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AS Aydin Senkut On The Peel with Turner Novak

“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.”

The Peel with Turner Novak · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“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

Context

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.

Transcript

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.

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