00:24:29 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:24:29] S1: constantly I'm imagining that Michael Jordan ad where he talks about all the shots that he missed. It's like to get a certain number of shots, have to miss a lot. Well, that's a great entry point to the decision to start Felicis some twenty years ago. You were one of what, You were like the original product manager at Google, right? [00:24:49] S0: I was the first product manager at Google. And you know why? It's so funny. I was the only non engineer they interviewed and I'm like, God, how am I gonna impress Larry and Sergei? Then I realized I was the only one who spoke languages and none of them spoke any language other than English. And Google was only available in English. And so I told him, like, I can do a great job for you. I'll take Google and I'll launch it in the first international languages. I'm a language guy and I lived in all these places. I can do it. And so that was my first job. I created my first job. [00:25:16] S1: And what was the first language you did besides English?
00:25:18 · Aydin Senkut
[00:25:18] S0: We did 11 languages. So it was basically the Western languages plus Japanese, Chinese, I think simplified traditional. And I thought I did a great job. And Larry is like, thank you for doing this, but it was not nearly fast enough. Basically like took what I did and just like shut it down to pieces. And in fact, his takeaway was like, I feel like this should be done by machines and not humans. So I joke with people that my first PM job being imperfect and falling short of like Larry's bar actually is the kind of accidental godfather of Google translate because he's like, let's not use humans anymore. Let's have machine learning take care of all of that. I'm So very proud how far that came. And what was more interesting is to then switch into sales and then nobody wanted to touch international. The reason why that's important is because I think most underappreciated business aspect of venture capital is that it's about people. It's about finding people, understanding them, what makes them outlier and relating to them. Because if you just find them but they don't have trust in you, it's not going to work. And so to me, that was the perfect underpinning of going to 40 countries for Google. Some of the languages I spoke and some of them I didn't. But the only way I could succeed was to relate to those people and put myself in their shoes. And that was the perfect training sitting across from founders. And they saw something different. I wasn't doing it for ego. I wasn't doing it for fame or money. I genuinely cared about what they were building and they could see why I got excited just like they are. Kind of like how an eight year old gets excited. This exuberance and giggling like, Oh my God, this is going to be the most amazing thing. And so that's sometimes the biggest difference. And they're like, You know, we can get excited about that and we can trust that. And that basically like opened a door for me because I think until then, especially like in my era twenty years ago, the VCs were used to founders coming in and like pitching to the authorities kind of the royalty and like, oh, we don't know if we're going to give you money, thumbs up, thumbs down. Like the Roman gladiator, I'm like, no, like it's all about the founders. But luckily the world ended up moving to our side of things.
00:27:27 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:27:27] S1: How long did you stay at Google? [00:27:28] S0: I stayed at Google for six years and I left. I joined when it was about 30 people left when it was 3,000 people. I left about a year after the IPO. Thought 3,000 people was already too large. And I'm a parent of two entrepreneurs. And I think my dream was at some point always to start a company. And I don't know how you thought about media, but I'm like, look, the great thing about venture capital, even though I know nothing about it, is that all you need is some brands, a good strategy and a little bit of capital. Like you don't need much to get started. Like you don't need like to put a break, whatever. And I'm just really lucky how everything turned out. [00:28:04] S1: Yeah. How was fundraising for that first fund?
00:28:07 · Aydin Senkut
[00:28:07] S0: I think the fundraising for that first fund was very difficult because there were a lot of good things for them to look at. Like I basically did angel investing four years on my own and had 100 investments and 12 exits. But people still looked at it and say, Oh, you know what? Like Aydin, we like you, but you don't have an engineering degree. You're not technical enough. You're not an expert enough. Like you didn't really get promoted at Google. You weren't a director or VP. I mean, pick your favorite excuse. And none of that is untrue, but I think what they underestimated is I saw the world differently than all the other venture investors because I was an insider. And I said, The world, when we look at it, the talent could be more global. There are going to be companies in areas you don't expect. And if you're like an expert and you see the world in a very narrow way, you're never going to look at something crazy and say, Oh wow, that could work. You're going to find 10 things why it can't work. And so you're never going to take those chances but I'm willing to take those chances. And so what was really great is even though rejection was extremely painful, it became my rocket fuel. Like we always talk about rocket ships but we don't talk about the fuel. And I'm so grateful the first few LPs that took a chance on me, one of them sent me their memo. It was really interesting. Like later did I realize that most of them were also like startup LPs. Like I was full outsider going into venture capital and a lot of them were like, Hey, we're just getting new into the LP arena. The biggest funds are not going to give us allocation but there's new breed of super angels and they're starting funds. Let's go back these managers, the new managers. So I'm really grateful for them because obviously the capital put us in business but more importantly they've been a great mentor to me. They kind of told me Hey, this is how the greatest venture capital do things. They basically questioned all my thesis and like how I wanted to run things without quashing the original idea of like talent could be global and you can invest in them from just with a small team from Silicon Valley. But then there are other things about the venture business like, hey, like I didn't I wasn't like inside for decades and decades.
00:30:08 · Aydin Senkut, Eric Newcomer
So that was really great in terms of like holding me to great excellence, maybe kind of similar to your experience at Information, right? Like in other newspapers that you kind of showed you the ropes but you still like went [00:30:20] S1: your Exactly. Own How big was that first fund? The first fund was $41,000,000 And how large is the firm today?
00:30:28 · Aydin Senkut
[00:30:28] S0: Have now $4,000,000,000 under management. But to me, like you can talk about I mean, I can say, Oh, I'm excited about it. Somebody is like, Well, there's a venture fund that's 100 times your size, right? That's not a big deal. But I feel like sometimes what I am really proud of is like we need to compare ourselves to ourselves. Like can you be the best version of yourself rather than trying to compare yourself to everyone else. I was really inspired by this. I looked up the first fundraising deck from 2009 and it was really cute. It's like, Hey, I already had like six exits. The aggregate value is like $377,000,000 whatever, not what we captured but the value of those companies. I think I might have a shot at like 1,000,000,000 or $2,000,000,000 companies. And then I'm like, wow, it's not about the AUM we have but now like the collective aggregate value of companies, it's like literally like three twenty five billion is almost like 1000x bigger. And I thought maybe I'll have a billion or two, like 1 or $2,000,000,000 companies. We have 65, 27 of which have exited 20 IPOs. And by the way, not just 20 IPOs. We had an IPO in Finland. We had an IPO in Canada. We had an IPO in Netherlands. Maybe one day we'll have an IPO in Australia. I don't know. So I'm really proud of that because we did this with a tiny little team out of Silicon Valley and people said there's no way this is going to work. You don't have offices in these places. You don't know any of these founders. And to see that what those founders have been able to do. And today like we have companies like Chip Company in U. K, Fractal, Adyen in Germany and Supabase which is global but headquarters in Singapore. The trend continues. We're still able to find companies in brand new sectors that I didn't even think like, I couldn't even imagine that we could even be talking to those kind of founders. And it's the same thing, like a crazy outlier founder that looks at the world differently. And next thing we know, they're building a great foundational layer for what's exciting today.