Shaquille Vayda
Principal
Lux Capital
Biography
Shaq is a Principal on the Lux Capital team with a passion for technology and a desire to invest in people, helping turn their vision for a better world into reality. Specifically, he is excited about partnering on “building block” ideas where the value and markets unlocked downstream are greater than that of a single product. Some examples of these building block ideas include discovery and delivery platforms, molecular, phenotypic, and computational tools, synthetic biology, data infrastructure, and developer tools. Shaq’s career journey in some ways mirrors the ethos of Lux, investing at the intersection of technology and the natural sciences. Shaq started his professional career in the aerospace and defense sector spending time at NASA and Northrop Grumman. Following, Shaq got exposure to the emerging life sciences sector at Illumina, seeing firsthand the impact DNA sequencing has had on ending human suffering. Most recently, Shaq worked at Parthenon in San Francisco, where he advised premier private equity and growth equity firms on enterprise technology and healthcare investments.