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

Why Did Larry Page Duct-tape Google's Servers?

Aydin Senkut says Larry Page refused to buy servers for Google. Bought machines were a waste of money: inefficient, expensive, and not built for what Page wanted. Page designed the servers himself late at night. The build was cheap Intel CPUs, a huge pile of disks, and literal duct tape.

An engineer at Google then wrote an internal system Senkut calls a precursor of AWS, 10 or 15 years before Amazon did it, plus software whose job was to babysit hardware that failed all the time. Cheap chips and disks broke constantly. Someone would run to the data center because ten more disks had to be replaced and would plug the drives in by hand. No rational operator would have run a company that way. Google then scaled faster, and more cheaply, than people imagined.

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 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…
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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…
  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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