Intro
I sat down with Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner of Felicis. Before starting the firm, Aydin worked in product and international sales at Google. Felicis has backed companies including Shopify, Canva, Adyen, Notion, Supabase, and Runway.
We discuss how he finds companies before they become obvious, what he has learned from missing important investments, and how his approach has changed over two decades.
Aydin still has an email from Brian Chesky offering him the opportunity to invest in Airbnb at a $2.5 million valuation. He also passed on Uber. Rather than give up on the broader opportunity, he started looking for the infrastructure those businesses would need. That search led him to Adyen.
Another thread is the tension between expertise and curiosity. Aydin explains how consulting an experienced camera founder contributed to Felicis’s initial pass on Verkada, why he revisited the decision, and how being a generalist can help an investor see possibilities that an expert dismisses.
We also discuss what Felicis underestimated about OpenAI and Anthropic, its investments across the AI ecosystem, and the changes Aydin is making inside the firm to move faster without losing rigor.
What we cover
• Engineering serendipity: following small insights, discovering people outside your existing network, and connecting companies that don’t yet know they can help each other.
• Finding outliers before consensus: missing Airbnb and Uber, pursuing Adyen, and recognizing the opportunity in Canva and Notion.
• The generalist advantage: why technical expertise doesn’t guarantee investment insight, and how to avoid turning experience into assumptions you won’t revisit.
• Investing through the AI wave: what Aydin underestimated about the leading labs, and opportunities across models, databases, agent infrastructure, data, chips, and robotics.
• Building Felicis: portfolio construction, the most important thing an investor can do for a founder, faster deal teams, and the case for one-page investment memos.
Watch the full conversation
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Aydin Senkut: https://x.com/asenkut
Felicis: https://x.com/felicis
Suffiyan Malik: https://x.com/suffiyanmalikk
We The Builders: https://x.com/WeThe_Builders
Timestamps
00:00 Reviewing decisions and mistakes of omission
01:51 Welcome and the portfolio construction question
02:50 Why roughly 50 companies per fund?
05:33 The most important thing an investor can do for a founder
08:46 What Google sales taught Aydin about people
10:21 Why your existing network isn’t enough
14:29 Curiosity, deep reading, and following a thread
19:13 Missing Airbnb and Uber—and finding Adyen
22:45 Connecting Shopify and Rovio
24:59 Hiring for motivation, resilience, and hunger
27:45 Investing before growth becomes obvious
29:52 Supabase, Runway, and looking beyond funding stages
36:17 Resetting assumptions and the generalist advantage
38:43 The initial pass on Verkada
42:54 Building Felicis as an outsider
47:55 Portfolio network effects and learning through repetition
52:50 Google in Japan and joining Ron Conway’s network
57:46 Confirmation bias and copying successful networks
59:44 Investing globally and finding Canva
1:04:05 Consumer opportunities, email, and strategic importance
1:08:00 What made Canva and Notion different
1:13:41 What Felicis could have done differently in AI
1:16:26 Underestimating OpenAI and Anthropic
1:19:31 Unprecedented growth at scale
1:20:36 Investing across the AI ecosystem
1:24:39 Reinventing Felicis across technology waves
1:26:53 Data science, community, scouts, and fund investments
1:29:37 Moving beyond unanimous investment decisions
1:32:11 The prepared mind and the outlier map
1:34:55 Deal teams and moving faster
1:37:54 Why the investment case should fit on one page
1:40:03 Skild AI, robotics, and Fractile
1:43:26 Favorite food and Gladiator
1:45:04 Antifragile and Clear Thinking
1:47:49 Closing
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