Aydin Senkut explains how Felicis scales operational support for portfolio companies without building a massive internal headcount.
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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 …”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
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…”
Disclosure
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.”