YouSaid · the spoken record

Aydin Senkut

lines on the record: 63
first: 2022-02-07
most recent: 2022-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think I just started touching on it. We talked about consistency, but the other big thing is just to not take things personal. I'm Mediterranean by birth and it's hard. We're emotional, a little bit larger than life. One of my F1 drivers, his nickname is Iceman. And I'm the exact opposite of that. And sometimes I wish there is a little switch that I can turn on and I can be Iceman. Just don't take it personal. Don't care about it. I remember I read this article about Robert Reich one day, who was Secretary of Treasury, and he said, look, for every decision that I have to make, my first question is how much time do I have? I think we rush a lot of things, and this is part of being an ice man, is that instead of reacting in the moment, getting emotional, taking it personal, just realize there might be more time to take this step. It's good to sleep on it or take a little bit more time to see if you feel a little bit differently even a couple hours later. It's incredible how our mindset changes, even if we give ourselves the opportunity of a little bit of time. It's probably one of the biggest things that I learned and I wish I knew.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. So each parent told me one thing, what I learned from my dad, he grew up without his dad with a single mom. And so his biggest thing was don't ever be dependent on anybody else. Don't ever be in a position where you have to beg or plead for help. By all means, do everything you can to be independent and self-sufficient. And my mom hustled. She always used to tell me, I did all these things where if you look at my IQ or my exams, whatever, you would have never expected. Every time she was always the person that hustled the most, that tried the best, never gave up. So that grit and resilience that you're hearing, I think through DNA and through role model and osmosis that came from my mom.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I basically had a thousand shots on having my life again, I would do the exact same things that I did today, including the mistakes. I wouldn't change a single thing. But in terms of the meta thing, I wasn't as action-oriented before. And maybe I was a little bit more shy. If it's not 100%, where there's 98 or 65 doesn't matter. And the only thing that really truly separates you from everybody else in life is to be in the 100% camp, to be consistent. I think that subtlety is lost most often. So my mistake maybe earlier on or in general is to be not consistent. And honestly, maybe sometimes I take things too personal and maybe for personal happiness and to be able to subsist in these difficult times as we languish, as Adam Grant says, don't take things as personal and try to think of the happy things.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First person is Omit Kurdistani, one of the most formidable Google execs. He gave me my first Google offer. And if it wasn't for him to give me a chance and take a chance on me, I don't think I would have been here. The second one, even though I only work with him for a year, I'm going to say Larry Page just for the sheer fact that if you ask my wife, my team, or my”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very simple. The thing that I care more than anything else is value of time. So people that don't appreciate value of time and feel like there's all the time in the world, I always feel like it's not just enough to go somewhere, but go there as soon as possible or as efficiently as possible. And people that don't respect time and move on and action-oriented are big pet peeve of mine.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that makes me happiest is to say I love you to my wife and to my kids every day and to say thank you as many times as I can is just something special about that. And I'm like, look, if today is the last day of my life, I want people to know what I felt that I appreciated them and I love them.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it used to be flying because it was a big dream of mine. But these days, due to COVID, I'm back to tennis. I realize I'm getting older. So it's really important to be physically active and much more so than before. So I'm back to my first love, my first hobby, tennis is a sport that I love.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the funny thing is, I keep telling my team don't spend a single minute on valuation environment that the numbers are high. It's just that that is now fact because the reality is markets are supply and demand. You cannot fight supply and demand. Supply is what it is. Demand is what it is. If you have very short supply and very high demand, we're going to be in a situation that we're in now. Our job as professionalism is to figure out how do you succeed in that environment. One of the things that we discuss is contingency planning. Everything we do as a plan B, plan C, and a plan D. Every single fund is a model and a backup, and we have multiple contingencies prepared, and we are maybe five times a day talking about is there something noticeable that's changing in the market and what is going to be our real reaction versus complaining that it had happened. Don't even waste a single second about the difficulties. Let's spend all the time to figure out what we're going to do about it. Show me the solution.