AS

Aydin Senkut

Things Aydin Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Aydin Senkut has been a guest on Turpentine VC" | Venture Capital and Investing (2 times) , The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (2 times) , Summation with Auren Hoffman , Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry , The Generalist , NEW ECONOMIES , Venture Unlocked , NEW ECONOMIES , TBPN , The Peel with Turner Novak and StrictlyVC Download .

Recently: “Aydin Senkut: Growing Felicis from $4M to $4B” on The Peel with Turner Novak (October 2026); “Felicis Ventures” on NEW ECONOMIES (September 2026); “Felicis Ventures” on NEW ECONOMIES (September 2026); “Felicis founder Aydin Senkut: why moats are dead and alive” on Summation with Auren Hoffman (September 2026); “Why Being a Generalist VC Is a Competitive Advantage (Aydin Senkut, Founder & Managing Partner at Felicis Ventures)” on The Generalist (December 2025); “Marc Andreessen & Ilya Sutskever Host TBPN, Mag 7 Earnings Recap | Aydin Senkut, Dean Ball, Shreya Murthy, Lulu Meservey & Gaby Goldberg, Jakob Diepenbrock, Shishir Mehrotra, Karri Saarinen” on TBPN (October 2025).

What They Said

“We had about 160 M&A exits, and not a single one of those companies was led by an expert. Not one. … If you're a specialist, you are so deep in subject matter that you're going to look at a batshit crazy way of doing things and you're going to say that can't be done. It's easier to say it won't work than say it will work, because you are so deep, you've been trained for 20 years.” — Aydin Senkut, The Peel with Turner Novak

Senkut's case for generalist venture investing over specialist funds. He argues that founders who succeed in very different markets have more in common with each other than any one vertical does.

The Peel with Turner Novak · 2026-10-29 Permalink → Listen →
The Peel with Turner Novak Around 1:09:18 into the episode
Aydin Senkut

I mean, we have the data to prove it. So I've made myself alone probably about 250 investments. We have, you know, well over 400 investments. We have 55 unicorns, which probably doesn't matter today. Nobody cares about a billion market anymore. But

Turner Novak

you can start a company. We have

Aydin Senkut

roughly 20 IPOs and more. So we have, we had some decent successes. We had about like 160 MA exits, and not a single one of those companies was led by an expert. Not one. Hundreds, dozens of companies, not a single one was led by a subject expert. So this argument of specialists saying, if you're not a specialist, you're not going to understand it. I think what ends up happening is if you're a specialist, you are so deep in subject matter that you're going to look at like a batshit, crazy way of doing things and you're going to say that can't be done. Now, there's also benefits where you're really smart and you can find companies. So there are multiple different arguments. One, sometimes when you're an expert and when there is like a crazy way of like outlier way of doing things, you're going to say, no, it can't be done. It's easier to say it won't work than say it will work because you are so deep, you've been trained for 20 years. Now somebody's saying all those 20 years and the experience you had and the thing that you learn is wrong. It can be done this way. It's very against human nature. Say yes to that. Versus if you're a generalist, you know what? Like…

Turner Novak

There's kind of this like almost you, there's like an overlap of different specialties, like sector specialties that was in something like that, like Australian focused investor or design focus investor or like a cloud investor or something like that. And if you or and all those like different mega…

Aydin Senkut

I mean, look, I think part of it comes down to in an outlier business. I think even if you look at like sports, for instance, if you look at like all the quarterbacks or whatever, like pick any sport, I don't know what your favorite sport is, but the very top echelon, those people are different…

Speaker 4

Yeah. Right.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“You look at all the companies where we have the highest ownership, where we got the best valuation. None of them have made it to the top. And every single one of our outlier companies, oh my God, we barely eked a 1% ownership. The valuation was horrible. I was having heart attacks. … If you're so hung up on the valuation, you're always going to miss those outlier companies.” — Aydin Senkut, The Peel with Turner Novak

The Felicis founder, citing his own fund's data, on why he will pay up for companies that might grow a thousandfold. He says investors mocked the multiple Felicis paid for Supabase, and that the price stopped mattering once the company took off.

The Peel with Turner Novak · 2026-10-29 Permalink → Listen →
The Peel with Turner Novak Around 1:12:44 into the episode
Aydin Senkut

…a huge company. So, the way we think about success and margin of error is that I want a company with a growth path so promising, I like to use the word 100x. We talked about 10x. When I look at a company, the very first thing I ask, is there a true 100x revenue growth potential in this company?

Turner Novak

Grow 100x revenue for 10x.

Aydin Senkut

…it doesn't matter what price you paid. You know what I mean? Like, the founder is not going to tell you my company is 10 billion when he has like 100K revenue. It's going to be expensive, but it's going to be expensive with a mad function. So if you basically pick a company in the right place at the right time that has so much growth function, then valuation becomes absolutely not important. And if you're so hung up on the valuation, you're always going to miss those outlier companies. Like the same thing happened to Google. I mean, they like, they basically said like two PhD students, people like, it's never going to work. Notion, say, by the way, we're the only VC that invested in Notion and Canva. Like Notion engineer, like I remember Ivan, like now like it's at scale. Every VC wants to be his friend. We basically wrote him the first check on the back of a napkin, right?…

Speaker 4

it's kind

Turner Novak

of a different product in Canva and like different customer that they're going after.

Aydin Senkut

But the point is that everybody in the world wants to be creative. Do you want to feel like dumb when you use a product? Like the first thing is you open Adobe. I don't know what the fuck to do with this product. I mean, I did. I opened Photoshop. I mean, wow, like I need to go back to graduate…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Startups & Venture Tech Strategy & Big Tech