Why Being a Generalist VC Is a Competitive Advantage (Aydin Senkut, Founder & Managing Partner at Felicis Ventures)

Speaker A: The history of Felicis suggests that even in these hot markets, when other folks have leaned in and gotten burned, you've managed to be strong enough on the selection that those vintages still look good. Speaker B: There has been many instances where we picked the company just right and we were off by a 10x on the entry valuation. So everybody looked at only that side and said there is no way it's going to work. But what they missed is the revenue growth that materialized after was 30x, 50x, 100x. So while we were 10x wrong on the entry price, we were absolutely absolutely underestimating the revenue growth by even a much, much larger factor.

Speaker A: One of the investments that you've made is in Skilled AI. How have you thought about the way AI begins to enter the physical world more? Speaker B: We're going to have a ton more robots in the next 10 to 20 years. I doubt it's going to take jobs away. It's just going to do jobs that people are not meant to do, but they're doing it because there is no other way of doing it. I do think it's going to be happy coexistence. We're going to have a lot of robots and they're going to take more drudgery out of our lives.

Speaker A: When Aydin Sengkut started as a solo GP in 2006, most LPs rejected him, giving him little chance of succeeding as an investor. Speaker C: Nearly two decades later, and Aydin has transformed Felicis into a Silicon Valley franchise, now on its 10th fund, a $900 million vehicle. While many VCs insist on the importance of specialization, Aydin has kept Felicis genuinely generalist. From Shopify to Adyen to Canva to Crusoe, the firm has found billion-dollar outcomes across nearly every imaginable category, including in companies that many others overlooked. Speaker A: In today's episode, Aydin and I discuss how he scaled Felicis from a one-man operation into a well-oiled machine, his framework for evaluating opportunities across wildly different sectors, and why he's betting aggressively on AI despite the sky-high valuations.