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, the thing that I try to tell people imagine you're an NFL or NBA instead of 32 teams or 36 teams. Now there's 200 teams. And all of a sudden, every game goes from just a league game to the playoff game. And then it's even worse. Think of the nightmare situation, get 1,000 flashes going off, or you're playing an outdoor football game in sleeting rain, 30 mile per hour wins. This is basically the environment we're in. There is no low-hanging fruit left and everything is just insane. Everything is crazy. Well, the thing is that the people that are going to succeed in an environment like that are the ones that want it the most. I mean, a lot of people are still going at it despite the surplus of capital in a formulaic way. And we're still trying to do it the old school way of creating a bond with the founder, being very fast, being very prepared, always ready to adapt very, very fast to changing environment. And I think that's the one thing that's helping us.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warrants a conversation in a meeting. And by narrowing down the focus and narrowing down the scope of companies, we take fewer meetings where we say, yes, more, but it also frees up a lot more time. And then the other thing that we found is that even if we have aspirations and we want to grow, we don't want 200 people in our team. So we started doing some really creative things. We started engaging people. There are some great people out there. They just want to run their own firm, whether it's recruiting or PR or whatever. We're like, look, you don't have to be on Felice's payroll. We'll go and guarantee you 70% of your business or 80%, maybe 100% of your business. And so it's been really amazing. If you go to entrepreneurs like, look, you want to like make sure you have some guarantee and predictability. We come up with very creative ways to drastically increase resources, but also be pretty stringent with time management so that we are trying to free up as much time as possible to find that right balance.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A balance you're hitting on another thing where it's funny that many times that we've ran a lot of experiments and projects at Felices to see how the time is even spent. You'd be surprised how little people actually measure that. And this was coming up from our LPs. And there were times where we're a little bit worried about your capacity. So I'm like, well, let's figure it out. I mean, to my point to you, if you care about something, you got to measure it. And so we measured it. It's a moving target. It's not like there's a magic number, I think. The thing that I'm trying to do is go to success also by process of elimination. How many meetings are we taking that we don't need to take? And if you don't free up that time, you cannot help the companies when it becomes critical. So one of the things that I started doing a lot is to see if we can look at fundamentals and maybe start conversations and take meetings where we have a much better idea, maybe much more so than before, that, hey, this company really”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your success. Here's why we can't say no give them something good, something helpful. Here's what I saw. I'm not going to give you a bullshit answer. If I were you, I would think about this or I would pay attention to this. I'm really sorry that we can't invest. We are rooting for you, but try to pay attention to this or at least think about it. So when they see that, it's no with like, I care about you. And I'm trying to be helpful to you. And is there anything else I can do for you? And they know it's our business. We can't say yes to everyone. I know that it doesn't sound like much, but for a lot of founders, seeing that emotion also on the no side and not just on the yes side, that you care and you're trying to help, that's all you can do.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here is the toughest part of my job, and our job is that 99% of the time the answer is no, or 95%. In fact, one of the things that I'm trying to do is to only have conversation where I think there is a better than 50-50 chance of saying yes so that we don't waste somebody's time and we're not spending all that time in the meeting and saying no. We need to have a really good feeling. The game has advanced so far now that we have some incredible research capacity that we can look up things a lot more in advance before even we have a single conversation. Here's the thing. It's the toughest thing to say no to an entrepreneur. This is their lives dream. And you know what helps is because I've been in their shoes. The first time I was fundraising, there are 50 LPs that said no to me. No, like no way. This is not going to work. Here's some other LP. Go talk to them and that that person is like, no, like absolutely not. We wouldn't give you a single cent. Go talk to these other people. Maybe they'll give you money. The thing that really matters is to be upfront and transparent. Look, I care.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With you, you have about 100% revenue retention, and are you growing? How many customers do you have? And then even for growth, it's table stakes to say you're going to grow X next year. The top companies are like, hey, not only do we have that growth goal, but we have five to one pipeline coverage. Even if you get to 20% of your pipeline, you're going to hit that growth number. I know that you're going to hit that number because that coverage means that there is no way that you're not going to hit that number versus other people.