Catch every wave: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on reinvention, Shopify and the AI tsunami

Key points

Key takeaways from a The Peel podcast interview with Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis, hosted by Turner Novak (October 2026):

Success can rot your priors. Senkut argues first outlier success makes venture investors misattribute the cause; the discipline is resetting expectations the day after — the wave that made you won't be the one that carries you (his "reinvention and repotting" surfing analogy).

Ride every wave — the generalist model. Felicis runs a generalist strategy to catch the major waves: client-server and internet at the start of his Silicon Graphics and Google career, then mobile, e-commerce, payments, security and infrastructure, and today AI, chips and defence.

The AI wave is different in scale. Companies can now start with billion-dollar contracts and trillion-dollar IPOs arrive; he expects the same compounding in robotics, with memory chips, data centres and energy as successive bottlenecks — an energy gap versus China that he calls a national security risk, while Nvidia's earnings show the demand is real.

The Silicon Graphics lesson. He watched SGI — the "Google of its era" behind Jurassic Park's effects — get commoditised by cheaper Windows/PC machines with no second act; open source beat proprietary, a pattern he sees potentially rhyming in AI as models open up and buyers get cost-conscious.

Shopify: persistence and serendipity. Seven unanswered emails to Tobi Lütke, a flight to -30°C Ottawa and a six-month courtship got Felicis into the round; he then connected Shopify with Rovio (Angry Birds) before the holidays as a marquee e-commerce customer — "engineering serendipity".

Theses from first principles, not expertise. Payments (Adyen) and commerce are businesses every company needs; his non-engineer background pushed him to judge founders and markets rather than technology nuances.

Ask every founder what they need. No scalable one-size-fits-all platform offering: Felicis asks its hundreds of founders individually, and Senkut notes that "doing nothing" still puts most VCs in the top 10% of helpfulness.

The founder pledge. Felicis commits in writing never to vote its shares against founders — a trust signal he says almost no firm matches, in an industry where most founders don't trust their investors.

Read more: The Peel on YouTube