Episode 37: Michael Anders - Founding Partner of ICONIQ Capital

0:00This week on Generating Alpha, I'm joined by Mike Anders, one of the most influential forces in global finance and technology investing today. As a founding partner at Iconic Capital, Mike has helped steward the wealth of Silicon Valley's most prominent founders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey, and other transformative entrepreneurs. Under his guidance, Iconic has grown into a powerhouse managing over$100 billion, blending family office, venture capital, and philanthropy into a single, uniquely impactful platform. Michael's story begins far from Wall Street or Sand Hill Road.

0:34The son of two professors, he grew up between Palo Alto and Providence, absorbing lessons on discipline, curiosity, and long-term thinking. Those early influences shaped the investor and advisor he has become, one who bridges worlds between academic rigor, deep personal trust, and high-stakes capital allocation. In this episode, we'll dive into Michael's upbringing and the values that shaped him, how Iconic became a behind-the-scenes giant backing some of the world's most influential companies and his perspective on trust, discretion, and legacy in the modern age of wealth management. If you enjoy this episode, please follow the podcast and rate it a five stars on Spotify, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and share it with anyone who you think might find it valuable.

1:12I really enjoy talking to Mike on this episode, and I hope you guys enjoy listening. Thank you. Thank you, Mike, for joining me. I really appreciate it. My pleasure, Amir. Thank you for having me. So I want to start where I always do, at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your childhood and upbringing? And you had two professors as parents, if I'm correct. You grew up between Palo Alto and Providence and Rhode Island. What was your childhood like? And what were the conversations around the dinner table like growing up? So I think we all have interesting childhoods, and they shape us, obviously, but in many ways, to be who we are today.

1:51I would say my childhood was not as glamorous as you might think. I was born in Buffalo, New York, but very quickly, I think at age one and a half, moved to Palo Alto. Both my parents were professors. My mom was in medical school at Stanford. My dad was the chair of psychiatry at Stanford. And so at a very, very young age, I ended up living on the Stanford campus. And then without much of a say, when I was 13, my parents both got job offers at Brown University. And so they decided to leave Stanford and move to Providence, Rhode Island. And, you know, I think there was a fair amount of pressure, not necessarily to be a doctor per se, but to be smart, to be successful.

2:46And I think there was also a lot of personal issues going on at home that left me sort of feeling like it was going to be hard to live up to their expectations. And at the same time, I'm not sure how involved on a day-to-day basis they were in my early childhood. And so I kind of felt alone a lot as a kid. I was an only child for eight years. And then I had a brother come into the mix. And then another brother come into the mix three years after that. So I'm eight and 11 years younger than my brothers. And I think a lot of my childhood was sort of looking towards adulthood, but not necessarily being connected to it, meaning dinner table conversations were largely academic.

3:38They were about science. They were about psychology or psychiatry and neurology. They were a lot about politics. I don't remember specifics, but I was born in 1972. There was the Vietnam War. There was Nixon. There was Watergate. There was all these things that were sort of hangovers. Politics was a big thing. My dad I had marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was at Woodstock. And so activism was a big part of the dinner table conversation, so to speak. When I was seven, actually, or eight, my parents decided to take a sabbatical from Stanford. They went and taught in London at a medical school.

4:19And so I spent second grade in Dulwich Village. I had to wear a jacket and a tie to school. And so, you know, there were so many amazing experiences. and I was privy to so many amazing conversations, but I don't necessarily know where I was part of them. And so there was a loneliness to my childhood, but also a privilege to it without a doubt. And so, yeah, that's pretty much my background. Happy to dive into any of it more specifically, but at a high level, that was sort of where I fell. In all the topics of the conversation of politics around the dinner table, one day you were scrolling through kind of the channels on TV and you came across C-SPAN, you came across what you described as this very charismatic guy by the name of Bill Clinton, and you kind of call him your first row model.

5:04Can you tell me about what Bill Clinton meant to you? What was it about him that stood out to you? I think without sounding too sappy, Bill Clinton represented a few things. First of all, he was sort of a continuation of the activism that my parents embodied and instilled in me, right? Bill Clinton was, if he wasn't at Woodstock, he was certainly sort of aware and around Woodstock. And if he wasn't marching with Martin Luther King, he would have been. So I think Bill Clinton really embodied a lot of the values that my parents shared with me at a very, very young age. I think for me, I just felt pretty inadequate as a child.

