Venture capitalist Deena Shakir just wrote a children’s book to empower aspiring female founders

Deena Shakir, general partner at Lux Capital

VC Deena Shakir fields hundreds of startup pitches a year. But when it came to finding a publisher for her children’s book, “Leena Mo, CEO,” she found herself in the hot seat.

Shakir cold-emailed her draft to more than 200 book agents over the course of a year. Her pitches were mostly ignored.

It took Shakir two years to find an agent; it wasn’t until 2022 that she got an offer from Simon & Schuster.

Now “Leena Mo, CEO,” finally has a place on bookshelves. The book centers on a young girl pursuing her dream of building something great — a robot that takes care of her snow-shoveling chores.

Shakir first set out to find a story for children about entrepreneurship in 2019. But she struggled to find any books for kids about founders, let alone books with a young female protagonist or a protagonist of color.

Writing a children’s book about a young Muslim Arab girl becoming a founder that her children and other kids everywhere can relate to became a passion project for Shakir, she said.

“I want my kids to grow up in a world where they can see that at a young age,” she said.

Shakir’s book, which releases on September 24, features blurbs by prominent authors and entrepreneurs like Chelsea Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg. Shakir said she plans to donate all of the book’s proceeds to the global nonprofit Save the Children.

Shakir’s children’s book, “Leena Mo, CEO,” releases September 24, 2024.

Writing the female founder’s story

Shakir wrote the entire first draft of “Leena Mo, CEO” one frenzied weekend in December 2020. Yet despite Shakir’s prominent position in the venture capital world — she’s backed hot startups across healthcare like Maven Clinic and Everly Health — getting her book out into the world took years and plenty of rejection.

“The more I get told no, the more I want to prove that I can do something,” she said. “And honestly, that’s not dissimilar from my journey into venture, which was not easy, not linear, and was just full of rejections in the early days.”

Shakir reading to her daughter’s preschool class in October 2019.

During the five years Shakir spent at Google in the 2010s, she worked on some of the tech giant’s social impact initiatives to address the attrition of female engineering employees at Google.

In those efforts, Shakir said, she learned that dismantling the structures that keep women away from careers in tech or cause them to leave those careers must start early.

“You can’t just address it by making sure there are more computer science classes that are inclusive of women in college. It literally starts from the first days of consciousness and reading,” she said. “That’s really what led me to try to take this on at the childhood level.”

“Leena Mo, CEO” is also peppered with Arabic words — like the robot’s name, “Helmy,” a Romanized derivation of the Arabic word for “my dream.”

Shakir, the daughter of Iraqi immigrants, said she wanted Leena Mo’s identity as a Muslim Arab girl to just be a normal part of the story’s context, showing a type of young leader not typically featured in children’s books while keeping the plot relatable to kids of all backgrounds.

Shakir’s characters use Arabic words intermittently throughout “Leena Mo, CEO”.

Shakir said she’s gotten a lot of positive feedback about the book from both her family and her VC and founder friends. Next, she said she’d consider writing a children’s book about an investor or maybe a book for a slightly older demographic — the four-year-old daughter she set out to write a book for is now nine.

Two of Shakir’s three children are boys. Shakir emphasized that this book is for them, too, not just for young girls.

“Think about some of the canonical children’s books of our childhood. Did it matter to us that the characters were boys? I never thought that a book wasn’t relatable to me because the character was a boy,” she said. “That’s part of what I want to normalize here. Yes, it’s a story about a kid and the kid happens to be a girl. That doesn’t mean it’s a story for girls.”