Deena Shakir on Embracing Entrepreneurship for Global Impact
In 2008, graduating senior Deena Shakir delivered an encouraging message during her Harvard Oration, reminding her class that they were not only united in their mutual experiences at Harvard and graduation date, but also by the challenges–and opportunities–ahead.
Deena’s speech is particularly salient in retrospect; her fellow Class Day Speaker was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Pending economic collapse aside, Deena visualized a future where education, healthcare, and upward mobility are not just a privilege for a select few. She reminded her class that they carry tremendous power with the privilege of their education, or an “H-bomb,” capable of ending wars against hunger, disease, environmental degradation, and intolerance worldwide.
After a non-linear career from the halls of the State Department to the labs of Silicon Valley, today, Deena is driving her positive impact as a Partner at Lux Capital and Kauffman Fellow (Class 23), investing in innovative companies such as Shiru, a y-Combinator alumnus that identifies and creates food proteins with machine learning and precision biology, Mos.com, a platform to help students get access to over $135B in annual government financial aid, and AllStripes, the leading platform for rare disease research.
Lux Capital has a reputation for tackling the world’s most significant challenges with technology, with investments that “turn science fiction into fact” in verticals such as 3D printing, surgical robotics, holograms, virtual reality, computational imaging, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence.
Having joined Lux as a Partner in August 2019, Deena seeks out exceptional entrepreneurs building lasting businesses with deep social impact, complementing the dizzying allure of cutting-edge innovation Lux tends to seek.
Deena Shakir: The Early Years
As a Harvard freshman in the fall of 2004, Deena momentarily shared the same Cambridge cyberspace as a soon-to-be college dropout-turned-entrepreneur working on a startup that would change the world. Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” in February 2004, exclusively available for Harvard students. As one of the first users of what would become Facebook (with access as soon as she was admitted early to Harvard in late 2003), Deena found herself unknowingly at the epicenter of the beginning of one of the most massive economic and social movements in recent history.
As a student, Deena was already starting to lean on novel advances in technology to make a global impact. Having grown up in the heart of Silicon Valley (daughter of Iraqi immigrants who made their way to Stanford for medical education in the 70s), she grew up with the industry.
“Facebook was just starting, and ecommerce was slowly becoming more prevalent,” reminisces Deena. “I had always oriented my aspirations around impact.”
Even the e-commerce platform she co-founded in college was more of a play at impact than a social network or fintech play.
Deena would observe a seismic shift over the next decade: the nation’s brightest young talent was no longer gunning for Wall Street positions, but slowly trickling their way into her own childhood backyard in the Bay Area.
“I felt the center of gravity shifting from Wall Street to Palo Alto, and Silicon Valley was becoming the new mecca for innovation and for impact.”
Deena Enters Journalism and Policy
Deena always figured she would end up in journalism, policy, or human rights, but she found herself repeatedly pulled towards the tech scene. Graduating college a few months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Deena thought she was going to pursue a Ph. D. in anthropology, starting with a Masters at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
As a first-generation, Muslim Iraqi-American, Deena witnessed first-hand the growth of rampant Islamophobia in the United States and the simultaneous destruction of her native country of Iraq. She concentrated in Social Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard and wrote a nearly 200 page senior thesis comparing the post-9/11 epistemic journeys of students in the Arab diaspora seeking meaning, impact, and identity.
While in graduate school, Deena explored journalism (“vocational anthropology,” as she put it.) She was briefly on air hosting a bi-lingual news show on Al Arabiya and spent a summer as an intern with the BBC. Deena paid for both her undergraduate and graduate school on her own, earning local renown in high school for amassing six-figures in merit scholarships (some as small as $500) and working anywhere from 1 to 3 jobs at a time while in school.
“I was lucky enough to find jobs that were both meaningful learning experiences and helped pay the bills.”
While working with the BBC, Deena was moved by President Obama’s canonical 2009 Cairo Speech, which she helped cover.
“President Obama spoke of new beginnings with the Muslim world, embracing technology and entrepreneurship as a better way of enabling development and diplomacy and that was a watershed moment for me, and certainly so for my career path,” says Deena. “I realized I wanted to be part of this moment in history, not just write about it. I made it my job to find out who in the administration was going to be leading what became to be known as the “post Cairo” portfolio policy, and then I literally made it my job.”
