Aydin Senkut taps early Google days for success at Felicis Ventures

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Aydin Senkut founded Felicis Ventures in 2005 after leaving Google, where he was employee No. 30 and its first product manager.

Aydin Senkut is proud that the boutique venture firm he founded in 2005 was recently named the second most successful VC of 2012, behind only Intel Capital.

But his years as an early Google executive (he was employee No. 30) show through in his striving to find what he calls truly iconic companies for Felicis Ventures.

Senkut was Google’s first product manager and later ran strategic partner development in Asia for the Mountain View search giant.

Felicis’ biggest score came last year when Cisco Systems paid $1.2 billion for Meraki, the software-controlled networking company that Senkut backed early on.

Among other notable companies backed by Felicis have been Angry Birds’ developer Rovio, personal finance site Mint.com (bought by Intuit in 2009), Chomp (bought by Apple last year) and Karma (scooped up by Facebook just before its 2012 IPO).

Senkut talked with me last week about his investment philosophy and how he has applied what he learned at Google in a conversation that I have excerpted below.

Congratulations on being named the second most successful VC firm of 2012, behind only Intel Capital.

Thank you. We are really proud of the fact that we had a lot of exits. But we personally define success by how we have helped in our founders’ successes. We are proud that we could be part of that and that we could contribute to it. Sometimes it’s funding, sometimes its strategy, sometimes there is other stuff we do for them. It makes us really happy.

I think there are a lot of metrics to measure venture capital success, how many investments a company makes and all of that. But at the end of the day, you know, let’s be very concrete.