When Lux Capital investor Deena Shakir struggled to explain to her three young children what her job was all about, she initially tried to buy them a Chia Pet, a doll that lets kids plant chia seeds on it and watch the seeds grow into something amazing.
Shakir, who is an investor in health technology companies including fertility startup ALife Health and women's health company Maven Clinic, said she particularly liked that the doll was a unicorn. “They didn't get the joke, but I thought it was really funny,” she said.
In 2020, in the midst of quarantine boredom, Shakir decided he needed to create something that would interest kids while still explaining the process of building a startup. He decided on a picture book and got to work. On Tuesday, Shakir's first book, “Leena Mo, CEO,” hits the shelves.
In this book, Leana Mo builds a snow shovel robot. Her neighbors all beg her to build dozens more and sell one, but it seems impossible until a neighbor offers to invest. Leana Mo recruits a team, promotes the robot in the local news, and, you guessed it, becomes the CEO.
To publish “Leena Mo,” Shakir emailed hundreds of agents, “and the majority of them just completely ignored me,” she says. She eventually found an agent and landed a deal with Simon & Schuster for spring 2022.
Now that Lena Mo is finally out in the world, Shakir is looking to expand Mo's world, even considering a sequel picture book or graphic novel. “It's the story of the entrepreneur, but I'd love to tell the story of the investor as well,” she said.
But most of all, she hopes that when kids read about Leena Mor, who is Iraqi-American and Muslim, they see a woman in business. “It's completely normal for a girl who builds robots and is an entrepreneur and is Iraqi and Muslim,” she says. “We are all so diverse.”