Aydin Senkut on How Robotics Could Reshape the Economy

Robotics is finally investable as machines learn like humans

Aydin Senkut thinks the next platform shift is physical. Robotics failed as an investment for fifteen years because machines could not learn on their own, but recent advances let them learn the way humans do, which turns labor into an infinitely scalable resource. The US and Western Europe hold 190m low-skilled jobs, a pool that includes Japan, and even a small share supports a $100bn company. That is why he treats robotics as the overlooked category, alongside AI infrastructure and biology, where abundance is becoming investable.

Takeaways

• Robotics is finally investable. Felicis invested in robotics for almost fifteen years and every bet failed until about eighteen months ago. Robots now learn the way humans do, which Senkut says makes the category infinitely scalable and finally worth backing.
• Robotics offers unlimited labor and huge market. Senkut counts 190m low-skilled jobs in the US and Western Europe. Capturing 0.2% would mean $10bn a year and a $100bn company at a 10x multiple. He expects an OpenAI and Anthropic equivalent plus a large robotics data business.
• Inference is real work, not crypto. AI became interesting when it moved past one token in, one token out to completing jobs and making decisions. Senkut says billions of agents will consume search through APIs, each doing about a million more searches than a human, making inference durable demand.
• Google holds the most scalable AI data. Senkut is extremely bullish on Google because data is the raw material of AI and Google holds the most scalable data through Maps, search, YouTube, Chrome and Gmail. Waymo's mapping advantage, built from Google's cars, gives it the most self-driving miles.
• Biology remains mostly unsolved. Senkut says only 0.1% to 1% of the hardest problems have been solved, and drug development still takes a decade. Felicis's Periodic Labs can run over a thousand experiments a day, while a Stanford professor Senkut supports grows brain cells from skin cells.
• Felicis aligns with founders, not gatekeepers. The firm votes its shares with founders and sets aside 1% of every check for founder development. Senkut says rejection from early LPs became rocket fuel, and he deliberately asks different, non-obvious people where demand is going.

Aydin Senkut's path to Felicis

1. At Google he was the first product manager and the only non-engineer the company interviewed.
2. He launched 11 languages at Google. He later moved into sales and travelled to 40 countries.
3. Early investors told him he was not technical enough, and that rejection became rocket fuel.