20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!

Aydin Senkut is the Founder and Managing Director of Felicis Ventures. An original “super-angel” investor, he was named to Forbes’ 2014 and 2015 Midas List and previously appeared as one of the top 15 tech angels by Businessweek. Aydin is well-known as an early backer of a number of iconic companies including Shopify (NYSE:SHOP), Fitbit (NYSE:FIT), Adyen, Clearslide, Credit Karma, and Rovio. More than 55 Felicis companies such as Brightroll, Climate Corp, Dropcam, Twitch, and Meraki, have been acquired by industry leaders such as Google, Amazon, Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Disney, Yahoo and Ebay. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Aydin made his way into the world of VC from being a Senior Manager @ Google? 2.) What does Aydin suggest to all those looking to make the move into VC who have potentially, an unconventional background?? 3.) What caused Aylin's shift from angel investor to VC ? What was Aydin's investment strategy look like at the beginning and how has that evolved over time? How does Aydin look to differentiate Felicis from the plethora of seed funds? 4.) How does Felicis' stage agnosticity work in practicality for Aydin and the fund itself? How much of a role does valuation play in Felicis' investment decision making? 5.) Question from Rob Hayes @ First Round: How did the Rovio investment come about? Why do you say you are most proud if it? 6.) Question From Hiten Shah: How do you approach the topic of growing the organisation, whilst still supporting founders with the same time and quality? Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Aydin's Fave Book: Anti-Fragile Aylin's Most Recent Investment: Diffbot As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Aydin on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings and if you have not already added me on Snapchat, add at H Stebbings, that's with two Bs, to get an inside peek into the world of the biggest and best VCs and startups. Now, people often ask me, you always ask VCs who is their mentor or inspiration in the industry, but what's yours, Harry? And the guest today most certainly falls into that bracket. Therefore, I'm delighted to welcome Idan Senkut, founder and managing director of Felicis Ventures. Now, I'm gonna do a bit of a numbers intro here, but these stats are simply too impressive to pass over. So, he started Felicis in 2006 with a 4 million fund, then raised a 41 million fund in 2010,

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  then a 71 million fund in 2012, and most recently raised a 120 million dollar fund in 2014. But this incredible trajectory is testament to their investments. But what are they? Well, they've invested in over 150 companies, have a staggering 55 exits and three IPOs, and you might recognise some of the names of their incredible portfolio companies. So, let's go with Twitch, Fitbit, Shopify, Mint, Brightroll, Dropcam. The list really is endless. And I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Daniel Waterhouse at Balderson Capital for making the intro to Idan today, very much appreciated. And also, before we jump into the show, are you feeling fresh? I am, because I spent the weekend in my new Leesa mattress.

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  And there's so many great things about it, but first, it was a fully online shopping experience, which meant I didn't have to traipse around a showroom feeling terribly awkward perching on a bed. Then, even better, I did not even have to go and collect the mattress itself. It was delivered straight to my office in a matter of days. Of course, this is also possible for all residents of the UK, US and Canada. Then, for the experience itself, the mattress is engineered to perfection with three crafted layers comprising of two inches of memory foam and two inches of latex light foam designed to keep you cool. So, if you want to enjoy a joyous weekend in a Leesa mattress like I had, head over to leesa.com/vc. That's L-E-E-S-A dot com forward slash VC.

• 2:11Harry Stebbings?

  And enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off. And even better, they have a 100 night trial. So there really is no risk. We'd also like to thank the kind folks at Mattermark for providing all the data and analysis for the show today. But now it's time to head into the show itself. Therefore, I'm delighted to welcome the man himself, Aiden Senkut at Felices Ventures.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:41Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Aiden, it's absolutely fantastic to have you on the show and a big shout out to Daniel Waterhouse at Balsam for making this happen with the intro. So thank you so much for joining us today.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Harry, thank you, and I also appreciate Daniel's connection and it's a great pleasure for me to be on the show as well.

