Billion Dollar Moves™ with Sarah Chen-Spellings | Global Venture Capital
00:27:02 · Matti
[00:27:02] S2: I really started my career in poverty advocacy work, grassroots poverty advocacy, thinking about how we can encourage the public to leverage their voice to actually shift policy around extreme poverty. I spent time in the field in Burkina Faso working on education policy in Kenya and Uganda working on campaigning for greater access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, to basic contraception for women and girls. And once I started that work, realized just the sheer need for folks to dedicate their lives to this space, which I never thought I would be, but really figuring out how can a global investment firm that works to support some of the world's smartest tech founders, how can we leverage that for greater impact at scale and really built a platform for large scale collaborative philanthropy. 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? Suddenly, you've got 12 families raising their hand and saying, hey, we do want to work on the ocean climate nexus together and what could that look like? And that's a real example. Six months later, we were able to build the first of its kind $50,000,000 ocean climate collaborative, leveraging some of the smartest people in the space, people who dedicate their lives to shipping decarbonization or changing the alkalinity of the ocean to make it absorb more carbon. And so by both encouraging co funding and partnering with the folks closest to the issues, it just accelerates not only your giving, but it accelerates your learning. And so by the end of it, you've got a crash course in ocean climate change, ocean climate giving, and you've met peers that you trust, and you ultimately know how to be more strategic in your giving moving forward because you've leveraged a really smart team and a strategy that works. Because if you do it alone, it continues to be scary. But if you see your friend that you trust and who you're maybe on a board together, maybe you've worked together doing something really big and impactful, and I'll give you a really specific example, one of our first efforts was a $10,000,000 refugee award, finding like the best refugee resettlement organizations around the world, and it started with one family.
00:28:57 · Matti, Sarah Chen-Spellings, Sarah Chen-Spellings
We did this beautiful call with the family and the wife had spent time in a refugee camp in her childhood, and we invited 20 families to listen in. By the end of the call, we actually had five other families so inspired that they joined, and it was really easy for them to join, and it was easy for them to join at scale because they heard from a trusted source. They understood the process was fair in terms of finding these exceptional organizations, and it just made it feel a little bit less scary because they were doing it alongside a friend. And so that was really the genesis of the COLAB model, which is our collaborative funds, which is at the most basic level, very simple. [00:29:31] S3: Since its founding in 2019, ICONIQ Impact has deployed over $500,000,000, and the results have been nothing short of transformative. [00:29:40] S2: We actually had an incredible organization write to us that we funded doing education in Tanzania, and they said, Thank you so much for your unrestricted grant. For the first time in twenty years, we were able to buy tables and chairs to hold our meetings on tables and chairs instead of on the floor, right? And you hear that and you think, Oh yes, that makes sense. You need to fund operations for for an organization. And it was just one of those examples of, you know, you do need to really embrace an approach to say, if I'm gonna fund an organization, I wanna trust the leadership. Wanna trust their vision. Yeah. And I wanna trust them to know what's right. [00:30:13] S1: How is ICONIQ Impact going to approach things differently?
00:30:13 · Sarah Chen-Spellings, Michael Anders, Sarah Chen-Spellings
[00:30:13] S1: How is ICONIQ Impact going to approach things differently? [00:30:16] S0: It was an idea that we had because we thought silos are bad. Silos create ego. Silos create inefficiency. And so the first premise is how can a group of really smart people who share an interest... This is not to say everyone has to care about ocean health or gender equality, but those that do shouldn't be trying to tackle these issues from scratch and on their own. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think ICONIQ really has an opportunity and a moral responsibility to bring our client base around a table and talk about existing solutions that work and how we're gonna have a coordinated effort to drive real lasting change. The answers are there. The capital is there. It's unlocking the capital to the existing solutions and answers in a really timely manner. [00:31:06] S3: ICONIQ Impact isn't just another philanthropic arm. It's a rethink of capital's role in healing the world. But behind every billion dollar move is a cost. For Mike, building ICONIQ wasn't just a professional journey. It was a deeply personal one. [00:31:20] S1: What do they need to know about your journey? Like, I'm talking good, bad, ugly because you've given me a lot of good PR stuff.
00:31:20 · Sarah Chen-Spellings, Michael Anders
[00:31:20] S1: What do they need to know about your journey? Like, I'm talking good, bad, ugly because you've given me a lot of good PR stuff. [00:31:26] S0: It is really difficult to grind it out for twenty years. Right? I mean, I love my ex wife, but I lost my marriage along the way. Right? Like, I put everything into this business, and it cost me a lot. And I'm so blessed to have a relationship with her still and I have an amazing relation with my kids. Mhmm. But this was my life and I did it with people I love within the company and I did it with clients I love and so I have no regrets but it is not for the faint of heart and you know, our first office space was above Kokkari in San Francisco. And while I love Greek food, like, smelling like Greek food every day, like, you know, that was that was not easy either. But it has been the journey of a lifetime, and I think what I'm probably most proud of is that every single day, we're asking ourselves how can we be better. We just came from our off-site a couple days ago and the level of energy and the level of curiosity and the competitive desire to be better hasn't changed at all since day one. And so you gotta have fire, you gotta have drive, you gotta have conviction. And you know, when you're small and starting on some cases, it's easier. Now, people know ICONIQ. We've lost a lot of friends, you know, to competitive firms, and that just means that you gotta work even harder.
00:32:45 · Sarah Chen-Spellings
[00:32:45] S3: From being scarred by Wall Street to transforming it from the inside, from the first coffee with Divesh to managing billions of dollars in capital for tech's most iconic names from wealth to impact. Michael Anders is showing us that it's not about just how much capital you raise, it's about how deeply you care about what you do with it. Thanks for tuning in to Billion Dollar Moves. If you found value in today's conversation, share it with a fellow builder and funder, and don't forget to check out our show notes for more on ICONIQ Impact's collab model. Until next time, keep moving with capital and conviction and making your own version of billion dollar moves. My name is Sarah Chen-Spellings signing off.