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Felicis Ventures' Aydin Senkut: The Next Great Mobile Company Is Not Here Yet

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Aydin Senkut.
Aydin Senkut, founder of Felicis Ventures, has an enviable track record. Founded in late 2005, Felicis has made roughly 60 investments, with 16 successful exits, including Mint, Tapulous and Aardvark. As anyone in the investment community will tell you, that’s not a shabby hit rate.

Senkut, a former senior manager at Google, is getting ready to deploy even more capital, with the recent birth of Felicis’ first institutional fund. The $40 million war chest was 33% oversubscribed and includes institutional investors like Flag Capital and Weathergage Capital and other notable names, like Peter Thiel and Joshua Schachter. So what is Senkut buying? The super angel investor recently dropped by TechCrunch TV to share his playbook.

Broadly speaking, Felicis is still looking for seed and early stage consumer internet and mobile companies, but within that category there are a handful of theories driving Senkut’s investment strategy.

“Right now we are thinking in terms of three different groups, the first group is horizontally, we’re trying to make more investments in mobile, e-commerce and enterprise areas, we do think that these areas are kind of having an interesting comeback and are likely to produce great companies. We are also investing in internet and mobile companies in four verticals that are huge markets, education, health care, personalized medicine and energy conservation, again we’re not looking for capital intensive companies in these sectors but we’re looking for internet and mobile applications that target particularly these huge markets where we fell really large companies can be built. We also think of data as an important play. So there was an interesting quote this year in the Economist that said businesses are no longer about capital labor, its about capital labor and data. We’re seeing a new generation of companies that turn data into intelligence and make that actionable.”

Senkut is hungry to hunt down the next great mobile company, which, he claims, does not exist yet: “What we do think though is that the large mobile company of the future is not created yet, we think it’s more likely that they will be using a subscription revenue model. It also will be in an area that people might not expect today but we think will be really interesting tomorrow.” That area may be personal health care. During our off and on camera interviews, Senkut seemed particularly fascinated by the idea of a mobile consumer health portal that will help users track their well being, diet and exercise habits on the go— a sort of one-stop customized shop to manage personal health.

Beyond health care, Senkut says he’s also looking hard at startups at the intersection of mobile and education (hence their recent investment in Inkling, a company that creates interactive textbooks for the tablets).

In part two of our interview, we discuss the potential of one of his other investments, Groupon, and the classic founder’s conundrum: when it’s appropriate to sell. His advice is based on his theory of the “three hills.”
 
AYDIN SENKUT
Aydin Senkut is the Founder and President of Felicis Ventures. He’s been an angel investor in promising start-ups since the end of 2005. His current portfolio emcompasses over 30 companies including Buzzlogic, Cake Financial, Dogster, Meraki Networks, Mint, Social.im Shopittome, Yapta, Yume Networks, Webs.com (/company/freewebs), Weebly and others.

Prior to starting Felicis Ventures, he was a Senior Manager at Google, responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Japan and Asia Pacific.

AYDIN SENKUT'S INVESTMENTS
Investments
Company                            Date     Round             Size     Participants
Nowmov                              5/10    Angel                                  12
Wildfire Interactive              4/10    Series A            $4M             5
MyLikes                              4/10    Seed                 $630k         11
ERPLY                                3/10    Unattributed     $2M              8
Posterous                           3/10    Series A            $4.4M          8
Worldly Developments       3/10    Seed                 $800k        13
Credit Karma                    11/09    Series A            $2.5M          5
Chomp                             11/09    Seed                  $565k         3
Bump Technologies         10/09    Series A             $3M           7
Producteev                        7/09    Angel                 $180k        5
Y Combinator                    3/09    Unattributed       $2M          4
CrowdFlower                    3/09    Seed                   $1.2M       9
Foodzie                          12/08    Seed                   $1M         22
Posterous                      12/08    Angel                   $725k      11
Producteev                      7/08    Seed                    $180k      9
Handipoints                     5/08    Angel                    $550k      5
Mob.ly                             3/08    Seed                     $1.1M      8
VentureBeat                   2/08    Seed                     $320k       7
Feedjit                            1/08    Angel                    $450k       3
Yamli                             2008    Angel                                     2
Mesmo.tv                     10/07    Series A               $900k        7
MUBI                             8/07    Series A                $750k       5
Mogad                          8/07    Series A                 $500k       4
Trivop                           6/07    Angel                                      7
Omnidrive                  12/06    Angel                     $800k        4
Rapleaf                       6/06    Angel                                       6
Cake Financial            2006    Seed                                      8
Loomia                        6/05    Seed                       $1M         7

Milestones
* Aydin Senkut invested in Nowmov. (5/10)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Wildfire Interactive. (4/26/10)
* Aydin Senkut invested in MyLikes. (4/13/10)    
* Aydin Senkut invested in ERPLY. (3/22/10)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Posterous. (3/5/10)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Worldly Developments. (3/5/10)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Credit Karma. (11/4/09)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Chomp. (11/09)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Bump Technologies. (10/24/09)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Producteev. (7/19/09)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Y Combinator. (3/16/09)
* Aydin Senkut invested in CrowdFlower. (3/09)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Foodzie. (12/16/08)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Posterous. (12/08)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Producteev. (7/15/08)
* Aydin Senkut invested in Handipoints. (5/2/08)

Source: Techcrunch.com 
Last modified onSaturday, 06 May 2017 10:07
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