• 2:56Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to start off today by hearing about how you made your way into the wonderful world of VC and investing.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's actually a very indirect route and I definitely don't make a traditional venture capitalist. I joke with my friends, like me being a VC is like a Jamaican bobsled team, you know, like from Istanbul, no engineering degree, all of that. I was born in Istanbul, Turkey, but I think what was really interesting is I followed a career in tech about 10, 12 years at firms like Silicon Graphics and Google. And once I left Google, I'm the son of two entrepreneurs, both my mom and dad are entrepreneurs. So I think I had that entrepreneurial in me and I really was excited and intrigued by the world of venture capital, which back then was still pretty small and there were only a handful of angel investors and no angel list and none of that.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  And it was interesting because at first I thought I have zero background in this. So maybe I should talk to some established VCs and they can give me ideas or maybe they'll like me and I'll get an opportunity to start with a little stint in one of those firms. But what was interesting is they basically saw a very unconventional person in me. And they said, not only would I not make a great VC, Uh, but they wouldn't even spend a lot of time with me, uh, with the exception of one. Um, and on my side, I saw that there was kind of a little bit of a reluctance to original thinking because for so long, you know, people with the checkbooks have had the power.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  And so that kind of gave me, uh, actually this kind of last push or nudge, if you will, to get into venture capital and just try to do things completely differently, think out of box, be very creative. Uh, and the big thing was people thought, oh, like this, this person is like an early Googler. You know, they're gonna be here for a couple of months and leave. Uh, but I don't dabble and I'm very proud of, you know, how far that first initial entry, uh, how it blossomed into this great firm and a team of ten people.

• 4:59Harry Stebbings?

  And, and then I'm gonna do something a little different because I see some parallels between, between potentially you and I at the start being slightly unconventional and unsure of our routes to get into the industry. So what would you advise me looking to get into the industry? I've got an unconventional past, um, huge network, but an unconventional past. I don't tick the management consultant and investment banker box. Do tick the startup box. So what would you suggest to someone like me?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  You're already giving me a good signal. So let me tell you the two things I think that really, really helped me, uh, be a good investor that I didn't actually realize. I kind of like see this as a little bit like finding your true calling and I think that's what the traditional VCs didn't get. I think there are only two things that truly matter, uh, to be a great investor in venture capital. One is having judgment and an opinion to really know in this crazy world, uh, where to focus, what matters, what's gonna be important in the future. Because if you don't have that opinion and that judgment, there are so many companies and so much going on that it's very, very difficult to make sense of it. And I think this conventional wisdom of like you need to be a banker or a consultant.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  To make sense, using a lot of processes and analysis and all of that. I feel like if you don't have the right ideas, you know, all of that stuff does not give you an insight. The second part that is, I think, the most underestimated part, I spent most of my life at Google. I started in product management. But then I did sales and I thought, what has sales anything to do with venture capital? Then I realized is that, hey, I I represented Google and I sold Google in forty different countries. So what that really taught me is I can be in front of anyone, from a street beggar to a Fortune fifty CEO in any country. Whose language I don't know, whose culture or history I don't know. And I can immediately, you know, break the ice and relate.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  And the reason why it is important is because in the last twenty years, or let alone ten years. The pendulum has swung towards the founders. There is a ton of capital out there, but if you don't have the network and you cannot relate to people. You can't be successful in this business because the first step is you need to find the companies that matter. But then the second step. You need to be able to relate to those founders and be able to work with them and convince them that you'll be a great partner. There is no glory or anything good if you if if you find the companies and you can't close them. And you can't be like true partners to the to the founders. And that's where I think what you need to do is leverage. And take advantage of your unconventional background and everybody thinks, oh, they need like.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Some analytical background to be good in this business or some engineering background, but one of the huge assets you have is your network. That is one of the most valuable things.

• 7:42Harry Stebbings?

  Well, very reassuring to hear and thank thank you for that, solving a personal problem there on my professional time. That's that's brilliant news. Um, and and I do want to delve into one transition of of your career and that's kind of. You were the one of the first micro VCs and seed funds around, uh, very, very early on. And you made the move from angel investing to being a micro VC. So what caused that pivotal shift?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you. Yeah, I I mean, look, again, I had some really new radical ideas and, you know, just to sum it up. Honestly, all it was is I basically immediately realized that venture capital is a derivative business. It's like an art gallery. Um. We are not building these companies, but we're curating these companies and we're supporting them. So the only way you can be a brand and you can rise to the top if you curate the best companies. What ends up happening with a lot of other venture capitalists is that they try to optimize for a ton of other things. So I said, you know, I'm just starting out in this, so I'm only gonna try to find the world's best companies however I can. But I'm gonna be uh ownership agnostic, I'm gonna be stage agnostic, and I'm gonna be geography agnostic.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  And we just, I I basically just kind of perfected this strategy as an angel investor. Um. And then it kind of became obvious to me that, you know, what started as a handful of angel investors, then maybe, you know, less than a handful of seed funds, the writing was on the wall that that that part is just gonna explode. There's gonna be a ton more. Seed investors, even even seed funds, and there's probably gonna be programmatic stuff like angel list and all of those things. And so what I wanted to do is, once I started like seeing that the formula works and I had about a dozen exits. Um. I realized that I truly wanted to give this a chance uh to see if I can turn it into a franchise. You know, raise some uh institutional capital, build a team, you know, gather a team.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  And and really, you know, push it as far as I can. And and one of the interesting ideas there was a lot of times in venture, like LPs are basically checkbooks. But I wanted the world's most selective LPs, not just for their checkbooks, but for their experience because they knew and they saw some of the biggest venture firms getting formed uh and developed. And I wanted them to see me and my strategy and keep me honest. To this day, you know, we're very close to our earliest investors, five of them are on my board. And they didn't just, you know, provide me with capital to build this firm to where it is today from where I started, but they also gave me great insights.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  And and challenged me and my team on a lot of different aspects um that really helped us refine our strategy and get to where we are today.