5:53And so I felt like the way I could get attention from my parents was actually not getting good grades. So I didn't. And it was actually raising hell. So I did. And I'm not proud to say, but I was not a great student in middle school, not a great student in high school. In fact, I'm not sure I would have gotten into college if it wasn't an ability to play soccer and have been recruited to play soccer for university. And so I kind of got to college sort of feeling quite low, academically challenged, socially strong, but knowing that it was coming at the cost of really a conflict within who I was, I could be.

6:44I always felt like I could do better. I could be someone better. And so as you probably have heard me say somewhere, it was quite random, but I was at a very low spot. I mean, I was literally channel surfing, right? I mean, channel surfing pretty much epitomizes like getting to C-SPAN. And like, I mean, anyone who's on C-SPAN at 17 or 18 or 19, however old I was, there you are really channel surfing. but as like luck would have it it was at this moment where I knew I was I could be better I knew I wasn't living up to anything close to my potential and here on C-SPAN was this incredible young energetic charismatic governor of Arkansas and I just happened to hit the channel when he was like opening his mouth to speak.

7:40And he just was everything that came out of it kind of was mesmerizing and really echoed a lot of what my parents had espoused during my childhood. And so I very quickly and not from lots of comparing and contrasting, sort of gravitated to this very motivational, inspirational figure. And then he was, I think, also not too long after announcing, you know, Al Gore as his vice president. And it was sort of these two guys that would jog and they would talk about climate change and they would talk about, you know, values. And so that was a monumental moment for me. I probably didn't fully appreciate it at that time, But for other coincidental and not coincidental reasons, it wasn't long after when I sort of hit rock bottom at that moment of my life and got interested in a few things, partly through luck, that really turned me into a direction that lifted me up.

8:56And again, around this same period of time from witnessing Bill Clinton on TV to getting introduced to the debate team in college to being cajoled to run for president of the student body at the University of Rhode Island and winning to going and doing an internship for then congressman, now U.S. Senator Jack Reed. All of these things happen probably within a 24-month period of time for a guy who didn't even know where the library was his whole first year of college to then graduating, I think, with like a 3.4, 3.5 GPA and a double major and having done these internships and experiences and president of the student body.

9:43it was a very transformative period of time and a lot of lucky breaks a lot of grit but also it pays the channel surf from time to time and it's fascinating because looking back you might think you know what would have happened if I didn't go on the channel go and see span when Bill Clinton was speaking at that time you know who knows and you interned for Congressman Jack between your junior and senior year of college, if I'm correct, and congressman, now senator. And he gave you the advice to gain some experience out of politics if you wanted to go into politics. And that kind of got you to go to Wall Street.

10:19So my question is, how did it lead you to Wall Street? And one of your first experiences in Wall Street, which kind of was the starting point or led to your eventual interest in starting of Iconic, was commercial donor advice funds. So how did you get to Wall Street? What led you to it? And how did you come across commercial donor advised funds? Yeah, I love these questions. So I don't remember the year. I think it was 1993 or 1994. 1994, I went down to Washington, D.C. I had been awarded an opportunity to work for free for then Congressman Jack Reed. I I bunked up with a friend of a friend of mine in Foggy Bottom in Washington, D.C., and it was a very cheap rent for me.

11:08I was unpaid working for the senator or congressman and ended up working for a restaurant called Planet Hollywood at night to pay the bills. And I remember every morning getting up extra early and I would jog from Foggy Bottom around the White House trying to run into Bill Clinton. and Al Gore jogging. That was a big thing they used to do is their jogging cade. And then I would, you know, head to Capitol Hill. I would work for the congressman. I was writing position papers. I was supporting the legislative affairs folks. I was so interested in it. I worked pretty hard, sat in hearings, took notes, did whatever was asked of me in the office.

11:50And then I would leave after a full day and go work so I could afford the minimal rent that I had in D.C. And after the end of the summer, having had, you know, very, very little experience with the congressmen, but having been invited to a lot of, you know, the the congressional staff, you know, meet and greets where I met a lot of dignitaries, a lot of other congressmen, senators, cabinet members, I did get this moment with Congressman Reed where he asked, what did I want to do? And I remember saying to him at the time that I really believe in public service. I want to be him someday. And I remember him telling me that I should strive for it, that I have good energy, that I worked really hard and that I clearly care about people and the issues.

