How a Female Investor Teaches Kids About Startups and Women in Tech

Deena Shakir, an investor at Lux Capital, had trouble explaining exactly what her job was to her three young children. She first tried buying a chia pet, where kids plant chia seeds on a figurine “to show them how the seeds can grow into something amazing.”

Shakir, who has invested in health tech companies like fertility startup Alife Health and women’s health company Maven Clinic, was particularly pleased that the figurine was a unicorn. “They didn’t get the joke, but I thought it was funny,” she said.

In 2020, in the midst of quarantine boredom, she decided to create something that would explain the startup process but would also be engaging for kids. Shakir decided on a picture book and got to work. Shakir’s first book, “Leena Mo, CEO,” will be released on Tuesday.

In the book, Leena Mo builds a snowplow robot. All the neighbors beg her to build dozens more and sell them one, which seems impossible until a neighbor offers to invest. Leena Mo recruits a team, advertises the robot on the local news, and, as you might guess, becomes CEO.

To get “Leena Mo, CEO” out there, Shakir emailed hundreds of agents. “And the vast majority of them completely ignored me,” she said. She eventually landed an agent and then signed a deal with Simon and Schuster in spring 2022.

Now that Leena Mo is finally out, Shakir is tinkering with expanding the Mo universe, potentially with a picture book sequel or graphic novel. “It’s an entrepreneur story, but I’d like to be able to tell an investor story,” she said.

But most of all, she hopes kids will read about Leena Mo, who is an Iraqi-American Muslim, and see a successful businesswoman. “It’s completely normal for someone to be a girl who builds a robot and is an entrepreneur who is also Iraqi and Muslim,” she said. “We exist in numbers.”