• 10:17Harry Stebbings?

  And you mentioned there about the explosion, or what you thought would become the explosion of seed funding, and you're absolutely right in that, obviously, clearly we've seen the mass expansion of the seed landscape now. And so what do you make of the plethora of funds out there? And how do you look to differentiate yourself and Felicis's from from the many others?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I I think one of the the things uh that I always look for, I apply some of the strategy of how we select companies to our own strategy of how we differentiate ourselves as well. To me, it's all about companies that have such a unique product or aspect that they turn into virtual monopolies. So the way I think about it is we have to do things in such a unique creative way, and we have to create a custom playbook that even though we're in the venture ecosystem, it it somehow really separates us. So this attitude of being, you know, ownership agnostic, geography agnostic, and stage agnostic, but then being thematic investors, it's just such a unique combination that by the time you apply all of those together, it's just very rare that any other firm really does that. And then

• 11:20Speaker 02

  we basically add other layers on top. For instance, we are religious about doing net promoter uh uh score analysis with our founders, and you know, we really, really know what resonates with them. And it's an authentic thing. I mean, we always were founders first kind of approach. In fact, I was just gonna say like we call ourselves boutique VC, but since we're kind of having like a little bit of a slant to the UK, like it's like bespoke VC, like that concept, that artisan bespoke concept did not really exist in VC, and that will, that's what we're trying to refine. One thing that I will tell about this plethora of seed funds out there, I really feel for them today because the issue is when I started 10 years ago, Google and Facebook were still buying a lot of small companies, YC classes

• 12:04Speaker 02

  were only 10, 15 companies. I think it was much easier and much more fun to do seed investing. Now, there are just so many companies and so many other funds doing exactly the same thing. And meanwhile, what used to be like, oh, if all else fails, it could be a small exit to like one of the great companies. More and more, we're seeing the bigger companies, you know, focusing on only on large M and A, um and companies' success driven more like either they get to a scale where they can go public. Uh, but there is not as much glory in kind of smaller successes. So I think there is kind of a precarious nature at the moment for the for the smaller funds. Because one of the, you know, predictors of their success of these smaller exits, I'm seeing some major headwinds there.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  And meanwhile, the competition has increased ten to a hundred fold. So it is it is very interesting times, to say the least.

• 12:55Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm I'm absolutely fascinated by one of the traits of Felicity's there that you mentioned. And that's your kind of commitment to being stage agnostic. And and you've stated before that you can lead series As and and even series Bs. But how does that work in practicality for you?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  It is a very good question. So I think the way that we have managed to make it work is that there are certain things that have always been around in venture capital in the status quo. But people don't question it, like there's this absolute focus on stage, like the seed stage and series A and series B. The way we look at it is like, actually, that does not really matter to us, you know, that much. The the the bigger picture here is that the thing that predicates success in venture is growth and compounding of that growth. So if you're like doubling or tripling revenues and you keep doing that for two, three, four, five years. If you compound that number, it it comes comes to a very, very exciting, very big number.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  So what we think about instead is what is the likelihood and probability that the company that we found, regardless of stage. Uh, because of their unique insight on product or unique solution, you know, they're going to be able to keep compounding their traction or their growth. And that's basically what makes success. And we focus on the absolute probability of that rather than absolute stage, right? I mean, there are some companies that even when you get in in like series D, they still have like ten, twenty years growth ahead of them. I mean, look at Google, look at Facebook, look at Microsoft. Uh, in the nineties, look at Apple in two thousand, look at Google and Facebook beyond two thousand and five. Um, what's really special is even after they've done public, they've been able to compound their revenues. You know, forty to hundred percent for ten years in a row.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  That is just a staggering number, especially when you have, you know, two, three, four billion dollars in revenue when you're starting out. So. I I think what people don't really pay as much attention is like where the company is today and what the absolute stage is today. But they're not spending as much time thinking, well, how is it gonna work in the future? Like, what ah what needs to be true for them to keep compounding this growth? And that alone is basically the major factor of success. So by having this attitude, I think we're really focusing on the right thing. And it has served us well. I mean, some of the companies that we what was perceived when we entered was a mid-stage or late-stage have done equally well as some of our companies that we were able to discover first and we've gotten on the C-stage.

