00:28:07 · Aydin Senkut
[00:28:07] S0: I think the fundraising for that first fund was very difficult because there were a lot of good things for them to look at. Like I basically did angel investing four years on my own and had 100 investments and 12 exits. But people still looked at it and say, Oh, you know what? Like Aydin, we like you, but you don't have an engineering degree. You're not technical enough. You're not an expert enough. Like you didn't really get promoted at Google. You weren't a director or VP. I mean, pick your favorite excuse. And none of that is untrue, but I think what they underestimated is I saw the world differently than all the other venture investors because I was an insider. And I said, The world, when we look at it, the talent could be more global. There are going to be companies in areas you don't expect. And if you're like an expert and you see the world in a very narrow way, you're never going to look at something crazy and say, Oh wow, that could work. You're going to find 10 things why it can't work. And so you're never going to take those chances but I'm willing to take those chances. And so what was really great is even though rejection was extremely painful, it became my rocket fuel. Like we always talk about rocket ships but we don't talk about the fuel. And I'm so grateful the first few LPs that took a chance on me, one of them sent me their memo. It was really interesting. Like later did I realize that most of them were also like startup LPs. Like I was full outsider going into venture capital and a lot of them were like, Hey, we're just getting new into the LP arena. The biggest funds are not going to give us allocation but there's new breed of super angels and they're starting funds. Let's go back these managers, the new managers. So I'm really grateful for them because obviously the capital put us in business but more importantly they've been a great mentor to me. They kind of told me Hey, this is how the greatest venture capital do things. They basically questioned all my thesis and like how I wanted to run things without quashing the original idea of like talent could be global and you can invest in them from just with a small team from Silicon Valley. But then there are other things about the venture business like, hey, like I didn't I wasn't like inside for decades and decades.
00:30:08 · Aydin Senkut, Eric Newcomer
So that was really great in terms of like holding me to great excellence, maybe kind of similar to your experience at Information, right? Like in other newspapers that you kind of showed you the ropes but you still like went [00:30:20] S1: your Exactly. Own How big was that first fund? The first fund was $41,000,000 And how large is the firm today?
00:30:28 · Aydin Senkut
[00:30:28] S0: Have now $4,000,000,000 under management. But to me, like you can talk about I mean, I can say, Oh, I'm excited about it. Somebody is like, Well, there's a venture fund that's 100 times your size, right? That's not a big deal. But I feel like sometimes what I am really proud of is like we need to compare ourselves to ourselves. Like can you be the best version of yourself rather than trying to compare yourself to everyone else. I was really inspired by this. I looked up the first fundraising deck from 2009 and it was really cute. It's like, Hey, I already had like six exits. The aggregate value is like $377,000,000 whatever, not what we captured but the value of those companies. I think I might have a shot at like 1,000,000,000 or $2,000,000,000 companies. And then I'm like, wow, it's not about the AUM we have but now like the collective aggregate value of companies, it's like literally like three twenty five billion is almost like 1000x bigger. And I thought maybe I'll have a billion or two, like 1 or $2,000,000,000 companies. We have 65, 27 of which have exited 20 IPOs. And by the way, not just 20 IPOs. We had an IPO in Finland. We had an IPO in Canada. We had an IPO in Netherlands. Maybe one day we'll have an IPO in Australia. I don't know. So I'm really proud of that because we did this with a tiny little team out of Silicon Valley and people said there's no way this is going to work. You don't have offices in these places. You don't know any of these founders. And to see that what those founders have been able to do. And today like we have companies like Chip Company in U. K, Fractal, Adyen in Germany and Supabase which is global but headquarters in Singapore. The trend continues. We're still able to find companies in brand new sectors that I didn't even think like, I couldn't even imagine that we could even be talking to those kind of founders. And it's the same thing, like a crazy outlier founder that looks at the world differently. And next thing we know, they're building a great foundational layer for what's exciting today.
00:32:23 · Eric Newcomer, Aydin Senkut
[00:32:23] S1: How do you stay on top when other people come to your strategy? Obviously, founders being king, you know, is consensus now at this point. You're certainly way ahead on that, but the rest of the Valley has come to it. I mean, literally, I think today Sequoia gave up their London office. [00:32:38] S0: It's like [00:32:38] S1: they're saying, Oh yeah, we could invest anywhere from California. So it sounds like what you were just saying. Like how you stay differentiated when people respond to competition and try to match what
00:32:50 · Aydin Senkut
[00:32:50] S0: I you're think the most important thing is the number one value. It's so important that we actually put in all our conference rooms is learning and adapting rapidly. So reinvention is the biggest thing. In fact, one of the things that I saw, especially when human beings are most successful is when they're most vulnerable because that fools our brain to think something works so great, don't change anything. Like something like we had a dog in the room, right? Like you were wearing the cerebral valley hat and you were wearing these great glasses and you had a beard. Like don't change anything. Like don't shave. Like you should stay exactly the way you are. And in some ways the things that makes technology really interesting has this kind of like backside of like, wow, like you know like the reason why these things happen is because they're going to get disrupted again. And the only way to get ahead of it and not be surprised or shocked by it is to reinvent yourself and preempt the disruption before the disruption hits you and you're surprised. Right? So that's why I'm like religiously obsessed with I mean I read 20 fourseven. I literally like try to go out of my way to talk to very interesting people and that goes back to the emergent list. Don't always ask the obvious people. Ask different people. Ask experts. Ask the demand. Where is demand going to come from? And that informs where the growth is going to come from which then informs where the value is going to come from. So I think the most important thing is like go around and wonder, like do the not obvious thing and pick the unconventional way because with the right amount of bravery and a little bit of consistency, it can take you to
00:34:24 · Eric Newcomer
[00:34:24] S1: great places. The weird point is that I'm only really going to change if I'm in sort of a high pressure situation where I have to like, oh, I'm not comfortable. It's like when you're comfortable, you sort of stay static. And when you're not, that's when you change. That's when you sort of create a great startup. Is that that was sort of the point you