About
Shaq Vayda
Shaq joins the Lux 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 by “building block” ideas where the value and markets unlocked downstream are greater than that of a single product. Some examples of these building blocks include: biotech, drug discovery platforms, molecular & computational tools, synbio, 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 (SSG) in San Francisco, where he advised premier private equity and growth equity firms on enterprise technology and healthcare investments.
Growing up on the Space Coast, Shaq earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Florida. He is passionate about pursuing his lifelong goal of living up to his name and finally dunking a basketball. He loves partnering with his companies, and helping them think strategically on how to stay ten steps ahead of the competition. Competitive from a young age, Shaq is obsessed with being a team player and helping whatever team he’s on to win, whether that is his peers at Lux or the entrepreneurs he works for.
