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

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Two decades ago, Aydin Senkut was a first-time fund manager with a thin track record to show prospective backers. LPs didn’t believe a solo GP, especially one without experience at a legacy firm, could build a lasting franchise.

They were wrong. Today, Felicis is a Silicon Valley mainstay on its 10th fund, a $900M vehicle. Across its history, Felicis has backed a slew of winners, including Shopify, Canva, Crusoe, and dozens of other billion-dollar outcomes. Rather than specialize over time, Aydin has remained a true generalist, investing across markets and cycles. In this conversation, we dig into the frameworks, stories, and philosophies that shaped Felicis into what it is — and where Aydin believes the next decade of technology is heading.

We explore:

• How growing up in Turkey with entrepreneur parents shaped Aydin’s approach to risk and investing

• Lessons from working alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin during Google’s early days

• Why Felicis deliberately chose a generalist strategy when most VCs were specializing

• How international experience became a competitive advantage in finding global winners

• The mathematical case for portfolio diversification (50-70 companies per fund)

• Why valuation concerns are often overblown when revenue growth is exponential

• Felicis’s aggressive AI investment strategy and what other investors are missing

• The future of robotics and physical AI through companies like Skild AI

• Why learning and adapting rapidly is Felicis’s constitutional principle

Explore the episode

Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction

(03:09) How Aydin made his way to Silicon Valley

(06:15) What he learned from his entrepreneurial parents

(08:55) Learnings from the early days at Google

(15:05) The childhood roots of his investing philosophy

(16:31) Why rejection became a catalyst for his venture career

(19:28) Strategy behind Felicis’s first $41M fund

(25:44) How his international background became an investing edge

(28:17) How Aydin approaches diversification at scale

(32:08) How he sizes investments based on conviction

(33:15) Generalist vs. specialist investing

(38:23) Why founders are the foundation

(42:48) Why success may look different than expected

(43:46) The Felicis journey

(48:18) Why