• 15:23Harry Stebbings?

  And and I'm I'm intrigued there. Covering such a variety of stages, how much of a role does valuation play in the kind of determining whether you make an investment or not?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  From a mathematical point of view, it it it feels like it should play a big role. But there is also another thing that people forget. So, you know, we've done this analysis. So we're very lucky that not only have we invested in quite a number of companies, but we had sixty M and A exits, six zero, and three IPOs. So we have a very, very good data set. And what we found is that at least half of these companies, we were borderline ah about coming in because they were very expensive deals. But that had nothing to do with the eventual outcome. So I think what people sometimes forget is that you can get a cheap deal or you can own a very large percentage of the company. But there is another side of the equation, which is probability of success. And in this industry, you know, like if you were to compare it to like banking and mortgage,

• 16:17Speaker 02

  in a mortgage, the house is the asset. In a company, the founders and the human talent is the asset. So if you optimize only for that and not for things like valuation, I think it has a huge impact. Like, people forget this is a cash-on-cash business. You know, like, valuations or absolute stage has no impact on the eventual outcome. If the companies are chosen well, so that's where we basically, you know, try to spend our our time. And the the way we make it work also is that we kind of have this really interesting flexible approach, right? I mean, most VCs is so much easier to say every partner invests in two deals a year and they always do the same stage and they always write the same size of check. The reality is, you know, we have gray zones, right? It's not black and white. I mean, some companies have a lot of promising things.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Some other companies have a few promising things, but also great risk. So what we what we have learned, what what I perfected as an angel investor is to adjust the check size. So when there is more perceived risk, we start with smaller checks. So when there is failure, we can fail cheaply with the company. But when there is these crazy ideas where we sometimes see great promise, but also great risk, we can basically become insiders with a smaller check, see if the company really is there to execute what they said they were gonna do, and then double down, triple down, or quadruple down, or whatever it takes to then, you know, cap, you know, capitalize on on their success and, you know, back them even stronger.

• 17:37Harry Stebbings?

  And and I'm intrigued now to hear about one of your investments, which a few were crowdsourced questions from friends of yours and fellow investors. And one of your, quite a few actually referenced the Rovio investment. And so I'm I'm very intrigued to hear about the Rovio investment and how that came about. So can you tell us a little about that?

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it is one of the investments that I'm I'm most proud of because it predicated many other wins we had, like Shopify, Adyen, where we literally had no business of joining a round of such a company, but somehow we hustled and got creative and did everything it took to to get involved. Just to kind of give you perspective, when Rovio closed their first series A round, it was forty two million dollars and that was larger than our whole fund. We tracked them for ten months, we met them on three continents, we met them in three countries, we met them in US, in UK, in Finland. We just kept like meeting them, calling them and hounding them. We knew that they had something really special.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  What other firms saw as a crazy, insane team, we saw some great assets, like they had fifty failures, but then they Really understood what makes a great uh great game and their their their idea was not gaming. Their idea was entertainment and even when we first met them, not only did they have a lot of users, but they basically made, you know, the Angry Birds run on six different mobile platforms. And this is when people could barely figure out how to make things run on iOS or Android alone. So there were so many interesting things about this team and one of the things that really helps us break the ice. And and this also comes back to one of the other things that you brought up, I think, hit an ask. How do you scale both, you know, the the firm and then increasing performance, support them really well?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Is that we have this fundamental belief and it comes to my original point of bespoke, you know, boutique VC. Is that with every founder, we always ask them, what is the one thing that is meaningful to you? What is the one thing that you need that we can help that would really move the needle? In the case of Rovio, we got that chance um Christmas of uh two thousand ten. Uh the company was just about to launch their first e-commerce initiative with, you know, their stuffed animals and everything else. But they've never done a store before and they only had three weeks before the end of the year. We connected them with Shopify, which was also another crazy deal that we we worked months and months to get in and win. Uh and the CEO of Shopify was a big fan of Angry Birds. He put one of his top people.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And in seven days, the Rovio store was up and running on Shopify. Instantly, it became the top store in Shopify among ten thousand stores. They sold out their whole inventory in a week and Shopify was a huge winner too because they got this amazing new customer. So all we did was a connection and it was a huge win for Shopify. It was a huge thing for Rovio. So when I was calling the CEO to join their run along with Excel and Tomico, we were like a tiny little fund, but they let us in. I think they also let us in because we were the underdog. We hustled and they saw something in them that was so similar to their own DNA. And I think that's what where we really break the ice with a lot of founders, like they don't see us as a typical VC.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  They also see us as like the rebels, the underdogs, the underestimated ones that think like them, that look like them, that act like them. And so it's it it basically creates for a true partnership.