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I don't want to preempt, but one of my investment pit peeves is every founder is constantly talking about success and everybody's asking, how can I be successful? Everybody wants to figure it out. And it is surprising to me that nobody's ever talking about how to measure success. So if you don't know how to measure success, how the hell are you going to get there? For my German training, the one thing that I learned is if you have a plan, things might change and things might not go according to plan. But if you don't have a plan, there's no way you're getting to your destination. And part of an important part of the plan is if you have a goal, you need to have a map. And if you have to get to success, you need to figure out how to measure it, at least initially. And it can't be, we got an article on TikCrunch or whatever, Wall Street Journal. If it's all about using engagement, it's like the level of engagement. It's about having happy customers. What is your MPS score of the customers? If it's SaaS, are the customers willing to stay?”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agencies or web agencies. So we came up with this idea that if one of those basically loop in Shopify and it's built on Shopify, they get lifetime commissions as long as the customer is on it. It's such a simple idea. Of course, it's all about keeping your customers forever and nobody was thinking about it. Everybody's like, no, I don't want to pay out too much in commission. So literally those three things, along with seeing the product, and this is an incredible product and it's a lot of gut feel. That was it. And it's always something that you don't hear from somebody else. And the moment you hear it, it automatically makes sense. Like, of course. But until you hear it, it's not obvious. Because if it was obvious, everybody else would be doing it. And it is uncomfortable, but you hear it and you're like, yep, I get it. This very unique and nobody else is doing it. So this is the company I'm going to back.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not beholden to anyone. Go work on crazy things that we're probably going to need a couple years from now. But when we need it, you will have already worked on it. It was such a subtle thing, but unless I had that experience from Google, I don't think anybody would have appreciated everybody else was like pouring through the numbers and trying to calculate ratios. And I'm like, yeah, that might give you insight, but that insight was so different than all the other things you could get from the numbers. And then there were two more things. Number one, they were drastically underpricing the product and it might have scared someone. The message that it sent me is that it's like Amazon. No customer ever said, I want to buy a product for a higher price. Everybody's like, I want to buy it for the lowest price possible. And then the last thing is you're always looking for an unfair distribution advantage. And they're like, look, we have this crazy idea, even though we have this great tool. Majority of our customers still find us through designing.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just got to be a great listener. And I'm just looking for unique insight. There are a couple things that happened when I showed up. The first one is something very unusual where Toby said, look, we're doing something a little bit crazy. We only have 20 engineers and the whole company was, I don't know, 50 people, something like that. Maybe they had 25 engineers. And he said, I'm taking my best engineers off a product development, but they're going to build this real-time database for me. So then I have this real-time visibility into everything that's going on. And somebody else would have looked at that. great, I'm absolutely walking out of here. The CEO's crazy and I saw something that I saw exactly at Google, exactly at 50 people at Google. Larry said, you know what? We need to move even faster. And if we only put engineers on projects as they become relevant, it's not fast enough and we're going to fall behind. So for the first time in the history of Google, he took three people. He's like, from now on, your Google research.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are much more motivated to find a way to make it happen. And even though we have these competing goals and we want to maximize ownership, things are hard. You want to have also a good trusted partner around the table too. So it's just a balance, but it cannot be all given no take. We are very conscious of that and we always try to make it very easy for the other part to say yes or be overly generous because one day we feel like that good karma will always come back to us.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have 100 times the amount of capital now, all the funds are bigger, they're all good teams. It is natural that we're going to run against each other. And it's tough. We all want to be in the same great companies and we all want to maximize our ownership. So one is to remember that it's a long game, never optimize for the one deal or investment be as generous and as nice as you can in every situation. The second thing is just be top of mind for people. A lot of times I wish, oh, there's a formula. You know what the formula is? Just be always good to people and try to be as top of mind as often as you can. Remember them. Reach out to them. It's interesting that in this like crazy age of technology, so many of the fortuitous and serendipitous things that happen happen because we just bothered to call someone and open up and ask them what they're doing. And lo and behold, oh my God, we're excited about the same area or the company.