Michael Anders co-founded ICONIQ in 2011 with Divesh Makan, and the firm now manages over $80bn.
ICONIQ shifted in 2013 to enterprise software, backing Adyen, ServiceTitan, Procore, Snowflake and Datadog.
Anders says the AI debate is over, but warns it is as easy to lose money in AI as to make it.
How ICONIQ turned founder clients into an investing edge
ICONIQ is a bet that a community of founder and CEO clients beats conventional sourcing. Anders and Divesh Makan left Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in 2011 to build that firm, and shared deal flow gave it diversification and an access edge a normal fund cannot buy. That edge let ICONIQ move early from consumer into enterprise software and then into AI applications and data centers.
Takeaways
Community of founder clients is the edge. Anders built ICONIQ around a community of founder and CEO clients whose shared deal flow produced diversification across hard-to-find deals. It launched with client trust and a delivery record, and its network supplies an information and access edge.
A 2013 shift into enterprise software paid. ICONIQ moved the vast majority of its investing from consumer to enterprise software, which led to Adyen, ServiceTitan, Procore, Snowflake and Datadog. Its venture growth equity fund, built with partner Will Griffith, is in its seventh vintage with 100 people.
AI is real and ICONIQ backs applications. Anders says the debate over AI's reality is over. ICONIQ avoids foundation models, applies an AI scorecard weighing adoption and competitive standing, and points to Ryder and ElevenLabs as AI-native businesses. He warns losing money in AI is as easy as making it.
Hyperscaler storage demand pulled ICONIQ into data centers. CEOs of hyperscale players told ICONIQ they could not keep up with demand for storage. The firm raised its first dedicated data center fund and concentrated it almost entirely on hyperscalers.
Broker pay killed his donor-advised fund startup. Anders built a business that white-labelled donor-advised funds and signed all the major banks, including JPMorgan. It never got off the ground because it did not pay brokers enough, and it sold for peanuts.
Today's tariff confusion calls for caution. Anders names the 2008 financial crisis as the hardest moment of the ICONIQ journey and compares it to today's tariff confusion. He says this is the first crisis partly caused by irrational governments and that claiming clarity now is dishonest.
He rejects extremism on both sides. Anders criticises government's failure to regulate social media and says Americans have been let down by government. He wants reinvestment in education and accountability for lawmakers, and restates ICONIQ's commitment to racial justice and gender equality.
How ICONIQ Impact pools family capital
Matti came through education policy work in Burkina Faso and campaigns for contraception access in Kenya and Uganda.
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On this episode 3
Show 1
The COLAB model of collaborative funds became the genesis of ICONIQ Impact, which asks what many families can do together rather than what one can do alone.
Asked what 20 tech founder families could do about climate change, it built the first-of-its-kind $50m ocean climate collaborative with 12 families six months later.
A $10m refugee award drew five more families, and ICONIQ Impact has deployed over $500m since its 2019 founding.