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TBPN · 3 min · Oct 31, 2025

Venture investors have to keep backing outliers through downturns

Aydin Senkut argues that strong venture firms keep investing even when markets turn risky. The biggest returns come from backing companies with room to grow far beyond the entry price.

Aydin Senkut

Founder & Managing Partner, Felicis

Founded Felicis, a Menlo Park VC firm; former Google first product manager now backing AI and infrastructure companies.

  • John Coogan, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.

  • Jordi Hays, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.

About this segment

Aydin Senkut argues that strong venture firms keep investing even when markets turn risky. The biggest returns come from backing companies with room to grow far beyond the entry price.

From “Marc Andreessen & Ilya Sutskever Host TBPN”, Oct 31, 2025. Watch the full episode

“we still kept on making investments and we never slowed down”
Aydin Senkutat 2:30:29 · TBPN2:30:29

Takeaways

  1. Don’t stop investing just because the market feels risky.
  2. High-growth outliers can overcome a high entry price.
  3. A venture firm needs conviction, not just market timing.

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 2:29:44Venture investors have to keep backing outliers through downturns2:52

  2. 1:47:16A superintelligence ban lacks a workable definition and reach4:48Up next
  3. 2:32:27Generalists can spot opportunities experts overlook5:27
  4. 5 more moments in the full episode

Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

  1. 2:29:49

    Let me tell you an interesting lesson or maybe, like, a key secret is that venture business is you you have to be consistent. You can you cannot sprint and pause, sprint and pause. If you're not growing in this business, you're essentially losing, stagnating. There is no such thing as cruise control or, like, steady state. And I think the mistake that happens with a lot of VCs, if their conviction is not deep and they're essentially playing the market game, there are a lot of followers and not a lot of original thinkers, what happens is the moment the market gets risky and things look dire, people pause and like, oh, you know what?

  2. 2:30:27

    Like, I'm gonna stop making investment. And one thing I'm really proud is even in the '21 2021 vintage and '22 when things were really expensive, we still kept on making investments and we never slowed down and, you know, we were basically like steady growth. And part of that is because, look, this is not public markets where if there is 20% growth and your entry price is wrong, you're going to lose a lot of money. But if you find the right companies and you do have 50 to 100x growth ahead of you, even if you overpaid for them, you're still going to do well. In fact, the only way you're going to do well is to have these positive outliers that are fund makers.

  3. 2:31:02

    And so I think the biggest lesson is a lot of VCs spend too much time of this valuation high and low and this trend and that. The reality is you gotta be a surfer that can surf any wave in any season and not just one. Like, you can't just go to the beach and call it quits. You need to go back out. And, you know, I know Jordan lives in Malibu, he he's he's he's gonna like the surfer analogy. But the part of the other thing also is that you have to find the companies where there is gonna be so much growth that even if you got the price slightly wrong, it's not gonna slow down. So anybody who's like, oh, like, we're gonna be in this business and it's all about the price, They're misunderstanding it. It's all about, like, being early and understanding that incredible growth that's gonna follow. That's gonna basically give you the long term success. And so I feel there is definitely a delta between the VCs that are original thinkers that still had the conviction and the the the courage to make those bets, and not just like Supabase for us, but also companies like N8N.

  4. 2:32:02

    That was a sleeper company in Berlin, and all of a sudden, in fall, like, multiple VCs have woke up that they're doing a great job in Agentic AI.

  5. 2:32:11

    Yeah. That's a company. Interestingly enough, I saw it on getting people started making videos about it on Instagram, which I I look at as much more mainstream before I saw anything about it on on X, which is I think, a good sign. It means that it actually has traction outside of our little Silicon Valley bubble. Do you