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Aydin Senkut

Founder & Managing Partner, Felicis · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderexecutiveoperator@asenkut ↗LinkedIn ↗felicis.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Before transitioning to investing, Senkut was an early Google executive serving as the company's first product manager and first international sales manager. In 2006, he founded Felicis, scaling it into a venture firm known for early investments in companies like Shopify, Adyen, Canva, and Notion.

26statements → 9claims → 7claims resolved → 57%fully supported → 4.15/5average certainty → 1.96/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources → 42said about them ↓

4 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

9 assertions · 1 opinion · 7 insights · 9 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Aydin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Felicis was the first VC firm to pledge voting with founders
“For instance, you know, ah, two years back, we were the first venture firm to officially, you know, vote, always with their founders,”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 22:13 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Only Google has an AI dataset comparable to Diffbot
“I think the only other company in the world that has that kind of data set is Google.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 28:22 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
70% certainty 4
75% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.2 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.5

redirected or did not address 3 of 37 assessed questions (8%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

250 words/min while actually speaking · 18.8 um and uh per 1k words · 5.1 false starts per 1k · 26.4% of pauses land inside a clause

English is their second language (first language: Turkish). These numbers measure fluency in English. They do not measure thought; the argument clarity score above is read from substance alone.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 12,917 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 2 rated episodes:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10
setup questions received 60%

Everything Aydin Senkut said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Senkut: Optimizing for unlimited upside outweighs initial valuation and ownership constraints
“I think what we decided as a firm is the only thing that matters for us is to be in the world's best companies, because out of all the things that you can optimize for unlimited upside is the single most important one, right?”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 9:25 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Small seed funds face major headwinds as small M&A dries up
“More and more we're seeing the bigger companies, you know, focusing on only on large M&A and companies' success driven more like either they get to a scale where they can go public but there is not as much glory in kind of smaller successes. So I think there's…”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 12:16 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Assertion Not checkable as stated
High entry valuations did not correlate with Felicis' exit outcomes
“So we have a very, very good data set, and what we found is that at least half of these companies, we were borderline, ah, about coming in because they were very expensive deals. But that had nothing to do with the eventual outcome.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 15:50 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Assertion Contradicted
Only Google has an AI dataset comparable to Diffbot
“I think the only other company in the world that has that kind of data set is Google.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 28:22 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Insight
Senkut: The ideal VC fund portfolio size is 40 to 50 companies
“I really do think that in venture, the ideal size is around 40, 50 companies and not 20.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 14:41 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Senkut: Crossover funds focus 99% of their investments on enterprise software
“All these people have been 99% focused on enterprise software. So any other vertical, you don't have as much impact because they're not investing in everything. They're primarily investing in enterprise software, and it might grow from there.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 22:00 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Senkut: Low acceptance rates don't build great VC firms, hits do
“You cannot build a great franchise just turning down companies. You have to say yes to some great companies. Otherwise, there's no way, you know, like everybody talks about, we're so selective, you know we meet thousand companies and we only say to 10. Absolut…”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 34:45 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Senkut: Venture capital cannot scale without 100x to 1000x return bets
“Because if you don't get that hundred X or thousand X type of bets, you know, like, this is not a business that's gonna scale with, like, just two, three X type of investments, if you know what I mean.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 37:58 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Senkut: Felicis invested in Living Carbon for genetically enhanced carbon-capturing trees
“So one of the latest investments that just got public is this company called Living Carbon. So I think this area is going to be increasingly more interesting. And we said yes, because this is an amazing company that managed to biologically enhance trees to cap…”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 47:28 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Venture capital is a derivative business like an art gallery
“I basically immediately realized that venture capital is a derivative business. It's like an art gallery. We are not building these companies, but we're creating these companies and we're supporting them.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 8:12 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Assertion Supported
Felicis was the first VC firm to pledge voting with founders
“For instance, you know, ah, two years back, we were the first venture firm to officially, you know, vote, always with their founders,”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 22:13 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Felicis' anti-portfolio valuation is a multiple of its actual portfolio
“If you take our anti-portfolio and add up their current pending valuation, it's probably a multiple of that.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 24:35 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Assertion Partly supported
Senkut: Felicis's $41M debut fund backed Rovio, Shopify, and Fitbit
“The very first fund we had was only forty one million, and we invested in Rovio in Finland from that. The whole round was bigger than our whole firm. Shopify's A round and Fitbit's B round”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 5:14 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Senkut: Experiencing LP fundraising is necessary for building a VC firm
“For people that get into VC and that never seen that side of it, like, some people never see the VC fundraising, and I feel it's a very necessary part of it, like, it's a very necessary part of franchise and firm building.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 6:47 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Senkut: Shopify and Canva grew 10 to 20 times larger than expected
“But what I have seen with all the great companies we had, whether it be like Shopify or Canva or Adyen, it ended up being like 20 to 10 to 20 times bigger than what we expected.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 9:51 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Senkut: 2021 round sizes and valuations jumped 50% to 150% over expectations
“We had a great plan with the new fund and all of a sudden all the round sizes and valuations ended up like 50 to 150% higher than we expected.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 17:13 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Senkut: Selecting Right People Is 100x Harder Than Picking Startups
“We think that picking companies is hard. I think picking people is like a hundred times harder, right?”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 26:33 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Senkut: Passed on Airbnb at a $2.5M valuation cap in 2008
“I still have an email from 2008 from Brian Chesky. I didn't. We really like you. You sure you don't want to invest at like 2.5 million dollar cap, right? Like I just overthought the risk.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 33:26 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Senkut: Felicis prefers distributing post-IPO stock to LPs over managing positions
“Then I realized that our responsibility to our LPs is not managing their public stock is to be in great companies. And that's why we like to give them the stock, because listen, maybe for some, the right context is to sell the stock right then and there.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 40:46 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Senkut: Felicis intentionally filled its first LP board with its toughest skeptics
“We didn't construct a board with all the LPs that were just like in our favor and just kept telling us we're doing a good job. We put the most skeptical ones on our board, the toughest ones”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 44:24 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Rovio became Shopify's top store out of 10,000 within a week
“In seven days, the Rovio store was up and running on Shopify. Instantly, it became the top store in Shopify among 10,000 stores. They sold out their whole inventory in a week”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 20:04 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Disclosure
Felicis passed on investing in Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest
“Passed on Uber, passed on Airbnb, passed on Pinterest.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 24:31 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Disclosure
Senkut: Adyen was my largest personal venture exit
“My personal biggest exit was Adyen.”
Aydin Senkut May 27, 2022 ▶ 33:14 Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Y Combinator classes were only 10 to 15 companies in 2006
“When I started 10 years ago, Google and Facebook were still buying a lot of small companies. YC classes were only 10, 15 companies.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 11:56 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!

Show 2statements(2 left)

The other half of the tape: Aydin Senkut's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 42 times in 13 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 26Wesley Chan 11Renata Quintini 2Charles Hudson 1Brendan Foody 1Adarsh Hiremath 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0010220320162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions
02320162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodes it came up in
0041.58320162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions per episode
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 5 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2019 4 mentions in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 16 mentions in 2 episodes 8 per episode
2016 11 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890 · 20VC with Harr May 27, 2022 37m
20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differentl Apr 11, 2016 21m
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