Aydin Senkut: How I Scaled from a $4M Angel Fund to $900M AUM | 20VC #890

Aydin Senkut is the Founder and Managing Partner of Felicis. An original super angel turned multi-stage investor, he has been named on the Forbes Midas List for the past nine years (2014-2022). Felicis has been an incredible 16-year journey starting with a $4M Fund I back in 2006, their most recent fund in 2021 was $900M. Along the way, Felicis has invested in over 45 unicorns including Adyen, Canva, Shopify, Notion, Opendoor, and Plaid. Prior to starting Felicis, Aydin was a Senior Manager at Google where he spent an incredible 6 years. --------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 0:00 The Founding of Felicis 4:00 How did your mindset change when moving from Angel to VC? 7:45 How do you analyze early stage in current state of the market? 11:00 How important is ownership % with the first check? 13:00 Deployment Pace 15:30 How do you think about portfolio growth at scale when you're a lead? 17:50 What to expect from Tiger in this market crash? 21:45 Are we going to see price inflation in early stage? 24:44 What do you know now that you wish you'd know when you founded Felicis? 27:40 What is the guiding principle at Felicis? 29:40 How do you think about new products? 32:43 What mistakes have you made and were the lessons learned? 36:00 Biggest Misses 38:18 When do you take cash off the table? 41:50 Favourite book? 42:30 What have you recently changed your mind on? 43:07 Most overlooked quality for success in Venture? 44:00 Who's your mentor? 45:00 If Felicis could do one thing better, what would it be? 45:27 Biggest insecurity? 46:16 Most memorable first founder meeting? 47:22 Most recent publicly announced investment? --------------------------------------------- In Today’s Episode with Aydin Senkut: 1.) The Founding of Felicis: How did Aydin transition from a successful angel to the first $41M institutional fund with Felicis? How did Aydin’s mindset change moving from investing personal to LP capital? What does Aydin know now that he wishes he had known when he started Fund I? 2.) Fund Mechanics: Building a Portfolio Why does Aydin believe portfolios need to have 40-50 positions to be diversified enough? Given Aydin being multi-stage, how important is ownership on first check for Aydin and Felicis? Does Aydin believe it is possible to really concentrate capital into your best performers? How does Aydin think through outcome scenario planning? What is his biggest takeaway from this? 3.) Aydin Senkut: The Investor What have been the biggest changes in Aydin’s style of investing over the last 16 years? What was Aydin’s biggest miss? How did it impact his mindset moving forward? What is Aydin’s biggest insecurity as an investor today? How has it changed? Where does Aydin still believe he is weak as an investor? What is he doing to combat it? 4.) The Venture Landscape: Why does Aydin believe that despite the pricing, seed is the best risk-adjusted asset class? How does Aydin evaluate where crossover funds will move with the death of many growth rounds? What segment of the market will be hit hardest by the crunch? What worries with this? What would Aydin most like to change about the venture landscape today? Why? --------------------------------------------- #AydinSenkut #20VC #HarryStebbings #VentureCapital #Shorts