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EO StudioFrom Google’s First PM to Backing 50 Unicorns — The 10X Principle | Felicis, Aydin Senkut
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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Aydin Senkut on the 10X Principle, Markets, and Founders
- Senkut says setbacks and people trying to put him in a box have repeatedly acted as 'jet fuel,' and he urges founders to keep control of their destiny by trying different approaches.
- Drawing on his time at Google, he describes lessons from Larry Page about saying no to most things, setting very uncomfortable goals, and giving smart people hard challenges, like the small team that built the ad server in six months.
- He explains the 10X principle: a product or company should be ten times better, cheaper, or faster than existing solutions, and Felicis applies it to market choice, favoring large or fast-growing markets.
- Felicis starts with the market, believing that markets win, and then evaluates founders, using sales-based people skills and operating partner Michelle Del Cambre to assess founding teams.
- He lists founder traits such as focus, persistence, measuring success, and storytelling, illustrated by Shopify's decisions and his own 40 rejections and 107 deck revisions when raising Felicis.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasSetbacks can be reframed as fuel rather than verdicts
Senkut says rejection and skeptics can make you angry, but what matters is taking that energy and trying again or in a different way, sometimes 10, 20, or 30 times.
Great companies need ambitious, uncomfortable goals
He says he learned from Larry Page that you cannot build a truly great company by striving for only a 10% or 20% improvement, and that Google often gave hard challenges to smart people regardless of their experience.
The 10X principle applies to products and markets
Whatever you do should be 10 times better, cheaper, or faster than existing solutions, and Felicis looks for companies with that potential in markets that are or can become very large.
Market comes first, then founders
Senkut calls it a Newtonian law that markets win when other factors conflict, so Felicis is selective about markets and then looks for founders who can scale.
Understanding people is rarer than understanding numbers in venture capital
He says everyone in venture is good at numbers, while his sales background gave him a superpower in relating to people, and Felicis brings an operating partner into investment meetings to assess teams.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
4 quoteseverybody thinks venture capital is finance, it's all about the numbers, but everybody's good at numbers in venture capital. What is more difficult and more rare is being able to understand people and being able to relate to people.
— Aydin Senkut
I call it as almost like a Newtonian law in startups, is that when anything else goes against markets, the markets win.
— Aydin Senkut
I've been amazed the more I learn about technology, the more I realize I don't know.
— Aydin Senkut
which means that you're doing something that wouldn't happen unless you're actually doing it.
— Aydin Senkut
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SPEAKERS
EO Studio Host
hostHost/interviewer for EO Studio.
Aydin Senkut
guestFounder and Managing Partner at Felicis Ventures and former early Google product manager.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
