Unknown Startups Need Others to Talk About Them First

Shernaz Daver, who spent nearly five years as the first chief marketing officer of the venture firm Khosla Ventures, was responding to a piece of advice she keeps hearing in Silicon Valley. Some startup advisers, at least on social media, say young companies should skip traditional media and just talk straight to customers.

Daver believes that gets it backward for a company almost no one has heard of. “You have a seed investment, nobody’s heard of you, and then you say, ‘go direct,’” she says. “Well, who’s going to even hear you?”

By seed investment, she means the first small round of outside money, often before a startup has customers or a reputation. Her point is that potential customers do not even know the company exists, so there is no audience yet for its posts.

She compares it to arriving on a street where no neighbors know you yet. “You’re not invited to the neighborhood barbecue because nobody knows you exist,” she says.

The way to exist, in her view, is to have somebody else talk about you. At Khosla Ventures, that meant finding what the firm stood for, in this case being bold, early, and impactful, and then repeating proof points until they stuck. After OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, for example, she asked OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, for permission to talk about the firm being its first venture investor, then repeated the claim for earlier bets like Square and DoorDash.

She says establishing Khosla Ventures as the first investor in OpenAI still required two and a half years of steady repetition to stick.

That lesson shapes how she uses the press. She argues that one channel alone will not make a company known, so she layers traditional coverage with online video, audio shows, social posts, and live gatherings. By infantry and cavalry, she means different forces that work together, and by the gorilla, she means the dominant player everyone thinks of first. “I 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,” she says.