Deena Shakir, an investor at Lux Capital, struggled to explain to her three young kids what exactly her job was. She first tried buying a Chia Pet, where kids plant chia seeds on a figurine “to show them how seeds can grow into something amazing.”
Shakir, who’s invested in health tech companies like fertility startup Alife Health and women’s health company Maven Clinic, particularly loved that the figurine was a unicorn. “They didn’t get the joke, but I thought it was hilarious,” she said.
In 2020, in the midst of quarantine-induced boredom, she decided she needed to create something that explained the process of founding a startup but would also be engaging for children. Shakir settled on a picture book and got to work. On Tuesday, Shakir’s first book, “Leena Mo, CEO,” comes out.
In the book, Leena Mo builds a robot to plow snow. Her neighbors all beg her to build dozens more and sell them one, a feat that seems impossible until a neighbor offers to invest. Leena Mo recruits a team, advertises the robot on local news, and, you guessed it, becomes a CEO.
To get “Leena Mo, CEO” published, Shakir emailed hundreds of agents. “And the vast majority of them completely ignored me,” she said. Eventually she landed an agent and then scored a deal from Simon & Schuster in the spring of 2022.
Now that Leena Mo is finally out in the world, Shakir is tinkering with expanding Mo’s universe, potentially with a follow-up picture book or a graphic novel. “This is the story of the entrepreneur, but I’d love to be able to tell a story of the investor,” she said.
But, above all, she hopes that children read about Leena Mo, who is American Iraqi and Muslim, and see a woman excelling in business. “It’s totally normal for someone to be a girl building a robot and an entrepreneur, who is also Iraqi and also Muslim,” she said. “We exist in multitudes.”