12:41But his advice, if I asked for it, was don't go into politics right away. Go back to your senior year of college. Take as many econ classes as you can, as many accounting classes, as many finance planning classes. Go to Wall Street, get a job on Wall Street, do the best I can to absorb and learn as much as I can about the economy, the private sector, investing, his advice, if I don't want to put words in his mouth, but something along the lines of, if I start in politics out of college, I really won't know anything and I'll never get out. But if I go into the private sector and I work in the private sector and I learn about investing in the economy, I'll be a much more valuable public official because I will have worked and learned something of value.

13:39So that was always the plan. And I had really no support in the form of perspective from my parents because they were academics and they didn't understand Wall Street. They didn't understand investment banking. They didn't understand anything about the journey I was about to embark on. And I didn't really have anybody in my orbit that could advise me. So I kind of went to the alumni network before I graduated from college. And as luck would have it, I ended up getting a job at Fidelity Investments. And I remember after graduation, on graduation day, catching a train in Amtrak to Penn Station, moving into an apartment that I had found, sharing it with two roommates who I didn't know right behind Lincoln Center.

14:30And I think I was starting work the next Monday. And, you know, I was what they called an equity analyst. It was sort of a two-year program. It was actually much more operational and administrative than I expected or understood or knew. And I really quickly came to realize that one, this was not a job that played to my strengths. Two, it was a job, I was not learning the things I personally wanted to learn. And so I actually immediately began looking up and out. I did a program at Columbia for a year that was part of the School of Public Affairs, but I was also taking business classes that could have applied to a business school if I wanted to get my MBA.

15:23And I think the combination of spending the two years in New York City, working at Fidelity, thinking, learning more from building my own network and learning more about what it meant to, quote unquote, be on Wall Street and taking some classes at Columbia, really continued to push me towards the things I didn't want to do versus the things I wanted to do. very long story short, I always wanted to live abroad. I always had a sort of affinity to Paris and France because my parents were sort of Francophiles. And I ended up deciding not to go get my MBA or my law degree, two things I had been considering, and instead move to France, see if I could land on my feet there, see if I could even figure out a way to learn the language and get a job.

16:16Anyway, I ended up spending two years in France, ended up getting a job in investment banking, working for Société Générale. That was really interesting because that was when they were considering unifying the currencies throughout Europe into one, the euro. And it was also at a time when there was a lot of turmoil in the market with the collapse of long-term capital management, the Russian debt crisis, the Asian currency crisis. There's a lot of things going on and I ended up sort of being right at the epicenter of it and it was an incredible chance to learn. I'll spare you lots of details in that, but a few moves later, I ended up starting a company that was building commercial donor advised funds.

17:02One of the things I left out, which is actually not insignificant, is while donor advised funds have been around for 60, 70 years out of community foundations and Jewish federations, Fidelity Investments was actually the first firm, commercial firm, to launch a donor advised fund. And actually to the uproar of traditional community foundation donor advised funds that didn't understand how could Fidelity, a for-profit, a very for-profitable company, get into the business of donor advised funds. And while I had nothing to do with the launch of Fidelity's charitable gift fund, I was at Fidelity and I was aware of it and I thought it was very interesting.

17:49Fast forward five, six years, I just found myself at a moment when I met a fellow entrepreneur. We shared this idea and we created a company to basically build the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, the product at least, but to white label it for all the big private client firms like Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Northern Trust, Credit Suisse. back in the day, Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. And the idea was that these were much more traditional platforms with high net worth individuals. And they should each be having one of these private label donor advice fund solutions for their clients.

18:40And so that's how I ultimately made my road into creating this company, which ultimately took off. And then sort of came crashing down. We sold it for peanuts. And I ended up going to Fidelity and co-heading kind of their charitable services group, which was a whole nother chapter in my life and led to some amazing other things. But that's sort of the full story of politics and public service to donor advised funds. And I want to kind of set the stage for Iconic here. You've said that before starting Iconic, you were scarred by the wealth management industry to an extent. What left that impression for you?

19:27So no surprise. The previous experience really is what created an awareness of some of the problems of the wealth management industry. So while Fidelity and their charitable gift fund was raising billions and billions and billions of charitable dollars into their charitable fund, most of those dollars were coming from ultra high net worth clients of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, et cetera. So the idea for me to create a competitive product and white label it for these big firms that naturally should be marketing this product to their high net worth individuals really made sense. And as we signed up almost every single one of these clients, I thought the business was going to be a huge success.

20:31It ultimately failed because while we had all these clients, which I thought would be the hard part, the really hard part was getting the attention of the wealth managers. Their job is to sell stocks and bonds and funds. They understand how to do that, and they get paid a lot of money to do that. And here was this little old charitable product that was cute, but didn't really pay them, had the complexity of understanding trust and estate, philanthropy, talking to clients about their emotions and what they cared about. And so sadly, my company failed because the product basically sat on a shelf and collected dust at JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, Northern Trust, et cetera.

