Aydin Senkut
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The Peel with Turner Novak · Aydin Senkut: Growing Felicis from $4M to $4B
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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. G
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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. The usual worry is that a firm gets fat and old and loses its feel. He says the people still make the firm special, and the ownership math runs the other way. Felicis owns about 5 to 10 times more of its companies than before, exits have grown about 10 to 100 times in scale, and the bigger checks are why it could get into some companies at all. He also treats physical shape as part of the job, because the work is stressful and poor shape leads to poor decisions.
He reprices the old fund before he accepts the scary multiple. A $4 million fu
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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. The rare investor response he values is to call the plan reckless, tell the founder to do it anyway, and then prove the support with another check.
He describes companies such as n8n that were doing well, then missed a quarterly goal, and watched people get agitated. A deal that slips into the next month can make a small set of results look broken, because an early startup does not yet have enough deals or enough people. The founder is most exposed right then. Felicis offers more money and more support instead of the agitation. He think
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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. A friend or an LP would ask why he was raising a fund at all. He had not run a company, he was not an engineer, and he had not done venture capital. What he had done was be the first product manager at Google and the first international sales manager. His plan was to copy no other firm: back underestimated founders globally, invest across sectors, and break the rules LPs expected to hear. Almost every LP told him to get out.
He used his own money anyway. Four years later he had made 100 investments and had 12 exits, including a company exit of about $100 milli
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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. He thinks most founders do not trust their investors, and that one line puts Felicis in a small group of firms. Founders still show up having heard that Felicis votes its shares with them and gives them the pledge.
The pledge sets aside 1% of the investment, taken from management fees, for therapy, coaching, or anything else that money covers. The point is to make a founder harder to break. The most successful moments are also the most stressful, and he would rather put money into resilience than leave someone exposed when people come after them. He treats the work as the
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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. Payments passed that test when the firm backed Adyen. Processing payments is what makes a business a business, and trade has been around as long as people have. A commerce platform that really works did not require him to have been an e-commerce expert. He says none of it was rocket science.
The founder test comes from what he learned at Google. He wants a team that is an outlier in one place: something no other company paid attention to, one area where nobody else has excelled, or one or two secrets other players still have not realized. Felicis then tries to
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Why Can One Big Win Make a Venture Investor Worse?
Aydin Senkut says a first big venture win can make an investor worse. An outlier success makes it feel as if whatever caused it will keep driving the next one, whether that was the dog in the office, the blue sweater, or the hot market. The rush feels invincible. Venture stays interesting because of high variability and outliers, so the thing that just worked, and the market that was hot, probably will not stay that way.
The reset he uses is the day after the win. Go back to the basics and drop the expectations that got you here, because they may not be the ones that move you forward. His picture for it is surfing. You ride an amazing wave, hit the beach, and paddle back out without knowing
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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 lost. Skeptics had called Canva a design company in Sydney and doubted the founders knew how to scale.
Adobe was already a $200 billion company. Microsoft PowerPoint was a poor product, and Adobe worked but was so complex that opening Photoshop felt like going back to graduate school. At Google, the product that stuck was one button: search, and the result is great. He believed the Canva founders had a beautiful idea and would execute. Sales then rose a thousand times in eight years.
People study everything that can go wrong and skip
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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. You do not have to work as hard. There is less risk, and nobody is going to blame you if it goes wrong after you back amazing Silicon Valley founders. Who is going to say you were stupid to do that?
He found Adyen because even Google and Meta were having major issues in countries like Brazil and could not process payments. The financial system was too complicated. Adyen was the one company that had figured out how to do it, and most people did not know about it because it powered Braintree in the US. When Adyen was first getting announced in the US, he
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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 real cash. A $5 trillion valuation later, the outcome sat about a thousand times past what people had said was possible. In a famous exchange, someone asked whether revenue could ever reach $100 million, and the reply was a goal of billions. The business is now closing in on $200 billion in revenue. He wishes he had kept the old comments.
Early at Google, he hoped the company would become a billion-dollar company. He was off by three orders of magnitude.
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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. His firm watches cash runway so a hard decision can happen early enough to change the company's trajectory, before the company is in the 11th hour.
Data is hard to argue with. A founder might say the team is hiring so many people and things are going great, while burn sits in the bottom quartile and the rate of deals closing sits in the top decile. A higher burn can then be reasonable because the pipeline looks like it is ramping even faster. Every founder is getting some great things right, and every company still has something wavering.
Constructive feedback alw
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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 an
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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. He was not an e-commerce expert, so he looked for a concrete way to help and connected Shopify with Rovio.
Shopify was already a strong platform and still lacked a big marquee customer to raise awareness. He had just invested in Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds. Rovio badly needed an e-commerce site right before the holidays, and the merchandise was already huge even before the movie. Rovio expected a huge merchandise business. Shopify got a marquee customer. The win was not a huge chunk of the revenue share. It was very public and boosted awareness. Both companies