and one of them is KV. It’s quite a turnaround for a firm that, for a period, was better known for Khosla’s legal battle over beach access than for his investments. The Daver effect Daver says her success at KV came down to finding the firm’s essence and hammering 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, a VC firm is actually the people. They are the product itself.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 KV had already identified itself as “bold, early, and impactful” before she arrived. But she says she took those three words and “plastered them everywhere.” Then she found the companies to substantiate 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 check-in.” 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. “If you can own that first investor narrative, it helps a lot,” she says, “because 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,” people remember. 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. “To me, that’s fast, just because the industry is moving really fast.” Now when Khosla appears onstage or elsewhere, he is almost uniformly described as the first 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 have to repeat yourself far more than feels comfortable. “You’re on mile 23, the rest of the world is on mile five,” she 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 dealing with people mired in day-to-day operations that invariably feel more critical. “Founders tend to be so driven and tend to move so fast [that] in their head, they’re already [on to the next thing]. But the rest of the world is [back] here,” she explains. Daver also makes every company she works with do what she calls “the equals exercise.” She draws an equal sign, 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 the thing that when I say it, you automatically think of your company’s name?” She has seemingly succeeded with certain KV portfolio companies, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems (nuclear fusion) and Replit (vibe coding). “It’s just, whatever the word is that somebody says, you automatically think of them,” she explains. “Take streaming — the number one thing you think of is Netflix, right? Not Disney or Hulu.” Why ‘going direct’ doesn’t work Some startup advisers, a