Aydin Senkut

Aydin Senkut is the Founder and President of Felicis Ventures. He's been an angel investor in promising start-ups since 2006. His portfolio encompasses over 50 companies including  Appjet (acquired by Google), Aardvark (acquired by Google), Brightroll, Disqus, Imageshack, Inkling, Justin.tv, Meraki, Mint (acquired by Intuit), Mochi Media (acquired by Shanda Games), Outright, Posterous, Powerset (acquired by Microsoft), Plusmo (acquired by AT&T), Practice Fusion, RichRelevance, Sendori (acquired by IAC), Tapulous, and Yume Networks.

Prior to starting Felicis Ventures, he was a Senior Manager at Google, responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Asia Pacific (including Japan). Aydin joined Google in 1999 as its first Product Manager to launch Google's first 10 international sites, its first online search licensing products and its first Safe Search. He then became the first International Sales Manager at Google, responsible for world-wide licensing deals. He closed key deals for Google with strategic portal around the world including Lycos (Hotbot) in the US, Web.de in Germany, UOL in Brazil, NTT, NEC, Fujitsu, Rakuten in Japan, Sina, Netease and Tencent in China, Korea Telecom, Empas, Dacom in Korea, iPrimus/AOL in Australia, Yam and Hi-net in Taiwan.

Aydin received a BS in Business Administration with Honors from Boston University. He also earned an MBA in Marketing from the Wharton School and an MA in International Studies from the School of Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He speaks five languages: English, German, French, Portuguese and Turkish.

He is a benefactor to the University of Pennsylvania and UCSF. Aydin has been a Mentor to students in the Entrepreneurship class at Stanford University. He's on the boards of Imageshack and the Wharton Entrepreneurial Program.

Aydin has been featured on New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Financial Times Germany,  Cnet, TechCrunch and San Francisco Chronicle