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this strategy is not different today. There are many situations where because our true north is to be in the best companies, the only thing that has changed is we went from by default and by capital scarcity to be only participating investors to now, I think we lead or co-lead about 70% of the investments we make. And there is still 30% where we make strategic investments and some of those are most successful companies. So when we realize that it's either a small stake or no stake, we still offer the small stake because once we're in the company, we're very confident that if we can do a good job, we can over time increase those investments which we've successfully done so far. So we don't really see it like all or nothing. It's about like just get into the right company.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might not be able to make the investment at all, even though you've seen the right company and the company might be motivated to work with you. If you don't have a capital structure, for instance, like let's just say, look, if we weren't $600 million main fund or $300 million focus fund, even just to be able to do a Series A these days, I mean C rounds used to be, I don't know, half a million to two million. Now, very frequently we start seeing C round five to 10, sometimes 15 million, sometimes 20 million. A rounds used to be 5 million now. We have A rounds that can go up to 100 million. And this is just an A round. And so it depends on demand. If you have an amazing pedigree founders and a great company, you're going to have insane capital that wants to get into that company. So in this crazy world, you just got to be able to say yes for the right companies. And if you don't have that capital structure, it's very difficult to be successful, let alone to stay in the game.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the reasons why we kept scaling, and I started with a four and a half million dollar personal chick capacity, and our first one was 41 million. Now, for the first time, we're investing out of a fun family, and together we have, I think, 900 million committed in this latest fund. And so you're like, wow, that's quite a bit of growth. Yeah, first of all, I mean, you can see the numbers. I mean, everything is going up to the right very rapidly. Valuations are up, check sizes are up, round sizes are up, and things are scaling very, very fast. On the one hand, all this is scary, but the companies are getting to unprecedented levels of success in unprecedentedly short times. So the only job we have is to get onto those bullet trains, hypersonic planes, however you want to call them, the companies that matter, we need to have an unfair share of those, whatever it takes. The reason why this question is important is if you don't have the right capital structure,”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have about 26 people in our team. Roughly 10 of them are in the investment team. I do have to give a lot of credit to our founder success team. It's a very important aspect of our operation. So that's growing really fast. So say like anywhere between 10 to 15. And I would like to say we probably have somewhere north of 250 active companies. So even though we have more than 350 investments, roughly half of them have exited. So I think maybe for 350 to 380 investments, we have 170 exits. So we have 200 or so companies. And so I think it's still a pretty good ratio in terms of the companies we can handle. And we are investing to grow the team and to make sure that we have capacity to help.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all about our founders, even if the founder relationship manager is not one of us directly. If there was an ask, we're all going to roll up the sleeves and figure out. And then the thing that really helps us is that we have a very diverse team and not just diverse in terms of their backgrounds or their gender or anything. But like they worked at different places, they went to different schools. They had different professions. So we can cover a lot of ground with a small team just because we have nothing in our team that overlaps. So as a result, we always have someone that's kind of likely to have either perspective or know someone that's then going to get us to the right answer, whatever it takes and whatever that is.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We try to keep a good balance because I do think that having a certain portfolio size is really important because the network itself then becomes extremely valuable. But we also understand that this can't be a supermarket. We can't make hundreds and hundreds of investments. So it's a fine balance. I think one of the things that helps here is that we have a unique strategy with our team that we try to make decisions together unanimously. And that doesn't mean that we can't have different opinions and different levels and we can still have skeptics. But one of the reasons that happens by design is that the only way we can handle it is it's a little bit like a customer support team that we don't know each one of us how many demands or asks we're going to get but if we're all working as a team there might be one ask where at that moment five of us are trying to help this one company and then there are other times when each one of us can handle three companies by having that overall support of everyone that hey it's all about the pie it's all about the family”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advisor was from Facebook, and Facebook was their first major client. They were