Show Notes
Aydin Senkut started Felicis 20 years ago with $4 million of his own money.
After hearing "we don't back people like you" from every LP, he's now an early backer of iconic companies like Shopify, Canva, Adyen, Notion, and Supabase and investing out of a $900 million fund 10.
We talk about why success is the downfall of a good investor, the 7 cold emails before he met Tobi, the endowment LP who grilled him like the CIA, why he hired a CFO at fund 3, if raising a 250x bigger fund causes you to lose your edge, Larry Page's 10x rule, and paying 700x revenue for Supabase.
Thank you to Monaco, Flex, Clerk, and Numeral for supporting this episode.
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Timestamps: (0:00) Why success is the downfall of a good investor (2:04) Catching waves from YouTube to AI, chips, and defense (4:47) Is AI a bubble? How to tell what's real (6:17) Silicon Graphics: the company with no second act (7:33) Why AI infrastructure spend isn't hype (12:00) 7 emails, no reply: how he met Tobi at Shopify (15:30) On adding value: "Just ask the founder" (17:30) The founder pledge: vote with the founders (18:26) Fund 1 was $4M of his own money (21:01) Find LP's preconditioned to believe in you (22:07) Venture is a people business (23:05) Raising Fund 2: the endowment’s "CIA interview" (26:48) Why outsiders bet on outsiders (28:23) Turner's rejected podcast audition (30:46) LP pushback on Fund 2 and Fund 3 (32:56) Why he hired a CFO at Fund 3 (35:04) Feedback founders can't argue with (37:21) Founders forget the clock is ticking (40:43) Backing founders through the first bad quarter (42:34) Does a 250x bigger fund lose its edge? (45:53) a16z, OpenRouter, Cursor, and big fund returns (47:30) Why deep tech needs huge rounds (50:57) Trillion dollar markets, billion dollar contracts (53:36) Why SpaceX and Anduril alumni will crush it (56:34) From a $50k first exit to "off by three orders of magnitude" (58:17) The software mindset in hard tech (59:38) Google's duct-taped servers (1:00:56) Scanning every book in the world (1:02:37) Larry Page's 10x rule (1:04:54) Outsider founders: Shopify and Adyen (1:07:17) Why Silicon Valley VC's miss companies outside the Bay Area (1:08:16) Generalist vs. specialist: 55 unicorns, no subject experts (1:12:17) Category winners sit between sectors (1:14:59) Don't obsess over entry price (1:17:24) Paid 700x revenue for Supabase, it grew 1000x (1:18:33) Notion, Canva, and the one-button product (1:20:27) The "OpenAI is about to collapse" crowd (1:21:41) Inspiration from Benjamin Franklin (1:23:47) Funding the twinkle in a founder's eye
Follow Aydin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aydins/ Twitter: https://x.com/asenkut
Follow Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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