• 20:59Harry Stebbings?

  And talking about kind of traditional VC and the moving venture landscape, I'd love to hear now what you think of the evolution of Felicis itself. And and how with the incredible growth that you've seen, Felicis has approaches changed and have developed overall. What do you make of that?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, in some ways, our strategy has not changed at all, right? I mean, we're very thematic investors. We we give ourselves a broad mandate. And every six to twelve months, we cherry pick the best areas that we think are poised for future growth. But also, in terms of the overall heat map of risk reward, represent the best opportunities. That's the reason why we don't wanna narrow ourselves down to a specific stage or specific vertical segment. So that part of our strategy has not changed. But what ended up happening is we tend to be very, very good pickers of companies. But as we kept doing that, we also realized that founders' expectations of working with us have gotten higher.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  So we basically take everything we have, all the new team members, all the additional capital. And we basically invested in being better, stronger partners to our companies. And we keep innovating. For instance, you know, two years back, we were the first venture firm to officially, you know, vote always with their founders. And then again, last year, we brought on Wesley Chan, whom I knew from Google. You know, our founder said, look, you know, you guys are good at picking companies, but we need to see more operational, more founder experience in your team. And it was an awesome, awesome timing because, you know, Wesley was the founder of Google Voice and Google Analytics.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Within Google, so he was kind of a co-founder of many interesting initiatives. And he had a dozen years of experience. He was also one of the founding partners of Google Ventures. So it was a perfect, perfect match. Not only was it really helpful for us and it made a big difference for the companies that ended up working with Wesley at Felicis. But it also sent a very strong signal to our founders that we are very, very intently listening to them. And everything we do, every investment we make, every move we make, we basically measure their feedback, what resonates with them. And take that into consideration and take that as our true north as we build our firm.

• 23:22Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I love I love the the statement you said earlier about getting an MPS from your founders. I think that's absolutely brilliant and I've I've never actually heard it before from a VC. Um, but I'd love to dive into a quickfire round now with you.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 23:34Harry Stebbings?

  So your favorite book and why?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Very quick two answers. The most influential book on me and our strategy, Felicis, is Anti-Fragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Um, a lot of our strategy, being resilient, you know, using this broad mandate to also create this amazing uh portfolio that will benefit no matter what happens in the world. This concept of anti-fragile is at the core of our DNA, but I will also be honest. I don't spend a lot of time reading blogs or traditional management books. What fascinates me like I am obsessed with reading Navy SEALs books and military strategy. Um, that's where I get a lot of my management insight and, you know, my creative thinking. Um, so I if you look at my Kindle, half of the books are all about Navy SEALs and all kinds of military stuff.

• 24:22Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And then anti-portfolio, uh, what what's yours and does it affect you?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Anti-portfolio, where do I even begin? Uh, passed on Uber, passed on Airbnb, passed on Pinterest. One of the things that keeps me humble is even though we've done extremely well and we're very grateful for our, you know, trajectory and track record. If you take our anti-portfolio and add up their current pending valuation is probably a multiple of that. What we do is we we it makes us humble. And and one of the things like that that really inspires me is like when when it became obvious that we passed out on Airbnb and Uber and it was like, oh, my God, we we missed on great companies. That basically triggered this creativity in us to turn that, you know, uh, setback into uh an opportunity and looking out for a, you know, global payment processor.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  And that made us hound, you know, find and hound Adyen. And Adyen uh partners with a lot of the largest firms in technology, some that we might have even missed. So we even turned that setback and that miss and turned it into a great opportunity for our firm.

