When you are sick of saying it, people are just starting to hear it

Shernaz Daver knows how to make a name stick. As the first ever marketing chief at Khosla Ventures, the venture firm founded by Vinod Khosla, her job was to build the firm's brand and give its startup founders someone to turn to for marketing help. After nearly five years, when founders name top investors in artificial intelligence, two or three firms come to mind, and Khosla Ventures is one of them.

Her approach was to pick one message and repeat it. She argues that a venture firm has no product the way Stripe, Rippling, or OpenAI do, and that the people are the product itself. Khosla Ventures had already described itself as "bold, early, and impactful," and Daver said she adopted those three words as the central message and "plastered them everywhere." Then she collected proof, company by company, to back up each word.

The proof for early became first checks. After OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, she asked Sam Altman, of OpenAI, for permission to talk publicly about Khosla Ventures being the first venture investor. He said yes. She applied the same label to being the first investor in Square and the first investor in DoorDash. She said steady repetition across two and a half years finally made that message stick, which she considered fast because the industry moves so quickly. Today, introductions for Khosla routinely call him the first investor in OpenAI.

That is the part founders can copy. Daver tells founders who are tired of their own story, "You're on mile 23, the rest of the world is on mile five." Founders move so fast, she says, that in their heads they have already sprinted ahead while everyone else is still catching up. Her rule is, "You have to repeat yourself all the time, and you have to say the same thing."

To try it this week, pick the three words you want to own and the two or three facts that prove them. Then say them again, in meetings, in posts, and on stage, long after you are bored with them.