2022 Women to Watch Awards Americas EMEA
Monica Shokrai Head of business risk & insurance, Google Cloud; head of actuarial & analytics, Google/Alphabet
Alphabet Inc.
New York
Monica Shokrai said she is always looking to shift her perspective — an inclination that’s reflected in her career path.
She began as an actuary and worked for a broker and an insurer before joining Google parent Alphabet, where she has helped develop an innovative insurance program.
“I always tell people I’m a product of revolution,” said Ms. Shokrai, whose mother fled the Cuban revolution in 1959 and whose father escaped Iran’s in 1970. She grew up in San Diego with an older sister.
Ms. Shokrai, who attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, had originally planned to major in finance but rethought that when, as a college student, she interned with the soon-to-disappear Lehman Bros. during the financial crisis and “saw it crumbling.”
She graduated from Wharton with a B.S. in actuarial science and entrepreneurship and a minor in Hispanic studies. Positions at Willis Towers Watson PLC and Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance Co., which she joined when it was still a startup, followed.
Feeling she had “a good handle on actuarial science,” Ms. Shokrai decided she wanted to try something different. She turned to Loren Nickel, Google’s director of business risk and insurance — whom she knew was a former actuary himself — and this led to her joining Google in 2018.
At Google, Ms. Shokrai was instrumental in creating the Risk Protection Program, a team effort with Munich Reinsurance Co. and Allianz Global Corporate Specialty that provides underwriters with previously unavailable data while streamlining Google Cloud users’ underwriting process.
“What makes me come alive is innovation” and using traditional insurance to do things better, she said.
Mr. Nickel said Ms. Shokrai is “a very dynamic person” who “is very much focused on innovation and collaboration.” She also “is always the one checking in on people and being very nurturing,” he added.
Ms. Shokrai also believes in paying it forward. She relaunched a women’s group at Alphabet that now has more than 50 members, recognizing the pivotal role more senior women had played in her own career and their “taking a risk on me.”