trying to close. And we got some unique insights that I think really helped them in that journey. And I remember even after Shepify went public, one executive one day I get a text from Harley's like, look, we just need to get a hold of this executive. Please do whatever you can in a couple days, make the intro. I'm like, oh my God, there's no way. And then it turns out that we did find somebody in our team that could get through to that person and we did connect them. The reason why I'm mentioning this is that there is no secret formula or 200 people in the back end that just wait to do a job. It's our willingness in that no job is too small. Whatever the founder needs, we will just go find a way to make it happen. And they really appreciate it because the thing is that moment where it's most critical and timely, that's when they really need the help. And when you can do it, nothing builds trust more than that.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most important thing that we do honestly is to always ask the founders what is the one thing that matters the most to them and what is the most critical. There are some things that we do that is across the board that involves recruiting or strategic help with next round or exits, planning, introducing them to customers. There is every now and then something that is very unique and special. I remember this was especially the case with Robio and Shopify. Rovio was just about to launch their physical goods. They have these really cool goods, the angry bursts, the plush toys. And they realized that a couple weeks before Christmas that they had no experience building an online store and the time was running out. And that was right after we closed Shopify. So I went to Shopify and look, you have a lot of customers, but Rovia could be one of the biggest ones. And they put one of their best engineers just by connecting the two companies. Both of them got something amazing out of it. I remember when we were talking to Adian, they didn't have any notable customers in the US, but one of our big...”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People think that just because they have the degree, they have the title, they have the idea that the deal and the win is going to fall into their lap. And the founders, they are putting their life into this, they don't want to think that this is just like a little check mark or a little transaction in your Excel spreadsheet. What they want to see is that you care, that you're going to make an effort, suspend disbelief, and you're going to do whatever it takes to help them. We always talk about it. Who's your best friend? What is something that you appreciate about your significant other is because they support us. They're there in our worst days. And I think that's the important thing for that to come true with the founders. There is that moment where they truly believe that you are that trusted partner. That is the magical moment, I think, we win. And it's just very special.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried to lead by example. I mean, it's very much like apprentice model. It's not like I have a magic bullet. I think Shopify took me eight emails until Toby said yes. Then he asked me to fly to Ottawa. Adian took me two years to break through. Rovia took me a year and a half and I had to meet them in the US and London, in Helsinki. So it's not like I figured out this industry is the right industry and I found the company, but I had to be relentless getting smashed into a wall and hearing a no and no smile like something skeptical on the other end. I think until I broke through the ice. That's the funny thing. And I go back and the reason why I can do this is because of my experience in living in these crazy countries or dealing with these people where I'm like, how the hell am I going to convince them to buy what I'm selling? And that's the pivotal experience that keeps me going. And they see that. And also, if you are not showing emotion and if you're not showing that you care, then I don't think people want to work with you.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pivot into these areas. It's not like I'm a security expert. I'm definitely not a DevOps expert. I'm definitely not a cloud or infra expert. So even though I don't have any of these qualities, I am absolutely convinced that these are going to be monster areas in which incredible companies get created and you're already seeing it. We have to find the best companies. We came from scratch and we, I think, now have a dozen companies in these areas, even though we don't have a single resident expert.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are new areas of technology that are never going to go out of fashion. That's infrastructure, security, and DevOps. Because when I went to grad school and we studied economics, what does it take to start a company? People, raw materials, warehouse, office, capital. And today, what does it take to start a company? Oh, AWS, a little bit of capital and maybe a few people. So this is like an age where data is the new oil. Like there's nothing physical. In this new age, what matters the most is data and infrastructure and DevOps and security because if all your biggest assets are not physical, their IP, their software, then security is so critical because if I want to steal something that is really precious, I'm not going to go steal a car or office, whatever. I'm going to go try to steal IP. So that's what's happening between nation states. And it's also crazy because it is much harder to detect. So security is never going to go out of fashion. So we made a hard.