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The Silicon Valley Kingmaker You've Never Heard Of
Daily Grind for Friday, August 1: Tech's morning newsletter, featuring one headline, one page of a great book, and one question to start your day
Ben Putano
August 01, 2025
Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Grind for Friday, August 1.
Today’s headline is a culmination of stories that happen to revolve around one elusive investment firm: Iconiq Capital.
You probably haven’t heard of them, but you absolutely know their biggest investments—they were all in the news this week.
So who is Iconiq Capital, and how did they become Silicon Valley’s hidden kingmaker?
Let’s dig into it:
📰 One Headline: Iconiq Capital’s Very Good Week
Unless you’re a tech billionaire, you may have never heard of Iconiq Capital.
Founded in 2011 by three Morgan Stanley executives with ties to Silicon Valley and Hollywood celebrities, the wealth management firm has been intentionally quiet. They prefer to stay out of the spotlight, unlike some of their more recognizable clients like Mark Zuckerberg, and alleged clients like Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.
But this week, Iconiq couldn’t keep themselves out of the news.
First, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ramp, the AI finance startup, raised a massive $500 million Series E-2, which valued the company at $22.5 Billion.
The lead investor? Iconiq Capital.
Then, Anthropic—makers of the AI chatbot Claude—was purportedly ready to close a $5 billion round, which would value the startup at $170 billion.
Who’s leading the round? Iconiq.
And just yesterday, as the tech world celebrated the IPO of Figma and its good-guy founders, TechCrunch ran a story about a little known investor who wrote a seed check for Figma back in 2013.
That investor? Will Griffiths, partner at Iconiq Capital and the founder of its growth venture arm.
Many top tier VCs have name brands and well-known founders: Andreesen Horowitz, Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, Benchmark.
Even growth-stage specialists like Tiger Global and Softbank are known to most in the tech world.
Iconiq—and its founders—have opted to stay out of the headlines for over a decade, and only recently started to make limited appearances. Founder Divesh Makan sat for a profile in Fortune in 2024, and Michael Anders spoke on stage with Bloomberg in March of this year.
So who is Iconiq? And what are the aims of this deeply influential-yet-elusive firm?
Founded in 2011 with $80 Billion AUM
First, it’s important to understand how relatively new and HUGE Iconiq Capital is. Founded just in 2011 (compared to Tiger Global, which was founded in 2001), the firm claims to have $80 billion in assets under management (AUM).
That’s larger than all the largest VC firms, though Fortune reported that about $60 billion is part of their wealth management arm, and $20 billion is in venture. Still, their $20 billion of venture assets would put them at #8 on the largest VCs list.
Deep Silicon Valley Connections and Beyond
Some of the firm’s earliest and most influential clients are Mark Zuckerberg and Dave Goldberg, the late CEO of SurveyMonkey and husband to Sheryl Sandberg.
While most of its clients are unconfirmed, Fortune reported that it works with just 300 families, with the average client investing $250 million and having more than $1 billion in assets.
Iconiq recently made public its advisory council, which is a who’s who of business moguls:
Iconiq Started its Venture Capital arm in 2013
Incredibly, Will Griffiths invested in Figma before he had formally launched Iconiq Growth, the firm’s VC arm. Iconiq had participated in the occasional venture round on behalf of clients years prior, but they officially raised their first venture round in 2013.
Since then, Iconiq has primarily focused on growth-stage firms—Series B or later—with large bets on Snowflake (2017), Chime (2020), Calendly (2021), Robinhood (2021), and Anthropic’s Series C in 2023.
In total, Iconiq Growth has made 140 investments, 27 of which have IPO’d.
The firm has made only a few seed investments — just three according to Crunchbase, which doesn’t include their informal Figma check.
Top 10% Venture Firm with a Massive War Chest
Though they don’t disclose their returns, Iconiq has reportedly been a top venture firm since its inception.
Iconiq declined to disclose performance figures for its investments with Fortune. But a person familiar with the firm’s performance, who asked to speak anonymously because the information is not public, shared the returns of the firm’s first four funds. Its first fund in 2013 returned net multiples of 2.7 times the invested capital; the 2014 fund did 5.5 times; the 2017 fund did 5.4 times; and the 2019 fund has so far returned 1.9 times on its investments. These are high marks: All of these funds are in the top quartile of global venture capital firms, and the 2014 and 2017 funds are in the top 10%, according to annual benchmark data from PitchBook.
On the strength of those returns, Iconiq raised its 7th Fund in May 2024—a $5.75 Billion vehicle aimed at AI.
Centers of Influence
While little is known about the inner workings of Iconiq, their influence is undeniable. They have intentionally put themselves at the center of the technology circle of power and work to cultivate relationships within its community. From Fortune:
Iconiq hosts frequent dinners—around a couple hundred a year—to bring people together in smaller, more intimate settings at Makan’s house or at restaurants, wineries, or event spaces worldwide. But there are also more formal events and gatherings like its flagship Ideas Conference and CEO retreats, organized by Iconiq’s specific events and content team called Iconiq Studio. Councils set up by the firm advise founders and help Iconiq’s partners with their due diligence when thinking about investing in a company. One example is its health care council, which includes former Johnson & Johnson CEO (and now Iconiq Growth general partner) Alex Gorsky and former Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove.
