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Back to Aydin Senkut: Growing Felicis from $4M to $4B, with Aydin Senkut.

Why Were Felicis's Early Board Meetings So Brutal?

Aydin Senkut's early Felicis board meetings were brutal because he asked the board to battle-test the fund with everything they knew about performing among the very best. He asked why the fund needed reserves, and the board corrected him. What they wanted was recycling, so fees could be partially defrayed.

He hired a CFO while most peers questioned the spend and preferred an outsourced person. On the Fitbit exit a small window opened. He sold the stock, and the stock crashed. Peers with no CFO held on and rolled the stock to the bottom.

The board had thought the list would take 10 or 15 years to reach even 10% of what they asked. A year and a half later he had run through the whole list and everything else they had, and he asked what else they had.

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Transcript

Aydin Senkut: Growing Felicis from $4M to $4B ·

The Peel with Turner Novak

More from this episode

  1. Why Can One Big Win Make a Venture Investor Worse?Aydin Senkut says a first big venture win can make an investor worse.
  2. What Does Felicis Look for Before Backing a Founder?Aydin Senkut says Felicis looks for a market every person or every business can use, and for urgency, before it judges the founder.
  3. How Did Aydin Senkut Get Into Shopify?Aydin Senkut got into Shopify after six months of work, emails included, and the six months did not start the day he showed up.
  4. What Is the Felicis Founder Pledge?Aydin Senkut says the Felicis founder pledge is a promise that the firm will never vote its shares against the founder.
  5. Why Did Aydin Senkut Start Felicis With Only His Own Money?Aydin Senkut started the first Felicis fund with his own $4 million because nobody wanted to give him money. He does not blame them.
  6. Why Should Founders Track Cash Runway?Aydin Senkut says founders should track cash runway, because a clock is ticking and a good-or-bad label only gets people stuck.
  7. Why Does Felicis Add Money After a Bad Quarter?Aydin Senkut says Felicis will sometimes put more money into a company after a bad quarter. Founders occasionally want to do something that sounds reckless.
  8. Does a Bigger Felicis Fund Lose Its Early Edge?Aydin Senkut says Felicis's latest fund is a little over $900 million, up from a $4 million start, and that the larger fund did not erase the early edge.
  9. Why Did People Say Google Search Would Never Make Money?Aydin Senkut says traditional people spent 10 years insisting that Google search would never monetize and would never become a real business that could make…
  10. Why Did Larry Page Duct-tape Google's Servers?Aydin Senkut says Larry Page refused to buy servers for Google.
  11. Why Do Silicon Valley Investors Miss non-Bay Area Companies?Aydin Senkut thinks Silicon Valley investors miss companies outside the Bay Area because backing the Silicon Valley version is much easier.
  12. How Did Canva Grow Sales a Thousand Times?Aydin Senkut says Canva sales rose a thousand times in eight years after the founders executed a simple product for people who want to create without feeling…

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