Aydin Senkut
Founder & Managing Partner, Felicis. On 4 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
4shows
5appearances
47statements
11resolved
7supported
2contradicted
64%fully supported
43said about them ↓ Everything Aydin Senkut said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Senkut: Trying to accurately estimate early TAM is a major founder mistake
“Look, I think this is the biggest mistake is basically try to estimate correctly what the market size is. You just need to know that if it works, it's going to be big enough.”
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: Outlier returns in venture capital require outlier thinking
“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 into venture, 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 …”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Larry Page mandated insane goals at Google to prevent incremental thinking
“He had a very simple philosophy, which was, I'm going to ask you to do insane things. And they are insane by default because If they're not insane, you're going to basically revert to status quo and you're going to come up with incremental ideas. And the only …”
Felicis took mid-single-digit Series A ownership in Canva despite VC norms
“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…”
Felicis caps internal headcount by guaranteeing revenue for external solo agencies
“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…”
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.”
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,”
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.”
Senkut: People mistakenly judge market sizes based on existing product constraints
“I think the most important thing that people don't realize is that when we look at market size, we're looking at the market size with the existing product.”
Senkut: Early Shopify dedicated two top engineers to an internal data warehouse
“When I showed up in Ottawa, Toby told me that, hey, they had these amazing engineers and the team was by the way, like less than 50 people or barely 50 people. And he said, I took two of my best engineers and we're building a real time data warehouse.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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.”
The other half of the tape: Aydin Senkut's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 43 times in 14 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 26Wesley Chan 11Renata Quintini 3Charles Hudson 1Brendan Foody 1Adarsh Hiremath 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 42
Capital Allocators 1
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- Wesley Chan: How I Created Google Analytics; The Founding Story of Gmail & Canva | 20VC #919 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Renata Quintini and Roseanne Wincek – Renegade Spin-Out in the Supercritical Stage, Venture is Eating the Investment World 11 (Capital Allocators, EP. 242)
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Notion's Fundraise with Index: The Most Anticipated Deal in The Valley: How It Came To Be | The Future of Remote Work |How Notion Approach The Balance of Growth and Profitability
- 20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 4 mentions in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 16 mentions in 2 episodes 8 per episode
- 20VC: Building Shopify From $5m To IPO, Why The Future Of Retail Is Not Online vs Offline & Why Law School Is Like Finishing School For Entrepreneurs with Harley Finkelstein, COO @ Shopify
- 20VC: The 7 Requirements For Startup Scaling, Why VCs Must Approach Every Conversation with A Yes Mentality & Why We Will See The Humanisation of Technology with Renata Quintini, Partner @ Lux Capital
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 11 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster
- 20VC: The 3 Things LPs Want To See From VCs & Why The Table Stakes For VCs Is Higher Than Ever with Judith Elsea, Co-Founder @ Weathergage Capital
- 20VC: Raising A Solo GP Fund & Why They Are So Prominent Today with Charles Hudson, Managing Partner @ Precursor Ventures
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Aydin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Felicis | 2 | 26 | 57% 4/7 | full record on 20VC → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Felicis | 1 | 13 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Felicis | 1 | 4 | — | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & Managing Partner, Felicis | 1 | 4 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |