Surfing Tsunami Waves: Aydin Senkut on Betting Before the Crowd

0:00What ended up happening is because we committed to the founders that we will not vote against them, now we were having God-honest conversations. What really needed to happen is will the founders even listen to us and trust us when we're talking about tough things?

0:13Peter High: Welcome to TechnoVenture. I'm Peter High, president of MetaStrategy. My guest today is Aydin Senkut. Aydin is the founder and managing partner of Felicis, a venture capital firm celebrating its 20th anniversary this year with a$900 million 10th fund and a portfolio that's included numerous iconic companies like Shopify, Adyen, and Canva. Before founding Felicis, Aiden was Google's first product manager. And after struggling to break into venture capital, he began investing his own money and built a firm known for backing exceptional founders across industries and geographies. As a result of his performance, he's appeared on the Forbes Midas list for 13 consecutive years.

0:52Peter High: Today, we'll explore what it takes to build a generational venture firm, how Aydin develops conviction and unconventional opportunities, and why reinvention has been essential to Felicis' success, among other topics we'll cover together. Aydin, welcome to Tech to Venture. It's wonderful to speak with you today. Thank you, Peter. Great to be here. Really looking forward to this. As am I. Yeah, thank you again. Well, let's begin with your firm, Felicis, if we could, Aydin. Those who are familiar with venture capital will certainly be familiar with your firm. But I wonder how do you describe the firm in ways that you believe are differentiating relative to a sea of venture capitalists?

1:27Well, first of all, I feel I'm doing something that I truly love. And we have great luxury of being one of the few firms that has started from absolute scratch. A lot of smaller funds in this business tend to be splinters from larger funds and tend to act like the larger parent firms. we had a chance to start from absolute scratch and do something a little bit unique. So being unconventional is one of the things that drive us. I think the other thing is our most important value is growth mindset. So we always like to think of, even when things are going really well, how we can change things. Because things tend to always in the future not be necessarily the repeat of history.

2:13But we're a generalist firm and we have a number of different theses. So as a generalist firm, one of those things we like, we have one and one job only is to have the highest density of great technology firms in our portfolio. The way we think about it is we think about is surfing a wave and it used to be just surfing a regular wave. Now we're thinking about surfing tsunami waves, kind of like the one like outside of Portugal is that the precursor to the extreme growth in revenues and traction that we expect that drives the valuations that makes companies and stories interesting enough for you and for technology, the precursor to all of that is they basically ride a big technological wave.

2:57Google was able to ride that with search and making information accessible. Shopify did that by having a commerce platform that merged brick, bits and mortar. Adian did that kind of facilitating global payments and so on and so forth. So what we are basically looking for is foundational companies that solve a critical problem wherever in the world they might be, which is also by itself really interesting because most Silicon Valley venture firms thought Silicon Valley or New York had an unfair advantage. And we thought talent is global and there could be great companies created anywhere in the world, not just in those two geos.

3:34So our idea is to essentially find these waves before they become consensus, find great companies. And what we like to do is we like to simplify things where do we have enough conviction where we think from the point we invest, the company's growth is going to be 100x or more in revenues. And that's normally the driver of other great things that happen that makes that company fantastic afterwards. So that's what we're trying to capitalize. And then one of the ways we want to be unique as a platform, this business is always also known for the dynamic between the founders and investors. One of the things that I wanted to do a little bit differently when I started, I wanted us to be the venture firm the founders trusted the most.

4:17So we have done some very unique things like voting our shares in favor of the founders. The famous Uber example, as a founder, you do not want to get fired when you're just visiting your sick mom, or also making sure that we take money from our own pockets, put it into our founders in terms of investing in their development. So we have this founders pledge concept that we love. Every check we write, 1%, the founders can use for their development, could be coaching, could be any form of development really. And the idea is to make them unbreakable. So instead of waiting until the stress gets to them, we actually use our own money and say, hey, you don't have to feel bad about spending this money.

4:57It's coming from our pocket. It's a way of us demonstrating how much we want to help you be the best version of yourself, the best founder that you can be. And those are the kind of things that develop a lot of trust and close rapport between us and our founders.

5:13Peter High: Incredible. Yeah, remarkable. I can already see a number of things that are differentiating from your competitive set. Before we leave the the founding period to talk about the period since. I wonder, you've talked a little bit about some of the advantages of being so different, not simply a splinter from a larger fund, but rather truly beginning from scratch. I imagine there were some disadvantages to that as well for that very same reason. You didn't look like background-wise, like your competition. And I wonder, what was the case you made in those early days? Sure, you came from a legendary company and had a very prominent role within that organization.

5:48Peter High: You were a true technologist who was seeking out a fellow technologist. So I suppose a kindred spirit in some ways, but I wonder how you, how you thought about overcoming perhaps what might, might've been viewed as a shortcoming in the, in the, the founding period of the firm. Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right on that. In fact, what basically happened is majority of LPs that I talked to earlier, because we didn't quite look in the form of one of those established venture firms who had unorthodox ideas and me not having any experience in venture before, and maybe not a very large network outside of Google, people were a little bit skeptical.

6:25And yet what ended up happening is the advantage of investing with my own money solo for four years, I already had a book of 100 companies and 12 of them have exited. And so in some ways for the right people, there was already signal there. For other people, they were just, you know, the way they make decisions is checking boxes. I don't blame them. I'm sure like if I looked at myself, maybe I would say there are some interesting aspects of this investor, but maybe let's wait until the first few funds happen. And then we'll see whether the strategy really takes off or not. What ended up happening is two things.

6:59So number one, our very first few checks were themselves LPs that were starting out or started like catching on this wave of super angel investors, this new wave of investors where you could start with smaller capital bases, but just as effectively pick companies. So in some ways, we found LPs whose strategy kind of mirrored ours to kind of first get into business. I think the second thing is because of that early, I don't want to call it struggle, but the friction of being able to raise money and how we had to deal with numerous no's, it makes us a lot closer to our founders, right? Like we understand the kind of trials and tribulations they go through, the rejections and this can't be done.

7:49It's impossible. There is no way you can do it. We ourselves have experienced that so many times that one of the things that makes us good at what we do is being able to relate to the founders at that level. And that's not true for many venture firms, especially like in this current vintage, like a lot of them have been around for 20, 40, 50 years. And I'm sure their beginnings might also add similar episodes. So in some ways, the founders see a little bit of themselves in us.

8:18Peter High: That's interesting. Yeah, well put. You mentioned also that you're a generalist firm, and I don't want to get too far before exploring that point as well. Why have you chosen a generalist approach as opposed to focusing on cybersecurity alone or some specific part of the tech landscape? What advantages do you find in being a generalist? So I think venture is very simple. You can do kind of this interesting dissection of the venture map and say there are generalists and specialists. While specialists, the advantage is you have great experience in an area, you're easier to underwrite, you check a specific box.

8:55What I like about the generalist approach is that one of the things that makes technology exciting is the fact that disruptions happen with great frequency a lot sooner, a lot faster than people expect. And what becomes really hot and great can all of a sudden become not so hot and not so great. And one of the things that was really important to me is that I didn't want mine and my firm's destiny to be controlled by what we focused on as a sector. And I always wanted to be able to go back to the LPs and say, hey, you know what? The reason why we want to be generalists is because we just don't know what waves are going to be significant in the future.

9:40I don't yet know what they are, but the one thing I do know is that the generalist approach allows you to then selectively pick the ones where you have the higher conviction. And so that way, even if those waves have changed in the future, we never have to go back to the LPs and say, you know what, this is what we're originally focused on. Now we change our mind and we're going to try to do this. A great example is like I've seen firms that focused on consumer internet. And then when consumer internet stopped being interesting, they got stuck. There were firms that specifically only focused on SaaS.

10:12And then after SaaSpocalypse and SaaS started becoming less interesting, now they have to reinvent themselves. They have to go back to the LPs and like, we change our mind. This is no longer great. And there's been numerous firms recently that basically decided there is no longer exciting potential in fintech, no longer exciting potential in crypto, which crypto we forced has completely bypassed. And now they have to say, wow, we're going to have to try this new AI thing, having no experience, versus we never made those kind of commitments. And we've always kind of picked these things up before they became consensus.

10:48But the LPs can never say, wow, Felice has picked something and then changed their mind and doing something else. In fact, one of our core competencies and advantages is to be able to look into the future, figure out what's going to matter before it becomes consensus, and then choose those areas and find the best companies that we think and build a book and portfolio based on them over and over again.

11:11Peter High: Describe how you look into the future, as you just put it. What's the process that you use in order to develop the hypotheses that you then test? So the best way to encapsulate it is we are chasing hyper demand. Hyper demand results in business traction that grows far above public rates, right? Like if a public company is growing at 10 to 50%, we're looking for companies that are growing 500 to 1 ,000%, maybe even higher. The only way that can happen is there is a new wave, either a technology wave or a reinvention where something happens and all of a sudden there is so much demand and a huge part of the market is switching to this new solution or to this new approach in technology.

11:57So all we try to do is look into the future. And the way we like to do that is in two ways. Number one, we ask a very simple question, which is one of the benefits of not being a specialist. If you're not a specialist, when you look at a great idea, no matter how infeasible it might seem, you can take the approach of what can go wildly right. Versus I think when you're a specialist or you're narrowly focused, the tendency is to say, well, I have 10 to 20 years experience in this field and I know it really well. There are 10 things that probably create risk for us not to be confident to take this chance.

12:31We do the exact opposite. We're like, with those 10 risks, what is the one thing that would give us confidence that this is the best area? And the way we do that is, if this solution word to word, is it critical enough that it has urgency? And can it apply to every person or every business in the world? For instance, when you think about Shopify, every business in the world does trade and commerce. When you look at Adyen, every business in the world has to process some form of payment. When we look at our biology bets, cancer is like a scourge for humanity. If you were to have a cancer vaccine or diagnostic or cure, every person in the world that is fighting cancer or about to fight cancer is going to care about it.

13:11The next thing that we look at is, if you ask me, Aiden, if you look at all these different companies and sectors you have in your portfolio, what is the one underlying characteristic of all those companies, even if they're in different geos and sectors and all of that? Virtually all of them are foundational companies, meaning that they were companies that other companies have been built on. Like for instance, is Shopify created a commerce infrastructure. Millions of businesses were built on it. Adian did a payment infrastructure. Millions of businesses processed payments on it. We, for instance, backed a company called Superbase, a database company.

13:47What it did is it picked an open source database and made it the most developer-friendly version of it. And this is what happened before we had AI-assisted coding and before AI agents arrived on the scene. So what we thought was a developer ecosystem was just hundreds of thousands of people that have computer science degrees, maybe a couple million. All of a sudden, you have the AI-assisted coding revolution, and that number goes up with citizen developers by a factor of 10 to 100x. And you add the AI agents that are also programming. Now you're looking at a drastically different shape of that.

14:21And one company, Superbase, because they focus on that and specifically targeted developers, ended up riding that wave to a thousand X plus revenue growth in less than five years. It's a great example of a company because there were many other companies that were building end user apps using that foundation. But I felt the durability of that was harder to call. There are amazing companies like Lovable, Replit. They're doing an amazing job. They have fast growing user bases in the world. But what I'd rather be is one of the foundational technology companies that are empowering their growth. Because the way that I think about it is if other people are building on top of you, you will be much harder to replace.

15:07Because the second element of success in venture is you're looking for high growth companies. But the one aspect that makes them exciting besides extraordinary growth is how durable that growth is. And the way that it becomes durable is when there are critical infrastructure companies, and not just like infrastructure, but infrastructure in the general sense. It could be in energy. It could be in chips. It could be in so many different areas. Can you build something underlying that a lot of other companies or people basically build on? And that's what makes it really exciting for us.

15:42Peter High: Fascinating. Well, we spoke a short while ago about some of the advantages of being a nonconventional VC investor when you began. Now, 20 years in, and actually if you extend it back to your time as Google's first ever product manager back in 1999, I believe it was, you've seen a lot of these waves, very important waves dating back practically to the beginning of Web 1.0. Indeed, having joined an iconic company that emerged in the first wave. And I wonder how instructive are viewing past waves to derive or define analogies, recognizing that no two are the same, of course. But as you think about like the AI age that we're in right now, what similarities do you see that are that are helpful from an analogy perspective from past waves, maybe even dating back to the original wave that you surfed at Google?

16:33Yeah, I would say there is less analogy about the waves, but you learn certain things about them, what makes them interesting, and whether something has changed. So one of the differences of the AI wave, I would say there are two major differences that are very instructive. So the earlier waves like Web 1.0 and SaaS and other stuff, the scaling was still difficult. And one of the questions we always used to ask, it's all about distribution. How are you going to get distributed? How are you going to get to scale? One of the things that has changed since then is distribution has already worked out.

17:06When you have an announcement today, whether it's companies or people, if the product is really great, it picks up globally instantly. Distribution is no longer a bottleneck. So then the question is, what is the underlying product and how durable it is and how complex it is? Now it's much more about very complex products. And to be honest with you, we're in a new age. We call it trillion-dollar markets with billion-dollar contracts. We started investing in many new areas like energy, defense, global resilience, chips and all of that, where there is established trillion dollar demand for these products.

17:41And instead of adding customers at$10 a month,$100 a month, or$100 ,000 apiece, you now immediately have gone to an era where there is more concentrated customer base, but they're committing 10, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, even a billion apiece on an LOI or contract. So you can race to a billion dollar of traction level a lot more quickly with much more concentrated base, or you have instantly global distribution. Then the question is, how durable is the product and how interesting it is? This basically tells us what some of the things have changed. And one of the things that has really, really changed is how much steeper these growth curves have gotten.

18:20For instance, we're also in a company called Mercore, and we talk about AI waves. And the main ingredient of the current AI wave is data. Data is what's basically helping the model companies and others basically have these huge leaps. And then a data company itself has become really, really important. And a good analogy to that is Rockefeller 100 years ago became the richest man in the US by refining oil. And the people that produce oil have done equally well. So data is a very important area there. The last thing that I want to add on that is one of the aspects that is very different today than 20 years ago when Web.0 happened.

18:58I feel like a lot of the excitement was a little bit more hype. It wasn't yet clear how that excitement translated into business performance. You had a lot of websites created, but the business performance of those websites left a lot to be seen. So it was harder to make a business case and said, just because you have a web domain, that's going to make you a billion dollar business. Today, when we look at the companies, because of the rate distribution and usage is picking up, These companies are putting incredible business performance at such a rate. We have this favorite chart that we show our LPs of some of our recent fund makers, and we compare it to Shopify.

19:36Shopify went public in six years, became like zero to$3 billion company, went public. And so by all means, huge success story today, a$200 billion company. We have companies that are growing at such a rate that they take Shopify's growth and make it look like a flatline. Right. So if you ask me, that is a fundamental difference. So when we talk about whether something is hyped or not, again, you can always debate how durable it is. But at today's time point, what we can see is the business performance is the growth is an order of magnitude, maybe orders of magnitude, plural, multiple zeros, larger and, you know, bigger growth than I've ever seen in the 20 years that I was doing.

20:21I have been doing this as an investor in 30 years as an operator.

20:25Peter High: Yeah, fascinating. I want to ask you also, you know, as a stereotype about Silicon Valley venture capital, that, you know, all these firms on one road in Silicon Valley investing essentially in businesses that are within driving distance, if not biking distance, of where the venture capital firms are based. And indeed, of course, you've invested in plenty of companies that are driving distance from where you sit. But you also, we've already talked about Shopify based in Canada, Adjun based in the Netherlands. I mentioned earlier Canva, an Australian company. What is your process, especially casting the net so widely geographically, something you mentioned earlier?

21:01Peter High: What's your process to turn over rocks that are very far afield from where you're sitting? Yeah, I think the most interesting aspect of it is we're not investing in those companies because of where they are located. We've invested in those companies because the founders had a unique insight. Even Google, one of the biggest things that I learned at Google, yes, it was down the street from the VCs that backed it. But the reality is Larry and Sergey never took any of the advice from their VC board members very seriously. In fact, 99.9 % of the time went against the advice or did something completely differently.

21:36And one of the things that I learned from that is when you're looking for outlier companies, you cannot look for convention. You know, like you're looking for founders that will be outliers, which means that they will do things that are outliers. And by default, it means unconventional, unorthodox. And so one of the things that we were looking is that maybe because the companies that we back that are outside of Silicon Valley, they did things that were unorthodox. Like Canva wanted to do some things that traditional Silicon Valley venture investors said, well, we don't really like it. Like we're not getting a board seat or this and that.

22:11And honestly, like those things were not necessarily very important to the future success of the company. Instead, the founder said some crazy ideas. And the reason we ended up making that bet is we have not heard that from any other founder. Similar to Shopify, I remember when we were investing, Toby basically told me, look, I want to be honest with you. We did call a few firms in Silicon Valley, but they basically told us that the only way we could build this firm is to come to Menlo Park or Silicon Valley. And I'm like, already happily married here. I have no plans of leaving Ottawa, which then left an interesting space for us that we happily filled.

22:49But what was unique about it is Toby had great ideas, and I think he was able to attract talent even in Ottawa. And what people underestimated, Canadians are very proud. I'm married to a Canadian, and there was great talent in Canada, maybe not as great talent density as Silicon Valley, but just enough talent density that Shopify could use. And then Shopify did some very unique things. For instance, they underpriced the product for years and years. They basically said, if anyone helps us distribute this product, we will give you lifetime commissions. So almost everything they did that was major was very unorthodox, but ended up being one of the most important factors that contributed to their long-term success.

23:33In fact, one of the reasons why it was beneficial for them to be in Ottawa, nobody in Ottawa told them that's a crazy idea, you shouldn't do it. But if they were in Silicon Valley, I'm sure like 10 different VCs would have told them that has never worked, you should not do it. But that means that then you're going to be a conventional company and you're going to do what other companies have done. And by default, outliers do something completely different. So the most important that matters is do you have faith that the outlier idea has merit? And because of our own upbringing and the way we came into existence, our natural reaction is to say what can go widely right and less supported versus no, like we know the convention, we know the orthodoxy, this is never going to work and you're not going to really get into outlier companies doing that.

24:17Or establish trust with the founders.

24:20Peter High: Yeah, I want to actually double click on trust for a second. It's so compelling in your early description of the firm that one of the aspirations you continue to have is to be the venture firm that is most trustworthy. And you talked about some of the examples of what you're doing to back up that pledge. How did that occur to you? I mean, not that it's controversial, of course, but as you think about the ways in which you can differentiate yourself, I'd love to understand your pathway to choosing trustworthiness as an important hallmark. Yeah. So actually, one of the things that's really important is one of the adages of business is no die customer.

24:55And we are a two sided marketplace. We have our LPs that put us in business, which we are very grateful. But we also have our founders, our customers, our founders. So sometimes what you want to do is if you're really trying to be the most trusted venture firm by founders, why don't you actually ask founders what would enable them to have that impression of you? So when you ask, first of all, we ask them, what are the most important aspects that factor into your decision of choosing a venture firm? Trust was always top three, mostly top two, often the top reason, meaning that the way that they chose the venture firm that they want to take investment is based on how much they trusted the partner or the venture firm.

25:37The second thing we ask is, well, what can a venture firm do? And until then, what most venture firms did is put photos of them handshaking and bro-hugging and whatever, like VCs. And the founders are, look, that's not as important. And you can also say, well, we've done this for the founders. We've done that for the founders. The thing that was most important to them is when things go wrong, will you be by my side? Basically what they wanted to know is, can we even contractually promise them that when something goes sideways, we will not vote against them? And now you might think, well, this is pretty controversial because if something goes bad, isn't your job to help fix it?

26:21And that shouldn't even happen in the first place. But the reality is, look, even at Google, sometimes the things went sideways. What basically the founders are saying is, look, if I have trust in you, and by the way, that doesn't mean like being a board member, because often being a board member is not the best thing because founders don't have the courage to tell their board members what's really going on. And sometimes boards have to find after the fact, oh my God, if we knew X, Y, and Z, and we took a different approach. Number one, we said, if companies are going to succeed because things go widely right, if things are going really bad, I don't think any amazing company has created because you took a company where everything went bad and ended up fixing it with adult supervision and that that company became a great company later on.

27:05And so that basically said, we are willing to take this chance and risk. But what ended up happening is because we committed to the founders that we will not vote against them. Now we were having God honest conversations. What really needed to happen is will the founders even listen to us and trust us when we're talking about tough things? And the way that we engineered it based on two dozen founders comment is basically if we voted our shares with them and we helped them with their growth, we earned the right to be able to tell them tough things. And sometimes things we didn't disagree with them on.

27:37And we always use data to do that. But that ended up being a huge rallying cry and that ended up helping us have credibility and most importantly, do so when the timing still works. Because what ends up happening is if they don't trust you and then discover that area too late in the game, now you have discovered the truth, but there is not enough time left to act on it. So we had this controversial and somewhat contrarian idea that the thing that we care about the most, how much can we have enough trust that the toughest things, the things that are not working out, we can basically face it head on as early as possible when we still have time to be able to work on it and resolve it with the founders.

28:20Peter High: Fascinating. You mentioned the desire to make each founder unbreakable, I believe was the term that you used and the potential use of 1 % of an investment for development for themselves out of your own pockets, as you highlighted before. You mentioned coaching as an example of how that might be used. I wonder, as you think across the many founders that have taken advantage of this, what are the kinds of skill sets you've found to be necessary to learn through the development pledge? Are there certain areas that you think are particular difference makers? I recognize that each person's gap to fill is going to be a little bit different, but I wonder if there are some broad brushstrokes you might apply to this that would be meaningful or interesting.

28:59A hundred percent. I mean, a hundred plus founders have used it, so we know it's real. It is not a gimmick. Look, I think the main usage area is all into two buckets. One bucket through coaching and leadership circles is self-awareness. A lot of times being all in a company means that you don't actually realize how you come across as a leader. And this actually happened to me in the very beginning too. I thought I was describing my dream in my firm in a way, and I did not really pay attention to how good the narrative was. And I thought I was doing a good job. And when I kept getting those, I'm like, oh, wow, maybe I should pay attention to.

29:37And then I found out that there were two or three things that the way that I was perceived could be completely different by my narrative. And just a little bit of self-introspection can go a really long way. So one I would say is that founders having self-awareness helps them to not be surprised. A lot of times when you have conflict and you're surprised is because the way that you see yourself and your investors and your board sees you is not always the same. And so coaching really helps bridge that gap. I think the second thing is, look, every founder wants to be successful, but let's be real.

30:11One of the most important things to be successful is to truly understand what the high bar in XLS looks like. You might think you are the best version of yourself and you're doing something great, but you don't know that there are other firms and founders or leaders that are 10X, 100X from where you are. And not knowing that is essentially always leaving you at a permanent disadvantage because you think you're doing your best, but you're not even aware what great can look like. So another reason why coaching and this initiative is really important is it makes founders realize what true excellence looks like, whether it exists in their company or not, right?

30:48If you work with a coaching firm that has worked with the Apples and Googles and Facebooks of the world, they are not going to hold anything back. They're going to say, well, in some areas, you're really good. But in other areas, let me tell you, you're not even like as good of a leader as like X, Y, and Z. And so what it does is it gives you a framework for being the best version of yourself. And not just from what you know, but in a global perspective, taking advantage of all of the great companies at a much higher bar. And so when you basically like were to summarize all the instances where VCs decided to change a founder and like change their job is because they've ran out of patience.

31:24They basically lost faith. They said, we are no longer willing to take a chance on you. And this is why I like to use the word unbreakable, because what if you did that work in advance so you never have to make a change? What if the founders actually realized where there were shortcomings or what is the best version of themselves can be? So before the VCs have to come interact and say, wow, we want to change this, they're like, no, I'm already showing you that I can be the best version of myself. And that's what we wanted to achieve. And we're very happy that we managed to start a new wave there.

31:57Peter High: you're there's a story of your investment in notion your seed investment in that company that involves a commitment written on a napkin if i if i read that correctly and i wonder what gave you in that in that instance a conviction to act and to what extent can you draw that out a little bit further about the kinds of things you're looking for early in conversations and meeting with a founder uh to determine whether or not they're they're worth something as as uh as as quick a decision as that one proved to be yeah i mean it's a fascinating story so a little bit more background on the company notion, founder Ivan.

32:29So Ivan was first engineer at a company called Inkling. Inkling was a very interesting company. The CEO, Matt McInnes, who's by the way, today CEO at Rippling. So he's very well accomplished and established now. But at the time he came out of Apple. He was out of Harvard computer science, really smart guy. And his dream with the Apple influence to build the world's most beautiful eBooks. And like when I say beautiful, you know, at the time, this is almost like 20 years back, let's say 18 years back, spinning globes, beautiful visuals, like great stuff. So he basically built the world most sophisticated content management system to be able to produce these most beautiful eBooks.

33:14But you know what happened? Amazon came and said, you do not need beautiful eBooks. You know what you need? You need every book in the world to be online. And so they took a different gap. And what I thought was going to be a really great company ended up becoming part of history. But Ivan, the first engineer at Inkling, built that incredible content management system. So imagine you're in the content business, like there is it like after printing press, like somebody says, you know what, like, here's a word processor, there was a much better way to produce content. And it's beautiful, like, well, maybe like the actual initial goal of that did not succeed.

33:55But Ivan said, I can take this and build another foundational company. And what he basically found is that that same system could be used like every company needed like small databases and knowledge management system and content management system. That was the age where every company had an interment and they did not know how to make it. And Ivan said, well, I can basically be that. Like you can put your company, Wiki there. You can do different kinds of things. And by the way, when you're doing spreadsheet or a small database, we're not just limited by text and numbers. You can put videos and images and other data pipes we didn't even imagine yet.

34:31And so it took about five to six years for it to take off. But there were a couple initial premises. One, the founder CEO of Inkling said, the reason why Ivan was my first engineer, he was a savant crazy artist. And either he's going to do something very big, or he's going to do something so crazy and it's going to be worth zero. There's not going to be any in between, but if you're willing to take a chance on him, this is the guy to back. So I had a great reference. I also have seen the product that he's built, right? So I think one of the great luxuries of an investor is if you actually have seen a founder in action before, and you've actually seen what they're able to produce.

35:09So in some ways, you can look at it and say, well, I've written the check before I've seen a single line of code written, but it's kind of not fair. I have actually seen the code that he's written and it didn't end up working well, but I know that what he was capable of. So it wasn't like an incredible leap of faith. All I had to do was if he builds it, could it be really meaningful? And it's one thing to build pretty eBooks, which was a very limited niche market. It's another thing to say, I'm going to build a knowledge management system for every company in the world. It wasn't as beautifully articulated then.

35:43And that's what happened to Notion. That's why it became as big of a company as Canva, because they built something that every company in the world could value and could benefit from.

35:54Peter High: Fascinating. You mentioned the advantage you had of having seen previous work and giving you great confidence in a new idea, leveraging some of that past experience. I wonder, you know, How, as you think about past experience as a predictor of future success, how important is it to you, generally speaking, that an entrepreneur is a second-time entrepreneur or has a series of relevant experiences to the idea that they're bringing out into the world versus somebody who simply looks at the world a little bit differently and this is the first idea that they're pursuing? So, to me, I think it's less the experience they had.

36:31But of course, when you look at Notion, you can say, well, you kind of knew that Ivan could build a great product. The reality is he ended up building something related to that, but totally different. So to me, I think one of the most important things that I learned at Google, one of the reasons why we were able to do amazing outlier things, because we picked the world's biggest problems and then did something that was never been done before. So first we solve search. Then we realized, well, the only reason people are not coming to Google for search is because they're going somewhere else for email.

37:03And then we did email and we did it in a way that nobody else has done before. Then we're like, well, like the way to make search even more broadly accessible is to basically like make it part of the browser. Then we were like, why just part of the browser? We should own the browser. And then, wow, browser on a mobile phone. What if you own the mobile operating system? Then we're like, wow, like what other things people will need every day? hey, wow, we could build the world's best mapping solution. One day that's going to be really important. Then we're like, wow, content. We don't have content.

37:34Well, what about YouTube? We already have the world's best compute infrastructure. What would happen to YouTube? It was on top of Google and we could use unlimited money to scale it, right? Every one of these things, it was clear it was going to be big and something that Google didn't have. And we could tackle it because of the core competencies we have built inside Google. we could do something that nobody else in the world could do. And so when I'm looking at companies, I'm looking for two things. Number one, is it a crazy enough idea and an approach that I have never seen before? And is there at least one way that it could work?

38:09I mean, I am taking chances, but I need to have at least one way that it's going to work. If it works, is it urgent and scalable? That's why I always ask, can every business use it? Can every person use it? And is it critical enough? It can't be niche. And if it does work, would that scale work and give us what we're expecting? And the answer is yes. And I think the last thing is I am looking for the founder explaining in a way where it's not like a kitchen sink of 20 slides, but two or three things that I have just never heard from anybody else. So often we did things at Google where somebody would come up with an idea and it was always Larry and Sergey, and we would hear it.