All in on AI — and Betting on Anthropic
According to Anders, in his talk with Bloomberg, Iconiq is pushing all of its portfolio companies to adopt AI as rapidly as possible. “We have an AI report card that we go through with each of one of companies,” he said.
Most of the firm’s portfolio is made of Enterprise SaaS businesses, all of which have shifted their technology focus to AI, including Figma.
Iconiq Growth is heavily focused on AI-native companies with its latest fund, but Anders said they are deeply concerned with “picking the winners.”
Their past and potential future investments in Anthropic are a strong signal. They have picked a horse in the AI wars, and not necessarily the current leader (OpenAI just announced a new $8.3 billion round at a $300 billion valuation.)
But given their enterprise SaaS DNA, their bet on Anthropic makes sense. Anthropic is fundamentally a B2B company, and many enterprises prefer its models over rivals.
Will Iconiq be in the spotlight more moving forward? It’s tough to say. According to Makan, they started their soft media push because their clients asked them to. Frank Slootman, the former CEO of Snowflake, however, prefers the company keeps quiet. “Most of us like that—because we have no need for this to be a high-profile thing,” he told Fortune.
While they may not show up in the news, you can bet Iconiq will be on plenty of term sheets moving forward. Keep your Google Alerts on, it may be the only way to catch them.
🔗 A Few Good Links
📚 One Page: Influence by Robert Cialdini
Iconiq draws its power and influence from its extremely high-end network, and it works very hard to not only cultivate but support its community.
In many ways, Iconiq employs the Rule of Reciprocation from Robert Cialdini’s classic behavioral psychology book, Influence. From Fortune:
But what the partners hope really sets them apart from other VCs is what they refer to as “uncommon care,” or when their investors have gone beyond what’s typical for their jobs. General partner Matt Jacobson said the firm had orchestrated getting founders’ family members out of floods and other natural disasters, for example, and that the firm is prepared to offer “any resource possible at our disposal” when necessary. “Nothing is too much to ask of them,” Snowflake’s Slootman says.
Here’s the opening page from Chapter 2: Reciprocation:
Let not thine hand be stretched out to receive and drawn back when thou shouldest repay.
— Ecclesiasticus 4:30–31
Several years ago, a university professor tried a little experiment. He sent Christmas cards to a sample of perfect strangers. Although he expected some reaction, the response he received was amazing—holiday cards addressed to him came pouring back from people who had neither met nor heard of him. The great majority of those who returned cards never inquired into the identity of the unknown professor. They received his holiday greeting card, click, and run, they mechanically sent one in return.
While small in scope, the study shows the action of one of the most potent of the levers of influence around us—the rule of reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay what another person has provided us. If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours. Reciprocated greeting cards, birthday gifts, and party invitations may seem like weak evidence of the rule’s force. Don’t be fooled; it can prompt change in sizable behaviors. Researchers working with charity fundraisers in the United Kingdom approached investment bankers as they came to work and asked for a large charitable donation—a full day’s salary, amounting to over a thousand dollars in some cases. Remarkably, if the request was preceded by a gift of a small packet of sweets, contributions more than doubled.
The rule extends even to national conduct. The Magna Carta of 1215 employed it to define how, at the outbreak of a war, countries should treat merchants from the enemy nation: “If our men are safe there, the others should be safe in our land.” By virtue of the reciprocity rule, then, we are obligated to the future repayment of favors, gifts, invitations, friendly actions, and the like. So typical is it for indebtedness to accompany the receipt of such things that a phrase such as “much obliged” has become a synonym for “thank you” not only in the English language but in other languages as well (such as with the Portuguese term obrigado). The future reach of the obligation is nicely connoted in a Japanese word for thank you, sumimasen, which, in its literal form, means “this will not end.”
An impressive aspect of reciprocation is its pervasiveness in human culture. It is so widespread that Alvin Gouldner, along with other sociologists, reports that all human societies subscribe to the rule. Within each society, it seems pervasive also, permeating exchanges of every kind. Indeed, it may well be that a developed system of indebtedness flowing from the rule of reciprocation is a unique property of human culture.
Iconiq has made a business of doing good deeds for powerful people, thus building its influence and power.
❓ One Question: Does such an influential firm have a public obligation to be more forthright?
Iconiq is one of the most influential firms in the world—that most people have never heard of.
Our question today isn’t the introspective type, but a conversation starter:
Does Iconiq have an obligation to the public to be more forthright with its investments and work?
And as a follow up: What good would it do Iconiq to be more in the spotlight? On the other hand, what harm could it cause?
🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback:
That’s it for first FULL month of The Daily Grind!
Yesterday’s newsletter was quietly our 20th edition, a milestone that is feels surprisingly meaningful. In the past, I’d be lucky to write 20 newsletters in a year.
Plus, we've had 272 people read at least one newsletter this week. I’m so thankful for everyone who continues opening up these emails. I’d love to hear WHY you keep coming back.
Talk to you next week!
Cheers,
Ben