E73: Aydin Senkut on Building Felicis Ventures

**Erik Torenberg** (0:02)
Before we dive into today's episode, I want to tell you about a new show from Turpentine called Modern Relationships. On the season ahead, I sit down with power couples in tech and leading relationship thinkers to explore how ambitious people actually make partnerships work. Whether you're dating in a relationship or just curious how technology is reshaping modern love, I think you'd enjoy this on your feed. Our first episode features founders funds Delian Asparuhov and tech researcher Nadya Asparuhov, who take us through their evolution from dating to marriage to parenthood, with absolutely no filter on the challenges and growth along the way. You can find Modern Relationships wherever you get your podcasts. Now, on to today's episode.
Welcome back to Turpentine VC, the podcast where we discuss the art and science of building successful venture firms, VC to VC. This week, we're re-releasing one of our most popular episodes. My interview with Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures. Aydin was Google's first product manager and the original Super Angel investor. He was listed among the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capital Investors at least four times and has been named on the Forbes Midas list for 11 years in a row. The conversation ahead explores how Felicis Generalist's investment strategy leads to more successful portfolio companies, their narrative-driven investment philosophy, and the key factors behind their consistent success and strong decision-making process. Let's dive in. Aydin, you've been doing this for a long time, almost a couple decades. And so when you think about the evolution of the firm, why don't you trace that evolution a little bit and talk about how you guys have chosen to grow and evolve that's maybe overlapping or different from some of your peers who started in similar times or if you look at your peers today.

**Aydin Senkut** (1:49)
Well, first of all, it's a dream come true for me. I'm really glad to be doing something that I truly love and it seems like I also don't suck at it so that's nice. I feel like there was three different stages in the evolution of Felicis. One is the first four years of Felicis was kind of as a solo practitioner during the Super Angel era when the seed funds were just coming to form. That was kind of like just proving the theory that something like this could work especially for somebody who is a complete outsider to Venture. Again, most people were very skeptical that somebody who is not from Venture can break into Venture. Then I think the second part is when we started raising institutional capital, that's when things have changed a little bit, and then we've institutionalized like a company, maybe went from family and friends round to seed round. I feel like the middle stage of that is when we basically were building reputation. Then I feel like the current stage that we're in, the third stage is after we've established a successful track record, and then we started optimizing for things like ownership. I would say those were the three different distinct stages of Felicis. I think the other interesting aspect of it is we wanted to do something different in Venture. When you look at Venture, a lot of the so-called new funds are actually splinters from older funds, and the strategy is not that different. It's like, hey, we're doing the same thing, but maybe more nimble with a smaller team with less amount of capital. New ideas don't come very frequently in Venture, and we wanted to do something different, and that was the interesting thing. A lot of the things that we've done, like investing internationally without opening offices there, investing across multiple stages in GOs, without having specialists, I think we're going to touch on this a little bit, like the generalist approach. And a lot of the things that we've done, I would like to say that we have pioneered it.
And also, some parts of our strategy is a little bit unorthodox. We have a different attitude, like mostly Venture is about, hey, can you have only one or two big hits so that you can have a very high loss ratio but still be very successful? And we have a different attitude. We want to have a lot of hits in our funds, and we've been mostly able to engineer that. So the idea is to create like same level of high return but more resiliency with less risk, more consistently. And so far the experiment has been working greatly.

**Erik Torenberg** (4:12)
That's a great overview. And just on the last point, how are you getting more hits? Is it that you're just hiring better pickers? Is it that you're doing something at a structural level?