38:50And you didn't have to be a PhD to understand that the idea had merit. They would explain it in such a way that even if it came from a specialist, we're like, wow. For instance, one of the things about email is like, you know what? Email is exploding. So if you can offer people free storage and not charge them, the email users would go through the roof and you would become the world's number one email company. When I was like early days of Google search. Well, everybody thought the thing that made search great was all these options and checkboxes. And we realized that people didn't want any of it.

39:23And the reason why I had to use it is because the results suck. So we're like, well, if the results are really good and we can have less than one second reaction time at the time, thousand milliseconds. So if you went from thousand millisecond to 800 millisecond in terms of how fast the search results come about, the usage went up 10x. It literally were those two things. No complication, just the results, show it to the people in less than 1 ,000 milliseconds. We did that, demand went up more than 10x. So it was like a lot of complicated and complex things that went behind it. But it was some genius that said, these are the two things that matter.

39:59And have we done many other things? Yes. But it's always like, look, if you're going to pursue an area, do you really understand fundamentally the one or two things that's going to have the biggest impact, right? Like Apple figured out, like the thing about phone was not the nine or 12 buttons. It's a communication device. And if you can run apps on it, it could be like a hundred times bigger. You know what I mean? So like Steve Jobs saw something that nobody else did. And so what I'm looking for is not the past experience, but based on what you learned, can you come up with these one or two insights that if they work, you can understand why that would make the company so much bigger and so much more interesting to the masses.

40:38Peter High: I wonder, Aiden, what do you read or listen to or watch to stay current? So much of our conversation has been about your desire and necessity to look around corners, to predict some of the future and find the entrepreneurs who will bring that future forward. Who's particularly influential to you that you would recommend to others to at least have a modicum of the future view that you have? I mean, honestly, like I think one of the key requirements of being in my seat is to be a relentless and voracious reader and watcher. I mean, I think I've watched like hundreds, if not thousands of, you know, YouTube videos, books, like so many like social media posts.

41:21maybe instead of just saying like there are so many people that are influential and have good ideas I think like the way that I go by the way I used to do music as a teenager I was always interested not just the popular artists but the artists that very few people you know talk about I love discovering new music genres and new artists so the way that I like to do is you know especially when it comes to learning I like to find the people that are maybe just emerging and not the obvious ones, but in terms of the one person or book that has been influential to me recently, at the end of the day, what I have to do or what a lot of operators and our founders have to do is if you were to boil it down to what greatness requires is great decision-making.

42:06Great decision-making has become really, really difficult, especially in the age of AI. We have 100 times more noise and we need to do things 10 times faster. So one of the books that has been influential to me is this book called Clear Thinking. So sometimes I do a lot of reading just to be an expert in a subject area and learn about people. But most often what I found that helps me the most is something that I can use tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times in my career. And I hope we can agree that one of the most important things we need to do is just make good decisions. And I never had somebody like that broke it down to like, hey, like what's basically like preventing you from making good decisions, understanding like what's truly reversible and not, what is the timeframe to make a decision and three or four biases that basically prevent people from making good decisions because you're using your ego, you're using your emotion, or you're maybe anchoring too much on like a historic fact or whatever.

43:00So he has this really great framework of four things that dilute or cloud decision-making. And his point is, if you can cautiously remove these four biases out of your decision making, you're going to be ahead of like 99 % of the people. So I love that because sometimes like what I'm interested in is not just like read a very trendy book and some interesting content that's just relevant in that month, year. I want something that I can literally use for the rest of my life. And it's like one of those tools in your tool chest. So whenever something important comes up, you pick up that tool and like, I know what to do.

43:37And at least I have the framework.

43:39Peter High: Well, a number of good tools. I think any listener or viewer of this will pick up from the great insights you've shared throughout. I didn't thank you so much for, for sharing a bit about your experience. Congratulations on 20 years and your 10th fund. Look forward to seeing the great work that you and your team continue to do. Thank you, Peter. I really enjoyed this. Thanks again for having me. Thanks for listening to TechnoVenture. If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating. Thank you. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you.