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family, I've never had psychology training or psychiatrist training. It was a very simple thesis. One day it dawned on me that so many of my family and friends had different mental things that were going on with them. And I'm like, wow, every year I go to doctor for a physical checkup, but there is never really a mental checkup. Nobody knows what's wrong with you. They can't even diagnose it. There is no test. For physical stuff, you can do a blood pressure. You can do blood check. You can do gene test. We can pretty much identify anything that is going on with you physically. But we cannot do anything that is happening with you mentally. Health is the largest span of GDP, the largest budget, the largest cost in the US, probably for the rest of the world. And the only area of health that is still in Stone Age is mental. I guarantee you that there's going to be multiple huge companies getting created addressing mental health. So we went all in in mental health. Or a couple years back, we realized in the new world,”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In gaming, and it happened to be based in Helsinki. So our job was to travel to Helsinki enough times until the CEO said, yes, we're going to take your investment versus waiting in Silicon Valley. Oh, like we didn't get a gaming company, we got whatever, some other company. It doesn't matter. We are only going to be successful if we're going to get into this gaming company. We're only going to be successful if we're going to get into this formative commerce company, Shopify, because we did know or could predict that this is going to explode. It's such an important area. Every brick and mortar store is going to have an e-commerce store of some sort and somebody is going to facilitate it. If all the information is online, there's going to be a search engine and that's going to facilitate discovery of information. So when you have that simple thesis, just go try to find the best company that essentially fulfills that promise. Let me give you an example of one of our very unusual focus areas a few years back, which was mental health. I'm not a mental health expert. I don't have any psychologists in the field.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do find them and you close them, that's going to be the factor that's going to make you successful. So for Shopify, we add the thesis that, look, we wanted to invest in a formative commerce company. And it was in a crazy environment. And I was meeting some other founders that basically refused to take money from me. And in my defeat, I went to their blog. And so an interview with Toby. And I'm like, oh my God, this is the company. This is the company we're looking at. It wasn't, we went and looked at 1,000 commerce companies and decided Shopify was it. We always tried to find some way of very quickly getting who was either the current leader or the potential leader of this field and then basically say, look, it's not that we're trying to make an investment in Canada or Holland or Australia or Finland. It's just that we're trying to find the best company in an area that we are convinced is very, very important. With Rovio is that was the first mobile app that was number one in every app store in every country. It happened to be...”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question because one of the things that really helped us is even from the very early on when we didn't have the strongest deal flow, we always thought that our job was not to wait for the companies to come to us. Our job was to find the companies that matter and regardless if they heard of us or not, go find that company and do whatever it takes to be an investor in that company. And to be honest with you, my experience at Google was hugely helpful. I remember being responsible for Japan. I never lived in Japan and I had such a crisp plan. I'm like, I want to find all the portals that matter. And I knew that if I was in seven of the top ten portals and was successful, then I did solo against a competitor that had 30 people, most of which were Japanese. So we did the same thing in Venture. This is a race to find the best companies and the earlier you find them and hopefully you.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Board, and we're going to tell you how to run this company. And if you miss your goals, we're going to put our friends in the board or as executives. And the founder is like, no, I'm going to do crazy things and I want to know that you're going to believe in me and you're going to let me do this thing and you're going to support me versus telling me to run my company the way you see fit. So that's the thing that really gave us that first impetus. And today, when we have 100 more capital even, it really sets Felice apart as a VC because our heritage, our DNA has always been founder first and everything else we make it work. If we find the right founder in the right market, the answer is yes.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An incredible company, and that was in Amsterdam. Later on, we invested in Canva, which was in Sydney. I just want to tell you that everybody thought for the longest time Googles and Facebook's can only happen in Silicon Valley, but very quickly it became more democratic and international. And then what happens if you're going to invest in companies around the world? Well, do you have somebody in your team that is truly international? That's me, because I lived in 40 countries. I speak five languages. So then do funders look at me and like, you're perfectly made for this. You relate to us. You care about us. You love our country. You love our company. So it's kind of incredible that something that no VC ever thought was going to matter or is important became something that is really important, which is the founders want to feel that you genuinely care about their company, you have conviction, and you believe in their dreams versus at the time Silicon Valley VC methodology was, look, we're giving you the capital, we're going to get on your...”