How Felicis Ventures applies the 10x principle to back unicorns

Executive overview

Most startups fail not because the idea is wrong, but because they pick the wrong market or settle for incremental improvement. Aydin Senkut, Google's first PM and founder of Felicis Ventures, argues that every venture — startup or fund — must be 10x better, cheaper, or faster than existing alternatives to matter.

Felicis has backed 45+ unicorns and 17 IPOs in under 14 years by applying this lens at every stage: market selection, founder evaluation, and portfolio operations.

The 10x principle is a filter, not a goal — if you can't articulate how you're 10x different, you're not ready to compete.

The 10x principle and market selection

• 10x principle: whatever you build must be 10x better, 10x cheaper, or 10x faster than the competition — ideally all three.
• Markets beat everything else; when anything goes against a market, the market wins.
• Felicis starts with market selection before evaluating founders — a great founder in a bad market rarely wins.
• Target markets that are either already large or have a clear path to massive scale.
• Timing matters: being right too early is functionally the same as being wrong.
• The largest Felicis outcomes (Shopify, Canva, Notion) all serve near-universal customer bases — commerce, creativity, productivity.

What Google taught Senkut

• Larry Page's default was no — saying yes rarely meant full organisational commitment behind the decision.
• Google set deliberately uncomfortable goals; 10–20% improvement targets don't produce great companies.
• A healthy disrespect for the status quo: Google assigned non-specialists to hard problems (e.g. a biking buddy built the ad server in six months with five engineers).
• Real-time internal dashboards — covering servers, query volumes, customer health — were standard even at 50 employees.
• Measurement at F1-level granularity (1/1000th of a second) is what allows performance to be optimised.

Evaluating founders

• Market is the primary filter; founder quality is the second most important factor.
• Venture capital is fundamentally about understanding people, not numbers — everyone is good at numbers.
• Felicis brings in an operating partner (ex-Stripe, Okta, Databricks) specifically to assess founding team culture and character during investment meetings.
• Key founder traits: focus (do one or two things exceptionally, not fifty things adequately), consistency, resilience to setbacks.
• Storytelling is non-negotiable — either the CEO or a co-founder must be highly charismatic; it drives hiring, sales, and fundraising.
• Senkut iterated his own pitch deck 107 times before getting the first yes for Felicis.

The Shopify case study

• Toby Lütke originally wanted to build a snowboard store; when no good tools existed, he built the software instead.
• Shopify deliberately underpriced to grow with merchants rather than extract value upfront.
• Channel strategy: lifetime commissions to agencies, not one-time fees — turned the channel into a long-term growth engine.
• Payments launch was timed precisely to fuel the company's breakout growth phase.
• Like Google, Shopify maintained comprehensive real-time internal data from an early stage.

Founder mindset and resilience

• Setbacks are "jet fuel" — the energy from rejection and doubt can be redirected into action.
• Small wins compound; early-stage progress always looks slow but builds toward nonlinear outcomes.
• Great companies never succeed in a straight line — persistence through repeated failure is what separates outcomes.
• Know your audience: the last 10% of storytelling detail accounts for 90% of the persuasion.
• Mission ambition matters for hiring — a bigger, harder problem attracts better people because people want their work to have purpose.

Felicis as a firm

• $3B+ AUM, global mandate, unanimous investment decisions informed by multiple perspectives.
• Team diversity (backgrounds, languages, specialisms) is a structural advantage, not a cultural one.
• Impact lens: LPs include endowments, health systems, and foundations with charitable mandates — financial returns and societal impact are framed as aligned.
• Portfolio companies touch users every hour of every day globally — Senkut cites this as the firm's north star metric for meaning.