{"id":2439,"date":"2016-03-02T16:35:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T21:35:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/questrom-magazine\/?page_id=2439"},"modified":"2019-11-14T10:50:35","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T15:50:35","slug":"the-trend-spotter","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/questrom-magazine\/spring-2016\/the-trend-spotter\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trendspotter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aydin Senkut (BSBA\u201992) has an unerring knack for spotting the next big things in tech\u2014and acting on them before the rest of us see them coming. After making his mark at Google when it was just a start-up, he became a super angel, a venture capitalist with a golden touch: his company invested in Angry Birds<\/em> before hundreds of millions of gamers downloaded it; bet on Fitbit before 2 million fitness fans strapped on the activity-tracking device. A repeat member of the elite Forbes<\/em> Midas List of the world\u2019s smartest investors, Senkut shares with Everett<\/em> how he built his career and what the entrepreneurs he invests in all have in common.<\/p>\n

Aydin Senkut learned a lot from watching Google cofounder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page up close. That was one of the benefits of joining Google while the search giant was still in short pants. In 1999, when Senkut was offered a product manager job at Google, the company had around 30 employees and had been incorporated for just one year.<\/p>\n

Senkut (BSBA\u201992) noticed how Page sought new ideas, and how often he turned things down to stay focused on what mattered.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe constantly challenged the status quo and asked people to do impossible things,\u201d says Senkut. Once the inconceivable became reality, he says, employees would think, \u201c\u2018If that worked, what else can work?\u2019 That happened hundreds of times at Google.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Senkut left Google in 2005\u2014by then he\u2019d been its first international sales manager and was a senior manager for web search and syndication\u2014the company\u2019s value had surged past $80 billion.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of leadership is inspiration,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you are going to ask people to do something difficult, you\u2019d better go out in the field and show them that it could be done; you can\u2019t just be sitting in an ivory tower and barking down orders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Senkut is the one showing it can be done. As the founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures<\/a>, a boutique venture fund, he helps determine which companies seeking financing are worthy of his firm\u2019s investment. Since incorporating in 2005, Felicis has invested in more than 150 companies, with 55 of them earning notable exits (being snapped up by big names like Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft) and 3 hitting the New York Stock Exchange with initial public offerings, including Fitbit<\/a> and Shopify<\/a>. Nine of the companies have been valued at over $1 billion; 30 at more than $100 million.<\/p>\n

\n

What Makes a Good Founder?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Felicis Ventures founder and managing partner Aydin Senkut on the ideal entrepreneur.<\/p>\n

The best founders<\/strong> know their products inside out, says Senkut, and understand why \u201cit\u2019s going to be great and special.\u201d But they also know how to make their products better and objectively measure future accomplishments.<\/p>\n

They get<\/strong> that not everyone shares their passion, so look for partners that do. \u201cYou have to keep networking and keep meeting new people until you find enough people who are interested in your area.\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019re storytellers<\/strong> and can get someone\u2019s attention in 30 seconds. \u201cWhat is the one thing that is going to capture that person\u2019s attention that\u2019s going to make the conversation continue?\u201d<\/p>\n

Even when things get big,<\/strong> they keep track of the details. Whether it\u2019s office wall colors or business cards, even the small stuff can say something big about a business.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Life After Google<\/h3>\n

After Google, Senkut took a break\u2014traveled, spent time with family\u2014but he was still in his thirties; he didn\u2019t want the company to be \u201cthe final chapter in my life.\u201d He thought about becoming a venture capitalist. Today, the venture market is chock full of Silicon Valley success stories looking to turn their tech industry know-how into investment triumphs. But in 2005, Senkut kept hearing the same thing. \u201cThey looked at my background and said, \u2018You don\u2019t really make a typical venture capitalist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

They were right. After a brief post-Questrom stint with Hoffmann La-Roche<\/a>\u2019s finance department, Senkut switched to graduate school, then joined high-performance computing specialists Silicon Graphics (now SGI) as a business development manager, before jumping to Google. He\u2019d built a career managing product teams and clinching sales deals. Most venture capitalists at the time, he says, had made it big in banking or were successful entrepreneurs. They asked him why he didn\u2019t just go it alone; it drove him to start Felicis. \u201cI want to demonstrate and show that somebody can think out of the box, can think different, and yet can still succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Senkut says he\u2019s never dabbled. \u201cI\u2019m in or out, and if I was going to be in, I was going to be in all the way.\u201d At the start, that meant doing everything, down to designing Felicis\u2019 logo, website, and business cards. \u201cPeople thought I was a huge fund,\u201d he says. \u201cThey didn\u2019t even know it was just me. I didn\u2019t even have an office; I was working out of Starbucks. It was a very humble beginning.\u201d With its first $4.5 million fund, Felicis backed the personal finance company Mint<\/a> (bought by Intuit<\/a> in 2009 for $170 million) and the social media marketing firm Wildfire (purchased by Google in 2012 for $350 million).<\/p>\n

Even today, with Felicis two years into its fourth fund (this one at $120 million) and three other people on the investment team, Senkut remains concerned about the small details. Every design and color choice in the company\u2019s Palo Alto, California, office, which looks more Silicon Valley than Wall Street\u2014open, filled with light\u2014is deliberate, he says: orange for optimism; white for transparency.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same way, he says, that the entrepreneurs Felicis backs have thought about every detail.<\/p>\n

