Billion Dollar Moves™ with Sarah Chen-Spellings | Global Venture Capital
00:00:00 · Michael Anders, Sarah Chen-Spellings, Matti
[00:00:00] S0: Candidly, I had been sort of scarred by the wealth management industry. I've been wildly underimpressed by it. Even though ICONIQ is just thirteen years old, the work that went into building ICONIQ preceded our first day as ICONIQ by almost ten years. We had done a few one off consumer direct investments. Alibaba, jd.com, our clients became public company CEOs. They were no longer allowed to opt in to a direct investment that they wanted to do, so we raised a fund. It allowed us to find companies like IBM, ServiceTitan, Procore. The list goes on and on and on. [00:00:45] S1: You really were ahead of the curve compared to... I mean, Lightspeed is now RIA. General Catalyst stopped calling themselves a venture firm and even bought a hospital. You almost did what they are now doing, where you've built the family office relationships, managed the money, built the growth firm, impact. How is ICONIQ Impact going to approach things differently? [00:01:07] S2: Instead of thinking about what can you as an individual family or couple do for climate change, what could 20 tech founder families do for climate change? Six months later, we were able to build the first of its kind $50,000,000 ocean climate collaborative. [00:01:20] S1: The emasculation of what feels like America's culture and how it needs to revert. [00:01:25] S0: We're in this game of pinball. We are in a culture of extremism on both sides. [00:01:31] S1: I'm talking good, bad, ugly because you've given me a lot of good PR stuff. [00:01:34] S0: We're being honest.
00:01:34 · Michael Anders, Sarah Chen-Spellings, Sarah Chen-Spellings
[00:01:34] S0: We're being honest. [00:01:37] S3: You won't find them humble bragging or causing a stir on x, but behind some of the biggest tech fortunes in the world, there's ICONIQ. Quite by design, ICONIQ Capital manages the wealth of Silicon Valley's elite. With over $80,000,000,000 under management, they built a modern financial empire, part family office, part venture powerhouse, part philanthropic force. I spent the day with ICONIQ co founder Mike Anders, someone rarely in the spotlight, yet deeply trusted by the world's most powerful builders to steward not just their money, but their legacies. Let's get into it. [00:02:12] S1: Mike Anders. Mike Anders, the man behind the ICONIQ Firm that we've heard representing amazing tech founders, and you are now helping them steward their money, steward their impact, scale their impact and do so much more. What do we need to know about your upbringing to understand the leader we have here today?
00:02:32 · Michael Anders
[00:02:32] S0: I'm the son of two professors. My parents taught in the medical school at Stanford and the medical school at Brown. While I was born in New York, I quickly, without much of a say, moved to Palo Alto, California. My parents taught at Stanford until I was 12 or 13 years old. And then with even less of a say, they moved to Providence, Rhode Island at... To Brown University. My mom was first year medical student. I made the front page of the papers because I was born her first year of medical school, and she didn't miss a class. And my dad had marched with Martin Luther King in the, you know, sixties as well. So I grew up with the values of fairness, equality, decency, and a deep belief in education. Even though I wasn't a great student, if we're being honest, it wasn't until a very random moment, which I can remember as if it was yesterday. I was bored and disinterested and channel surfing, and I saw on the screen of C SPAN this unbelievable, charismatic candidate for president of The United States named Bill Clinton, and he was announcing his candidacy. I was so inspired by this guy's vision and his ability to articulate the vision. I was like, I wonder if I should do something in public service. And one of the things that I got was an opportunity to work for a summer in between my junior and senior year for then US congressman, now a US senator named Jack Reed from Rhode Island. He gave me the advice. I was 20 years old that if if I really wanted to go into politics and be a public servant, which he believed I would be good at, that I should start outside of politics. You'll actually have some worldly experience that would be relevant, make you a better lawmaker. And the day of graduation, I was on an Amtrak train in New York City.
00:04:25 · Sarah Chen-Spellings
[00:04:25] S3: That advice would take him to Wall Street. But it wouldn't be long before Mike realized he needed something more. What began as a pragmatic detour soon turned into a personal reckoning. Inside the glass towers of New York Finance, Mike found success, but also disillusionment.
00:04:41 · Michael Anders
[00:04:41] S0: So my first job at Fidelity Investments, even though I had nothing to do with it, Fidelity had just rolled out the first commercial donor advised fund. And I was really amazed by it. It seemed like such a clever, impactful idea. Fast forward a few years, I started a company that was building these donor advised funds for all the large financial service firms that frankly should be offering philanthropy to their clients, but weren't. And when I dug into it a little bit more, I realized it's really cumbersome to set up. It's not the core competence of any big bank. And so we created this company that would provide a white labeled outsourced turnkey charitable product that JPMorgan could brand and use JPMorgan asset management, but market to their own client base. Long story, very short and sad, the company did sign up all these major banks as clients, but never really got off the ground in terms of the private client advisors marketing the product to their high net worth clients. It just didn't pay the brokers enough. It wasn't in their core understanding or competence. And so the products all sort of sat on the shelf while Fidelity continued to raise billions and billions and billions of dollars, largely from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs clients. And then we ended up selling that company for peanuts.
00:06:04 · Sarah Chen-Spellings, Michael Anders
[00:06:04] S1: A quick note. Donor Advised Funds, or DAVs, are like charitable savings accounts. You get a tax write off now and direct grants to charities over time without the hassle of a private foundation. In 2023, Dives held over $250,000,000,000 Fidelity had the first mover advantage, raising billions. Mike's company tried to white label dApps for big banks, but it never took off. Why? Brokers didn't push what didn't pay them. DApps have lower fees and assets leave brokers AUM, reducing how they get paid. [00:06:37] S0: And I went to Fidelity to their charitable services group and led up kind of the fundraising efforts for Fidelity's charitable platform, which also included a pooled income fund and an outsourced foundation product. In that role, I started meeting some very affluent individuals, all of whom were very eager to talk about their philanthropy. And, occasionally, one of these individuals or folks around the ecosystem would bring up this guy, Divesh Makan. And candidly, I had been sort of scarred by the wealth management industry. I've been wildly under impressed by it. And so the idea of joining a wealth management platform was really uninteresting for me at the time. But so many interesting people and smart people and people I admired so much kept telling me I had to meet this guy, Divesh. And so in 2005, Divesh and I went for our first cup of coffee, and it was really love at first sight.