How to Craft Your Career by Existing in Hyphens
“Did you bake the cookies?” He asked her.
Deena Shakir was one of the few female partners at Google’s venture capital arm, GV, at the time. She was hosting a high-profile meeting that brought together various C-suite officers from major Fortune 500 companies, GV partners, and portfolio executives. She was shocked when she heard the question. One of the executives had asked it, and he was looking right at her.
Being the marginalized minority wasn’t new to her. Her parents had narrowly escaped persecution to come to the States, and she had grown up as a Muslim Iraqi-American in the wake of 9/11. “I was used to existing in that hyphen,” she told me. Iraqi. Hyphen. American. Living in the middle of these two seemingly diverging cultures forced her to get comfortable with in-betweens and nuance.
Over time, intersectionality has become Shakir’s identity. Spoiler alert: she has many skills, but baking is not one of them.
Shakir went to Harvard University for Social Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, where she co-founded an e-commerce company and kickstarted her career as a bilingual news anchor. After school, she served as a Presidential Management Fellow in the Obama administration, helping launch the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.
After a few years in government, Shakir pivoted into tech. She joined Google, where she led product partnerships for civic innovation, transitioned to early-stage product partnerships, and helped the tech giant launch their first healthcare services product. After a few years at Google and then GV, Shakir joined venture capital firm Lux Capital as a partner in 2019.
Her story is a mouthful to say in one breath, and I haven’t even started on her various roles on Boards of Directors.
We are often encouraged to chase after the security of linear career paths: find your passion by 18, study it in college, find a job that correlates at a respectable company, and then climb up the corporate ranks. But as a media-policy-product-entrepreneurship-investment leader, Shakir’s story exemplifies the value of existing in hyphens. By living at the intersection of multiple experiences, you can synthesize and connect disparate worlds in new ways.
Shakir’s career has been diverse, but one thing has held constant: she has always been the connector. In the federal government, she fostered strong partnerships between the public and private sectors. At Google, she worked on building relationships between very different entities — from the local electoral commission in Nairobi to one of the largest American health systems. Now, as a venture capitalist, she focuses her investments on emerging technologies and digital health, embracing her ability to be the connector to serve her portfolio. “My past experiences connected to make me a better VC, a better board member, and a better partner,” she said.
Her words evoked memories of those connect-the-dots puzzles we used to do as children. We started with a page filled with dots. And if we followed the instructions carefully, we would end up with a pretty little picture. But following instructions is never what we wanted to do. As Shakir discovered, the fun is in letting the puzzle go astray. Your hyphens and dots are unique, so the picture you ultimately create with your career deserves to be too.
The good news? As an underdog, you probably have a few hyphens you could be putting to better use. The bad news? You may need to grit your teeth at some cookie-obsessed executives along the way.
This article is part of my series about achieving the impossible. Read the last article here and subscribe to future updates by clicking the orange mail button on this page near my name.
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