The Ideal Founder<\/h3>\n

Felicis\u2019 investments have an emphasis on technology advances in the mobile, e-commerce, enterprise, education, and health sectors. Sometimes, the right entrepreneurs walk through the door, says Senkut; sometimes, his team tracks down companies in the areas they\u2019re excited about. Most of all, they\u2019re looking for the right founder.<\/p>\n

\n

You have to get very, very, very good at telling the story of what it is that you\u2019re trying to do and what the product does and why you\u2019re doing it and why it\u2019s going to be great and special.<\/span> It\u2019s not always very obvious to people, but being able to nail that is, I think, the absolute key to their success.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cCapital is not really that scarce. There\u2019s a lot of capital that wants to go into these exciting start-ups, and people forget that at the end, this is all about the founders,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re basically a supporting business, right? So if our founders are successful, we are successful. The founders build their companies, we help them, maybe we give them advice, we give them some capital, we make some connections for them, but at the end, it\u2019s all about them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides, you could \u201chave an amazing company, but [if] you don\u2019t get along with the founder, I think that would be miserable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good founders, says Senkut, have an innate understanding of what makes their product great and clear ideas of how to improve it and objectively measure future accomplishments.<\/p>\n

The standout entrepreneurs also understand that not everyone cares about their product as much as they do. Senkut says wannabe founders need to find investors who share their passion for a particular field. There\u2019s little chance of encouraging a \u201crandom investor to care about this if that investor or person does not already have some inclination.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009You have to keep networking and keep meeting new people until you find enough people who are interested in your area.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even a shared affection doesn\u2019t guarantee compatibility\u2014as anyone who\u2019s been stuck next to a dinner party bore knows. You need a hook, says Senkut. Forget the lengthy product briefings; can you get someone\u2019s attention in one paragraph, in 30 seconds?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to get very, very, very good at telling the story of what it is that you\u2019re trying to do and what the product does and why you\u2019re doing it and why it\u2019s going to be great and special. It\u2019s not always very obvious to people, but being able to nail that is, I think, the absolute key to their success.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Dash of Faith<\/h3>\n

Finding entrepreneurs who check all those boxes is as much an art as a science. It\u2019s easy to crunch some numbers on a company or market, but as a venture capitalist, Senkut says, \u201cyou\u2019re working with incomplete information, and most importantly you\u2019re working with people, so there is a very organic element.\u201d He has to be comfortable making decisions without access to reams of facts and figures\u2014these aren\u2019t companies with years of financial records to sift through.<\/p>\n

And some of those decisions might not pay off\u2014or they may stink\u2014for years to come. \u201cOne day you\u2019re a fool, the other day you\u2019re brilliant,\u201d says Senkut, because the companies go through ups and downs. \u201cIt\u2019s not a straight line\u2014it\u2019s the same thing in careers.\u201d His own career was like that, he says\u2014no great leaps in job titles, but shifts here and there, sideways moves, the steady accretion of new skills.<\/p>\n

At times, decisions felt wrong: he was at Silicon Graphics during its slow slide toward delisting from the stock exchange, but wouldn\u2019t have landed a job at Google if he hadn\u2019t met a key friend there. You need to have \u201cfaith the dots will connect,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

On the Felicis website, the company touts its greatest contribution not in dollar figures\u2014though you can find them, and they\u2019re impressive\u2014but in something seemingly more intangible: \u201cmeaningful connections at critical moments.\u201d Senkut gives the example of working with Rovio<\/a>, a Felicis investment and the company behind Angry Birds. In 2010, when Rovio decided to get into physical merchandise \u201cabout 10 days before Christmas,\u201d it called Senkut. He, in turn, dialed up the CEO of Shopify\u2014another Felicis investment. An Angry Birds store launched within a week, says Senkut, the virtual shelves bare soon after.<\/p>\n

Like his former boss, Larry Page, Senkut has made a habit of making the improbable become reality. In 2015, Forbes<\/em><\/a> placed him at 39 on the Midas List<\/a>, its annual ranking of venture capitalists betting on tech companies and \u201cearning outsized returns for their investors;\u201d others making the grade included Jim Goetz (who backed WhatsApp) and Peter Thiel<\/a> (PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor).<\/p>\n

\u201cNever take what is thrown at your feet as the sole, final alternative.\u201d Too many people, says Senkut, resign themselves to plodding through work and life, rather than thinking, \u201c\u2018What I really want to do is\u00a0this,\u00a0even if I\u2019m going to fail or hit the wall four or five times; I\u2019m not going to stop until I figure that out.\u2019 Unless you do that, you don\u2019t know if something is possible. The journey, and the process of doing that, teaches you a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aydin Senkut (BSBA\u201992) has an unerring knack for spotting the next big things in tech\u2014and acting on them before the rest of us see them coming. After making his mark at Google when it was just a start-up, he became a super angel, a venture capitalist with a golden touch: his company invested in Angry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10779,"featured_media":0,"parent":2285,"menu_order":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"story.php","meta":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Trendspotter - Questrom Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/questrom-magazine\/spring-2016\/the-trend-spotter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Trendspotter - Questrom Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Aydin Senkut (BSBA\u201992) has an unerring knack for spotting the next big things in tech\u2014and acting on them before the rest of us see them coming. 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