A Junior Marketer Defended Her Team to Steve Jobs and Was Shut Down
She was the most junior staffer at the table, and after Jobs dismissed her work, none of her senior colleagues came to her defense.
TechCrunch · The marketing guru who helped turn Khosla Ventures into an AI powerhouse is moving on | TechCrunchShernaz Daver knew she was the most junior staffer at the table. The meeting was about marketing Motorola's 68040 chip, the processing brain that helps a computer run its software.
Then Steve Jobs, the head of the computer company NeXT at the time, walked in 45 minutes late. He looked at the work and said, "You did a terrible job of marketing the 68040."
Daver spoke up. It was early in a career that would later make her a leading marketing executive in Silicon Valley, including nearly five years as the first chief marketing officer of the venture firm Khosla Ventures. At the time, she was just a junior marketer working on semiconductors.
"But we did all of this great stuff," she recalls saying in defense of her team. Jobs cut her off at once. "No, you have no idea what you did," he said. And, as she puts it, "nobody defended me."
She had not planned on marketing chips at all. Daver, who was born at Stanford and grew up in India, had returned to the United States to learn how computers could help teach, with the hope of joining Sesame Street and bringing education to the masses. She applied for 100 jobs and was turned down for all of them.
She came closest at Electronic Arts, the video game maker, under founding chief executive Trip Hawkins. At the last minute, Hawkins canceled the hire. A woman there suggested she try public relations instead. That advice steered her toward promoting chips relied on by Electronic Arts, and to the room with Jobs.
The rebuke did not dim her admiration for Jobs. She later said she still wanted to work with him at any cost, even though he was known for driving people hard.
She did not stay down long. Her next stop was Paris, working for Sun Microsystems with colleagues Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt, covering Solaris, software that runs computers, and Java, a language for building programs. The junior marketer who found no backing in the room with Jobs would go on to advise founders to repeat the same message and get other people talking about them.
Questions people ask
What was Motorola's 68040 chip?
The 68040 was a microprocessor, the brain of a computer, made by Motorola in the early 1990s. It powered computers including high-end Apple Macintosh models, as well as other machines and equipment. Marketing it meant convincing computer makers and software developers that it was fast and reliable enough to build on.
What was NeXT, the company Jobs was running at the time?
NeXT was the computer company Jobs started after he was forced out of Apple in 1985. It made powerful workstations for universities and businesses, and its software later became the basis for Apple's modern operating systems. Apple bought NeXT in 1997, which brought Jobs back to Apple.