• 25:25Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And then the career highlight for you and why, I'm sure there's many, many more, but for you so far, what's the pinnacle been?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  You know, you know what I really like is the career highlight, every time we get into a company that we have no business of like winning or have a chance of getting in, but we do anyway. Shopify, like every fund that was in Shopify was ten to a hundred times our size. Rovio, same thing. Uh, we made the same thing with Adyen. I mean, they had raised like fifty, hundred million dollars and we're again like a fraction of those funds. And the thing that I'm very proud is like, I see sometimes like my role is a modern day Marco Polo. Each one of these companies is like a new discovery. And it has nothing to do with the money you have. You can't buy this experience. It has to be earned. So that's why it's always a highlight for me because it is so much hustle and creativity and perseverance.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  And at the end, it has to be earned and it cannot be purchased. And there is nothing greater than having that feeling of going against all odds and coming to the finish line at the end.

• 26:24Harry Stebbings?

  And then the founder you most respect or admire?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  So the founder, I have to be honest, the founder that i- influenced me the most is Larry Page. Uh, I had a chance to work with him directly when I was first at a product role at Google. And the, the biggest influence that he's, he had on me is to always question uh, the status quo and never ever uh, settle for what's, you know, in, in what's out there and always think differently and think out of the box. But I also have to give a lot of credit to some of our founders like, you know, James Park at Fitbit, who's I think one of the most resilient CEOs that I know. And then Toby, uh, Luke Kiff, Shopify and Peter Wanda Doze at Adyen. Um, what I love about them is they have this insane ability to see around the corner

• 27:09Speaker 02

  uh, all the way into five, 10 years and make, take steps that other people don't even realize where it's gonna go. And later on, it became, becomes really obvious how they set everything up. They just have this insane ability to see into the future.

• 27:24Harry Stebbings?

  And then final question for you, most recent investment and why you said yes, that's public, let's go for.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely, most recent investment is Diffbot, it's an artificial intelligence company and it's a very exciting company. You know, earlier investors include Andy Bethelstein, who wrote Google, their first check. My friend George Herrick, who was employee number nine at Google and developed a lot of the early machine learning algorithms. And then my good friend David Wallerstein at Tencent, we let, we collabed the deal with Tencent. I think it's gonna be one of the world's most interesting artificial intelligence companies, is one of the few true platforms. They have customers like Yandex, Amazon, CIA. It is just like a fascinating, fascinating company that basically collected a dozen

• 28:10Speaker 02

  of the world's best artificial intelligence people and machine learning people and had built this amazing platform that learns and has already collected over a billion objects. I think the only other company in the world that has that kind of dataset is Google. So the kind of things that they can do with that is just, you know, so cool and, you know, not even limited by our imagination. So it just gets me very excited because I know that there's gonna be a lot of exciting stuff coming up there.

• 28:38Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Aiden, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been absolutely fantastic hearing your journey and story. It's a real inspiration for me and I really appreciate you giving up the time today.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Thanks, Harry. It's a great pleasure. I really appreciate our conversation and my best to the readers and hope to be in active touch with you.

• 28:58Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic chat and so many takeaways there, challenging the conventional wisdom of VC. And as I said at the beginning, Aiden really embodies the new and the future of VC and I know many of his founders and they all concur in saying that there really is no VC with the same value add as Aiden and Felicis. Truly inspiring. And if you're loving the show and would like to enter the world of the biggest and best VCs and startups, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings. Likewise, if you're loving the show, sign up for the newsletter on the20minetc.com. And never miss an episode or an update from us. But before we leave you today, I'd like to thank Leesa. It really is so nice to start the week feeling rested and refreshed. And that's all due to my new Leesa mattress, of course.

• 29:42Harry Stebbings?

  And not just any Leesa mattress, but these mattresses are crafted to perfection with a combination of memory foam and cool latex light foam designed to keep the user cool. However, the genius does not stop there as I did not even have to leave my house to buy it as they offer an end to end online experience, meaning no more mattress buying showroom nightmares. And not only did I not have to leave my house, but the manufacturing did not even leave the country as all Leesa mattresses are produced in the US and the UK and Leesa deliver to all in the US, UK and Canada. What's more, for every 10 mattresses Leesa sell, they give one to a shelter. Absolutely incredible stuff. And check it out by heading over to leesa.com/VC.

• 30:25Harry Stebbings?

  That's L E E S A dot com forward slash VC. And enter the promo code VC75 to get seventy five dollars off your order. Amazing, I know. As always, so grateful for all your support and I cannot wait to bring you Wednesday's episode.