By arguably any measure, Malika Aubakirova had already “made it” in life. She successfully immigrated from Kazakhstan to the U.S., a difficult and daunting feat in itself, and went on to achieve success many first-generation immigrants could only dream of. She graduated from the University of Chicago, one of the world’s top universities, and then worked post-grad as a software engineer at Google and other Alphabet companies. She had gained, through her industry work and research publications, a name for herself in the worlds of artificial intelligence (AI), infrastructure and cybersecurity. But what happens after you’ve achieved the thing you set out to do?

For Malika, the answer wasn’t to coast on her successes, or to climb higher. It was to begin again. 

After five years as an engineer at Google and Chronicle, a Moonshot Factory company within Alphabet, she left to pursue an MBA degree at Stanford. 

Like many students, she came here with more questions than an actual plan. But her free curiosity worked. In two years, she went from having never considered a career in venture capital to becoming a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most industry-defining firms of our time. In this profile, we talk about her path to where she is and how Stanford intersected with it.

I. Inherited grit, and choosing which stories shape you

Malika grew up in Kazakhstan during one of its most challenging periods in recent history — the “rough 90s,” as they’re called. Despite the hardships, though, Malika doesn’t talk about Kazakhstan as something she survived or overcame. She talks about it as a set of stories she inherited — and then chose to let define her.

She talked about her daily bus rides to school, a seemingly mundane event that shaped her deeply to this day. She was a tiny girl on public buses, alone, her backpack bigger than she was. Old women would cluck disapprovingly but never offer to help. That was the ethos: figure it out yourself, girl. She laughed while telling the story, but there’s something in the memory that explains how her grit wasn’t just instilled but expected of her.

Her generation, born in that sliver of time when the Soviet borders opened and the world suddenly became legible, grew up between two things: scarcity and opportunity. “People finally learned about opportunities,” Malika says. Kazakhstan was hard, yes. But it was also a place where you learned early that if you wanted something, you had to reach for it yourself. No one was coming to help you with your too-large backpack.

The complicated thing about immigrant stories is that they shape you in ways both generative and limiting. Malika chose to take the grit and leave the scarcity mindset behind. 

II. Choosing discomfort and “stretching” as a strategy

One of Malika’s guiding mottos: when things feel too comfortable, she leaves. When things feel impossible or murky, she leans in to figure them out. Discomfort, for her, is a signal that she’s in the right place.

It was this proclivity to chase and solve murky problems that led her to apply to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. After five years as a software engineer at Google and Alphabet, she was ready for something new. She could not pinpoint, at the time, what was lacking. She had a good title, meaningful work and the prestige of the company itself. But something in her was restless. “I just didn’t want to keep still,” she said. “I wanted to be around people who were also questioning, building, figuring things out.”

She left, with no clear plan, to come to Stanford. She wrote her MBA essays, but admitted there wasn’t a polished reason behind the choice to apply to business school. What was clear was a hunger to be in a room where people were stretching, not coasting. She didn’t know what she was hunting for, only that she’d recognize it when she found it.

Stanford gave her exactly that. She talked about the sheer disorientation of her GSB class: Olympic ice skaters sitting next to investment bankers, opera singers next to her — an ex-Google software engineer. “It was just such a fascinating environment that you cannot possibly feasibly experience at any one single workplace,” she said. Different brains, different perspectives, all asking different questions. Instead of being overwhelming, it somehow felt like home.

With her world bigger and more diverse than ever, Malika spent a lot of time asking questions and understanding all the paths of life that she’d never been exposed to. From this exploration, she unraveled her interest in a path she’d never even considered before, embarking into the world of venture capital through a cold application that “somehow” made it through the pipeline. The Stanford name and brand helped, for sure. But being in a room full of people thinking ambitiously about markets, founders, and the future is what changed what she thought was possible. “Without this school, I don’t know if I would necessarily end up in VC — or even think about it, to be honest,” she said.

Now, at a16z, she described her life as “five different careers compressed into one day.” Onboarding interns, interviewing candidates, writing SQL queries for reports, rushing to conferences, hosting events she planned herself. It’s chaos, and she loves it. It fits into her eagerness to chase the discomfort of ambiguity and new challenges. 

“You can’t coast in that environment,” she said. “You are constantly being stretched, intellectually and emotionally. And that is the point.”

III. How to hunt for invisible opportunities

Malika describes her Stanford education with a sheepish grin: when asked about her MBA program, the first thing she admits is a feeling of having “almost learned something.”

What’s striking is that she soon realized that what she really wanted from her Stanford experience could not be offered through lecture halls and seminars. So, she didn’t wait for the institution to teach her. Instead, she weaponized the institution to chase her own plans.

She wielded her Stanford email to reach people she’d long admired for mentorship, coffee chats and opportunities. (“It’s a crazy tool,” she said.) She found and took courses like “CS 323: The AI Awakening” specifically because Mira Murati showed up as a guest speaker. She signed up for the right clubs and mailing lists and soon found herself with so many invites to Jensen Huang dinners that, she admitted, she had to start declining them. 

She knew that sometimes, like during her pivot from Alphabet to Stanford, you needed to leave a good place if it was not the right one for you. Other times, like during her Stanford experience, you could change your experience of the place itself through intentional and creative moves. 

Some opportunities that she sought out ended up mattering more directly than others — like a random Google form passed around some insider circles that led to her first VC opportunity at Greylock. That led to a16z. But every conversation continued to shape her, and even primed her for her career as an investor who works with and advises the founders actively shaping our future.

IV. Making constraints your superpower

Having grown up in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and having learned resourcefulness in the face of scarcity, Malika truly admires others who bring this same unconventional approach to the world. This can be seen in the founders she pays the most attention to. 

“When you meet incredible founders, they have a very different way of thinking,” she told me. “It’s not something you can write a playbook for. If you follow the playbook, you’ll be stuck being mediocre.”

Then how might one craft their “original” playbooks? Malika shared one story she admires as an example. 

ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup valued at billions of dollars. When it was founded in 2022, the idea was born out of a simple but visceral frustration in founder Mati Staniszewski’s life.

In Staniszewski’s hometown in Poland, every foreign movie in the cinemas that he watched growing up was dubbed by one single monotone voice. There was one man performing all characters, all genders, in the same flat register. “It was one of the worst experiences,” Malika said, laughing, but there’s reverence in her tone too. Because that irritation — that tiny, culturally niche annoyance — became the seed of a frontier AI company.

“Something like ElevenLabs could not have been born anywhere in the U.S.,” she said. “It’s that problem you grow up with, that shapes your conviction more than anyone who didn’t live through the same things.”

As she speaks, the embroidered a16z logo on her jacket catches the light. It’s a sleek, subtle detail that reminds me that Malika isn’t just saying this as a reflection on Staniszewski and ElevenLabs. 

Malika’s career — scrappy, nonlinear, stitched together by improbable timing — mirrors the same contrarian approach that she admires.