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do eight sectors versus just one or two. I'm going to do four stages versus just one. I'm going to do 20, 40 geos instead of just one. Think about how much bigger the universe is and everybody thought that only can work if you spray and pray. And I said, no, it just means that the universe is much bigger, but I'm still going to sharpshoot, find one company in a critical market if the best company for this one area is in another place where people don't believe that it could happen. I'm just going to suspend disbelief. I mean, look at some of our biggest successes. It's like the exact epitome of that success. The first successful company, Shopify, was in Ottawa. People are like, that can never happen, became $160 billion company. Then we invested in Rovio. It was in Finland and Helsinki. Then our payment company, Adian, I remember when we first made the investment and wanted to take it to Wall Street Journal versus Journal is like, what is this company? It's not even our database. Just because it's in Amsterdam and everybody here knew Stripe.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was very simple. I said, I want to have the highest concentration of iconic companies around the world, independent of sectors and stage, but I said I'm going to be a market first investor and I'm going to find all the markets that are growing the fastest that need critical solutions that can be satisfied by tech. But everything else, I'm not going to have any strings attached. It's still a pretty broad strategy. In traditional venture strategy, when you explain it, the LPs like it because you're so specialized that it basically roughly translates to, I am so specialized that I'm going to be great at decision making. But what nobody ask is, and I had the much broader strategy, I was on the exact opposite end of the spectrum, but people confuse that just because it's broad, it means that the universe you can pick companies from is so much bigger that you are much more likely to have many more successes. Because imagine if I told you, Ted, I'm”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might never make an investment for three, four years. You're just going to sit there and watch, and I'm like, what? I don't want to sit there and watch. I just want to go do and learn. So that is why I'm saying that initial failure and the rejection was the best thing that happened to me because then I had to figure everything on my own just like scientific method, trial and error, research. You're going to run 100 experiments, see what works, and see if your strategy works. And it was probably the best way to learn venture because I feel I had so much more playtime and surface area, 100 investments. I tried everything. And the crazy thing was every time I bent a rule, I had success. Then you understand and realize this is a business of outliers. Nothing that is an outlier is normal. So if you try to bring normalcy or strings attached or boxes interventure, you're not going to succeed or at best you're going to be mediocre. So if you want outliers, you need to have an outlier strategy and you need to have outlier thinking.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, and I'm like, I've done so many different things. I have so much intellectual curiosity that I'm gonna pick it up. I don't need to be a VP in Gentech to invest in biotech. I know enough to know what matters and what's not. And so all of these things were very unusual at the time. And I built a strategy on that. And what was really great is that maybe a lot of people didn't appreciate it on the LP side, but it worked because it was unique and nobody else was doing it. And so when you're the only practitioner of a unique strategy like that, and also it was timely, it really helped me. I mean, I got a lot of momentum. And then the last thing is, and this is very subtle, nobody ever talks on the idea of shots on goal or hour spend. I guess we have the concept of 10,000 hours. By doing my own firm and making 100 investments in four years, four and a half years, if I was at another firm, God knows if I would have even been able to make five or six investments in that time, if at all. Some firms are like,”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the founder, and if the power is with the founders, then the only thing that matters is your ability to demonstrate conviction and build trust with the founders. So I decided that the way that I was going to excel is that I was going to find the world's best founders and be their trusted advisor and investor regardless of the size of my check. And I wanted to be world class at that. And then the other thing that I realized is I was going to take everything in the venture rulebook and turn it on his head. Pretty scary. Well, when you're an entrepreneur and you have nothing to lose, you go do something crazy. So every single venture adage, oh, you have to have high ownership. I'm like, it doesn't matter. I don't care if I have small ownership as long as they're great company. Always invest in what's local and what's close to you. And I'm like, look, I lived in four continents. I've been to 40 countries. I don't care where it is. I can either speak the language or break the ice. I'll go to where the company is. Very rare and unconventional at the time. And then it was also invest in what?”