For the next few years, Deena would work with the USAID and United States Department of State (in Secretary Clinton’s office), pioneering programs such as the first Global Entrepreneurship Summit and launching Secretary Clinton’s Global Diaspora program. Her role was focused on facilitating public and private partnerships and was an unwittingly ample training ground for her future career in technology and venture capital. She found herself back often in her hometown Silicon Valley as part of her role with the administration.
Simultaneously, the Arab Spring was in full swing, and Deena reflected on the juxtaposition of the innovation groundswell in Silicon Valley and the tech-enabled uprising and organizing toppling autocracies in the Arab world.
“It was clear that the fourth industrial revolution was propelling technology beyond a separate section; tech was levelling the playing field and facilitating exponential impact and change. I knew I wanted to learn how to build products, that I would be able to realize my ambitions for change through that.”
Deena Enters Big Tech
Simultaneously, Google was beginning to explore the development of civic products, and Deena was recruited to lead product partnerships for their Elections portfolio. relocated to the West Coast and found her home for the next five years at Google, working on a suite of early-stage front-line innovations in different verticals.
“I joined Google to help build out their civic innovation portfolio within Google.org, specifically working on launching the Civic Information API, which powers many of Google’s election tools, and many other products in the civic space,” says Deena.
On the “New Business Development” team, Deena’s team was often to work alongside the engineers and product managers to evaluate whether a product or service was commercially viable — and then help take it to market.
Deena studied the mechanics of entrepreneurship within a rapidly-growing tech behemoth.
“I worked on dozens of early stage products, and even more never saw the light of day or did and sunsetted very quickly,” notes Deena. “Since I was responsible for external partnerships, I got to know the key players in many ecosystems and met incredible entrepreneurs. I built a better understanding of the entrepreneurial experimentation process, and realized that big tech was perhaps not best suited to solve some of the most intractable problems, particularly in healthcare.” Deena helped launch Google’s first HIPAA compliant, which was in the telemedicine space.
Deena noticed that under-resourced, bootstrapped and scrappy teams were often capable of “disrupting” faster, more effectively, and more efficiently than the teams of hundreds of engineers at large companies like Google.
“Google is an extraordinary company, as are companies like Facebook and Amazon, with plenty of resources, but I’ve come to learn that resources don’t always translate into breakthrough innovation,” says Deena. “I don’t mean to undermine any of the innovations, some of which I was a part of at these large companies, but I do think there’s a reason Google started the way it did, and hopefully, the companies that we invest in will grow the same way as well.”
Deena notes three things that differentiate success in scrappy startups and big tech organizations:
- Speed– it takes longer to get things done in a large company,
- Prioritization– getting the attention and resources you need in a big company can be difficult,
- Hunger– a scrappy startup mentality is difficult to replicate with access to a plethora of monetary resources, meals, and massages (the latter of which she will be the first to admit she misses the most).
Deena looked towards venture capital to support smaller, more effective teams– and she didn’t have to leave the Google ecosystem to do so. Deena joined GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) as a Partner in 2017 to focus on post-investment partnerships, supporting the vast portfolio of startups with access to key relationships at Fortune 500 companies.
“I had amassed a wide array of contacts to gain an insight into how we could help kickstart companies commercially,” notes Deena. “I helped build out the partnership team and facilitate the connections and introductions to follow-on investments and acquisitions. It was a blast– I got to spend half my day supporting founders with their go-to market strategy, and the other half meeting with executives at some of the world’s largest companies who were looking to partner with the best innovative companies out there.”
It was around this time that Deena started coalescing her experiences in policy, journalism, investing, and entrepreneurship into her own investment theses
“I joined the Kauffman program, which was pivotal in accelerating the development of my personal mission,” says Deena. “Joining Lux was a straightforward decision for me. It wasn’t a matter of fitting a square peg in a round hole. I felt I could actually bring the various parts of my background and whole self, as a human, to the Lux team. I felt my skills were highly relevant to the kind of work Lux does, whether that’s in geopolitics, national security, or healthcare.”
And it helps that she happens to love the people she works with too.
“I wanted to find a firm where I could be constantly learning and challenged, where intellectual rigor, debate, and hustle was valued, and where I was surrounded by people I admire.”
Deena, a mother to two young children, is an advocate of motherhood as a superpower. She notes that Lux embraces multi-faceted individuals of unique backgrounds as critical team members following a mission to usher in the “near future” of the world. “We don’t just invest in contrarians with chips on their shoulders; as a partnership, that is also who we are.”
