Feb 7, 2022 · 1h 4m · capital-allocators
Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Ted Seides interviews Aydin Senkut, founder of Felicis Ventures, exploring his operator career from Google to venture capital, his borderless outbound sourcing strategy, and his empathetic approach to scaling a premier multi-billion-dollar investment firm.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Ted holds 21% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Ted as informed peer 1.8 Guest teaching 2.7 Guest disagreement 0.8 Ted pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is Ted, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 26:00 Rejecting venture industry conformity
Aydin strongly rejects standard venture capital dogma, declaring that trying to apply normalcy or rigid rules ensures mediocrity in an outlier business.
Hardest push from Ted ▶ 45:01 Ted queries the trade-off of scaling check sizesTed presses Aydin on the tension between his original philosophy of small opportunistic stakes versus taking lead positions in larger rounds.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 16:31 Reframing business education versus Google realityAydin directly counters the notion that past MBA or corporate experience prepared him, explaining Larry Page's counterintuitive management philosophy.
Ted holds their own ▶ 55:13 Ted presses on operational time allocationTed sharpens the discussion by asking how Aydin practically splits partner bandwidth between sourcing new investments and supporting existing founders.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Ted as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Ted pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early Life, International Upbringing, and First Expatriate Role | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Ted opens with broad biographical questions about Aydin's upbringing in Turkey and his early career. Aydin shares personal background and anecdotes in an entirely collaborative, storytelling atmosphere. | |
| Silicon Graphics, Google Growth, and Lessons from Larry Page | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Ted probes what Aydin learned from the collapse of Silicon Graphics and early Google. Aydin reframes the premise by explaining that traditional business education could not prepare anyone for Larry Page's radical moonshot approach. | |
| Transition to Angel Investing and Defying Venture Dogma | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Ted asks how Aydin developed his angel strategy without conventional institutional experience. Aydin articulates how he systematically violated every traditional venture rule—ignoring geography, sector, and strict ownership percentages—to achieve outlier returns. | |
| Founding Felicis Ventures and Tenacious Global Sourcing | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Ted asks how Felicis effectively sources deals across unlimited global sectors and geographies. Aydin explains his outbound, relentless sourcing playbook with examples like Shopify and Rovio, detailing how macro theses beat local specialization. | |
| Sponsor Break: Ridgeline | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Ted inquires about post-investment value-add, team capacity, and scaling check size across fund generations. Aydin explains the firm's unanimous decision-making structure and flexible ownership model. | |
| Due Diligence Conviction, Empathetic Rejections, and Venture Competition | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Ted asks about due diligence conviction, delivering empathetic rejections, and navigating heightened market competition. Aydin offers practical frameworks on evaluating founder metrics and maintaining disciplined focus despite high valuations. |
Statements from this episode (13)
Netscape, TiVo, and Nvidia share Silicon Graphics technology heritage
“A lot of companies like Netscape, TiVo, like all this, like digital recording, all these are SGI technologies. And it's so funny that then permeated to other companies like Nvidia. So many of these companies have Silicon graphics heritage.”
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 …”
Aydin Senkut made 100 angel investments in his first 4.5 years
“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.”
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 …”
Sourcing Shopify took Aydin Senkut eight emails; Adyen took two years
“I think Shopify took me eight emails until Toby said yes. And he asked me to fly to Ottawa. Addion took me two years to break through. Rovio took me a year and a half and I had to meet them in the U S and London in Helsinki.”
Felicis Ventures manages 200 active portfolio companies with 26 team members
“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…”
Felicis Ventures grew from a $41M fund to a $900M fund family
“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.”
Felicis Ventures leads or co-leads approximately 70% of its investments
“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”
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…”
Larry Page launched Google Research when the company had just 50 employees
“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 to…”
Senkut only takes founder meetings with a >50% chance of investing
“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.”
Fifty LPs rejected Aydin Senkut on his first Felicis fundraise
“The first time I was fundraising, there are 50 LPs that said no to me.”
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…”