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things. One, I didn't have any experience, but the one thing that I knew if I wanted to be successful was to have very concrete benchmarks and a very concrete strategy. And in my free time, I love reading military strategy books. But the one thing that you learn is that if you”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was just starting to take off first class, only 12 companies, hardly any angels, no networks, nothing. And it was just a great time to get into Angel Investing. And the timing was so fortuitous that by being one of the most active ones, I could maybe make it to the first wave of super angels. Now we have solo capitalists. It's just like these things get reborn and reinvented. And that really gave me a lot of impetus and momentum and a personal brand to get into great deals. And it became more self-fulfilling as it went.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was very interesting because I thought, hey, there's no way that I can get into venture capital by myself. I need to start working somewhere. I talked to like four or five venture firms and it was clear that I wasn't going to make their cut because I didn't fit any of these check boxes. And honestly, that's probably the single best thing that happened because the only option I had left was to basically be an entrepreneur by default. And even though I was curious about many other things, I realized that venture capital was the way to go because that was the most relevant and the best way I could leverage all the things that I learned at Google, Silicon Graphics, and all the other roles. I was very lucky because I was early at Google. I had surplus personal capital. If nobody gave me money, I had my own money that I could put at risk. And I'm like, I'm just going to go be an angel investor. And I need to be very humble and frank with you that the timing really helped me. Back in 2005, 2006, I mean, God knows, there were maybe 50 angel investors. I mean, YC.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really interesting because when I was leaving Google, they came to me, Hey, I didn't look, you've done so well at Google. We trust you. Do you want to go and run Google Turkey or have a regional role? And I think what I realized is at that point, I was very happy to serve Google, to have great contributions, but I wasn't motivated to manage 1000 people or let me be the CEO of Google Turkey or Google Europe or something like that. Just didn't motivate me. I think I am much more driven zero to one than one to N. I'm not a political person. I'm very plain spoken. The other thing that I realized is, hey, you spend six years at Google, but you weren't a director or VP. That was actually a lot of people asked me when I was trying to get the VC. Yeah, like you're not a senior executive. We're not really sure you can really do this. And it's just because I think I was almost to my detriment as plain spoken and I don't know. Speaking the truth doesn't always help you, especially you're very passionate. So I realized that my only choice was to be an entrepreneur.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I somehow had been exposed through these variety of roles that I had. The reason why I'm saying is when you become an entrepreneur and when you start a company, all of these things matter because you're responsible for all of that and you need to hire people for all of that. If you've never been exposed, it's really difficult. So I feel like I had that great advantage post Google when I was starting my own firm.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was at Google for about six years from 1999 to 2005, variety of roles from product management to sales. And what was really great about it is maybe it took me a little longer to start Felices, but at Google I did sales. I did product management. It's Silicon Graphics. I did product management and dealt very closely with engineers. At Roche, I was in corporate finance and a little bit in marketing. And at school, I studied marketing. And then I lived in all these different places and always had intellectual curiosity to be interested in a lot of things. Like I did trading, I had an internship at Citibank. My freshman year out of college. And the only reason why I'm mentioning to you is they're so different from each other. But it allowed me to appreciate every single role in a company and the areas that I didn't do myself like HR, I knew from my mom because I've seen her in action. How she stressed about recruiting people, motivating people, managing people. So I feel like HRI in my DNA and then all the other disciplines.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In and to do the first portal deals, like whether I spoke the language or not didn't matter, but I somehow break the ice and break bread with any of the people that I dealt with. And I think it was the world's best job, maybe being James Bond is the coolest thing, but that's in a movie. And then the second best thing was to be the first international sales executive for Google. I got to see all these portals and all these countries. And that was my dream, to be in all those countries. So I couldn't believe that I ended up what I dream. If you dream it one day, it can't actually come true.”
2022-02-07 · Capital Allocators · Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source