Shiza Shahid is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Our Place, a mission-driven brand reimagining kitchenware for the modern, global kitchen. Rooted in the belief that home cooking has the power to bring people together, Our Place celebrates the traditions, ingredients, and connections that make every meal meaningful.
In February 2025, Shiza is launching Dinner at Our Place, the first-ever cookbook from Our Place, published by HarperCollins. The cookbook is more than a collection of recipes—it’s a guide to hosting meaningful gatherings. Drawing from her own experiences growing up in a culture where sharing meals was a cornerstone of community, Shiza’s deeply personal project celebrates the art of coming together over food, while offering menus, tips, and inspiration to make hosting simpler and more joyful.
Since founding Our Place in 2019, Shiza has overseen its growth into a beloved global brand. Known for its innovative and sustainable designs, Our Place’s kitchenware, including the iconic Always Pan, has garnered waitlists of more than 30,000 people, and widespread acclaim.
Before Our Place, Shiza co-founded the Malala Fund with Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, serving as its founding CEO to champion every girl’s right to education. She also launched NOW Ventures, an angel fund investing in mission-driven startups with a focus on female founders.
Shiza has been recognized as one of TIME’s “30 Under 30 People Changing the World,” Forbes’ “30 Under 30 – Social Entrepreneurs,” and INC Magazine’s “Top Female Founders.” Her thought leadership has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, and more. She’s also a sought-after speaker, frequently appearing at major events like Aspen Ideas Festival, Fortune Most Powerful Women, and the World Economic Forum.
I'll be honest, a lot of what passes for "supporting women" right now is lip service. The conferences, the galas, the dinners, most of it doesn't move the needle. It feels good, people network, and then nothing structural changes. There are real exceptions, WIE being one of them, where the focus is genuinely on advancing women rather than performing it. But broadly, I've stopped mistaking visibility for progress.
The opportunity I actually care about is ownership. I'd rather build and generate my own wealth so I can deploy it on my own terms. That's the real systemic shift: women becoming principals, not just participants. When you own the capital, you don't ask permission to back the founder or the category everyone else overlooked. So my advice to women founders and executives is to think about equity and independence early, because the path to changing what gets funded runs through owning the means to fund it, not through being invited to a table someone else controls.
The first lesson is that you rarely feel ready, and you start anyway. I was in my early twenties when we built the Malala Fund, and the work mattered far more than my level of experience, so I learned to move with conviction while staying honest about what I didn't yet know. The second lesson is to build with the people you're serving, not just for them. The best ideas came from girls and communities on the ground, not from a strategy deck. And the third is that mission and rigor are not opposites. I've always believed impact has to be paired with discipline, scale, and sustainability, otherwise it doesn't last. Those three things, courage to begin, proximity to the people you serve, and operational seriousness about the mission, still shape how I lead today.
I used to think about legacy in abstract terms, the systems you build, the change you leave behind. Then I had my daughter Sophia, and it got very concrete. Now when I think about legacy, I think about the world she's going to inherit and whether the work I'm doing makes it even slightly more open and fair for her and for girls like her everywhere. Legacy isn't my name on anything. It's the conditions you leave behind for the next person. The real question is whether Sophia grows up with more options, more ownership, and fewer ceilings than the generation before her, and whether the things I helped build keep creating those openings long after I've stepped away. The most meaningful legacy isn't being remembered. It's being multiplied in the people who come next.
True partnership. People expect me to name a strategy or a habit, but the real answer is the people I choose to build with, most of all my husband. Nobody builds anything meaningful alone, and having someone who fully shares the load, the ambition, and the belief in what you're doing changes what's possible. A real partnership means you're not negotiating for permission to go after big things, you're being pushed toward them. So much of what looks like individual success is actually two people deciding to back each other completely. That's mine.
My friend Brit Morin. What I admire most is how she shows up for the community. She's always ready to dive in, to lead, to share what she knows, and she does it with a generosity that's genuinely rare. So many people guard their networks and their knowledge. Brit gives hers away freely, and she makes everyone around her better for it. That kind of open-handed leadership is exactly what more of us should aspire to.
My Our Place Wonder Oven. It's the whole reason I built this company. I wanted cooking to be easier, non-toxic, beautiful, and actually nourishing, the kind of everyday air-fried meals you can pull together fast without thinking about what's leaching into your food. It's become the thing I reach for almost every day, and it's a small daily reminder of why I do this work: making the heart of the home a little healthier and a little more joyful.
The shift toward non-toxic living is finally going mainstream. This got real for me as a mom. Once you're pregnant and then feeding a little one, you start reading every label and asking what's actually in your cookware, your home, the things you touch every day. You realize how much you've been told to accept that convenience has to come with hidden chemicals. It's exactly the wave we anticipated when we built Our Place around non-toxic, non-stick essentials like the Always Pan and the Perfect Pot. For years, "non-toxic" was a niche concern. Now it's becoming the default expectation, especially among parents, and I love that people are demanding better from the products they bring into their kitchens every single day.
Anything by my friend Kate Bowler. Her bestseller, "Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved," reshaped how I think about control and the stories we tell ourselves about success and hardship. And her latest, "Joyful, Anyway," is a beautiful case for finding joy that doesn't depend on everything going perfectly, which is something every founder and frankly every human needs to hear. Her work is a constant reminder that meaning and joy live in the middle of the mess, not on the other side of it.
