Felicis Ventures

“We're at twenty million in revenue. They ask us, what valuation do we think makes most sense? And I say one to two billion dollars. So they give us a term sheet at a two billion dollar valuation.”

“By September of 20, 25 or say October, we were at called four hundred million in revenue run rate. And then Felisa's was like, we want to invest more. And so they gave us a term sheet at a ten billion dollar valuation.”

“When Felicis gave us the term sheet, we were at twenty million in revenue run rate. So it's a hundred X multiple on the revenue”

“It was doing, you know, eight figures in, in revenue, right?”

“Actually, I didn't send from Felicis, who's one of our series B, he passed on my seed. And this is the feedback. So you guys, like when you pass and you do give the feedback, it's really important. So I didn't was like, you're biting off too much. You need to …”

“I actually was thinking maybe I should work at a firm first and learn the ropes before I started. But I didn't really have a typical background and Nobody really wanted to give me a job”

“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”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“We think that picking companies is hard. I think picking people is like a hundred times harder, right?”

“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.”

“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”

“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…”

“And the round that we participated in Angry Birds was bigger than the fund size that we were investing at the time. The check size was order of magnitudes bigger than the check size we've written before.”

“By doing my own firm and making a hundred 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.”

“Today 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 to say like anywhere between 1…”

“And our first fund was forty one million. Now for the first time we're investing out of a fund family and together we have, I think, nine hundred million committed in this latest fund.”

“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”

“Canva is a good example. It's one of our most valuable companies. Our initial series A ownership was probably around single digit percentage, mid single digits. In other world, ABC is like, oh, we can't even get 10, 20%. We're not going to do it. Look at where…”

“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 fifty-fifty chance of saying yes, so that we don't waste somebody's time, and we're not spending all that time in a meeting and saying no.”

“The first time I was fundraising, there are 50 LPs that said no to me.”

“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 start engaging people. There are some great people out there. They just want to run their own firm, whether it's recruiti…”

“I know that Adyen was top in our portfolio in terms of revenue per employee. I think Adyen was also top in terms of 300 investments we made or so in terms of efficiency of those revenues, meaning that to generate that one extra dollar of revenue, how much capi…”

“Backing, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, Dad, but an incredible two unicorns per year since founding, including Shopify, Opendoor, Flexport, Adyen, Twitch, Fitbit, and many more incredible companies.”

“One of the things we do at Felicis is we track NPS score with founders and something we pay a ton of attention to”

“To address this, Felicis launched something called the Founders Pledge, Founders Development Pledge, where we contribute one percent of our committed capital toward leadership coaching and mental health for the founding team.”

“Now, each one of the Felicis partners has at least one billion dollar exit under his or her belt.”

“One of the biggest investments, in fact, the largest check that Felicis has ever written was into a company in Australia called Canva.”

“With Fitbit, when I didn't bet on Fitbit, everybody else was looking at connected devices or looking at hardware and going, you can't make money on hardware. And I didn't, You know, sort of wrote a check into it and became one of the biggest, you know, sort of…”

“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.”

“When Rovio closed their first Series A round, it was forty-two million dollars, and that was larger than our whole fund.”

“For instance, you know, ah, two years back, we were the first venture firm to officially, you know, vote, always with their founders,”

“Passed on Uber, passed on Airbnb, passed on Pinterest.”

“If you take our anti-portfolio and add up their current pending valuation, it's probably a multiple of that.”