21:25And it was there that I saw the wealth management industry and really the relationship managers on these platforms as more interested in selling hedge funds that pay them lots of money than engaging their clients in a conversation about impact and making the world better. Not true of everybody, but at least back then, generally true of the industry. and um and i just it left a scar and so that was that was the beginning of my understanding of what felt broken to me and around that time a lot of your clients are saying you should meet this guy named dvesh makin and you eventually go and have a coffee with him and you describe it as love at first sight what was it about that meeting that convinced you that he was the right person to build with and we're kind of this what was the start to iconic well where did the idea come from Yeah, so it is true that a handful of people, some of them were sort of friends of ours and intermediaries and some clients did continue to say, you got to meet this guy, Devesh.

22:35And my first impulse was, thanks, but no thanks. I'm done with anyone who's a wealth manager at a wealth management firm. And the pushback was always, now this guy's different, this guy's special. So given we both worked with similar types of clients, but did two very different things for them, we agreed it was we should go for a coffee. And within a very quick moment, he understood that I had a pretty interesting background. I had spent half of my career either in investing, investment banking, in and around capital markets, or advising very affluent individuals on their philanthropy, and had an understanding of trust and estate and tax and philanthropy, and some of the softer issues, which are really important to ultra high net worth individuals.

23:32And so he quickly sort of said, what are you doing at Fidelity Charitable Services? Why don't you come join me at Goldman? And I was immediately torn because in my mind, there was no way I was going to go into the wealth management industry and certainly at one of these firms that I saw as challenged. And on the other hand, there was this wildly intelligent, charismatic, entrepreneurial mind that was already thinking about building the business differently than most people would do. And so that conversation did go on for a long time. I would continue to show up skeptical and leave inspired. And after some period of time, I agreed to join Devash because he really was a force of nature, very, very talented, very smart.

24:42and he had a real love for his clients that was unique and real and something that I shared with him in terms of how I really admire people and wanted to serve people. And I want to talk a little bit about what Iconic is now, but before we get there, what do you think is necessary for me and my listeners to understand about the building of Iconic all the way from when you started it to today to kind of just get a sense of what it is, what the core principles are, what the tenets are. Yeah. So I think the core tenets of Iconic

25:24are listen more than you talk, even though I'm doing a lot of talking right now.

25:32Build genuine, lasting relationships, not with some transaction in mind, but because you genuinely care about the human and you want to help them in any way you can. Create goodwill, not for the sake of it, but because you genuinely want people to live a happier, healthier life and you want to create this goodwill. and always be learning. I think generally speaking, a lot of industries, certainly wealth management can be a mile wide, but an inch deep. And one of the things that was a tenant for us was go deep and go wide. If you're not learning, you should quit. And being an inch deep is you become a commodity and you become transactional.

26:34And so that was, those are the sort of the tenants of building Iconic. And it wasn't something we wrote down. It just was who we were. And I think in the end of this long party, I think it will go down that, well, Devesh and I have many strengths and weaknesses and differences. I think those core tenants are foundational in our DNA. That was sort of an unwritten thing. It just was. And I think that's very core to who Iconic is. And Iconic now manages over$100 billion, yet remains relatively unknown and under the radar outside of the world of finance. And I love the analogy, describe it as, as a caddy to a golfer.

27:13Can you kind of just expand on that and tell my listeners a little bit about that? Yeah. I mean, I think taking one step back and going back to one of our early tenants, we understood from the very beginning and we were really kids. We didn't know anything and it wasn't about what schools we went to and what grades we got. Life is also about real experiences, running businesses, being exposed to volatility and facing adversity. And in our lives, we had some of that, but not nearly as much as folks that are 10, 20, 30 years older than us and running things. So for us in the beginning, it was less about how much wealth someone had or didn't have.

28:06It was really about who they were and what they ran and what could we learn from them by listening to them. And if we could curate a group of clients founders and CEOs, star athletes, star entertainers, and we could spend our time listening to this diverse group of thought leaders, the collective wisdom of these clients who sat around the proverbial living room table would really help us form a view of the world. And because we were managing everybody's wealth, their incentive was to share the whole truth and nothing but the truth with us. But it was the aggregate of all this wisdom versus any one individual that helped us really think about where the world was and where it was going.

28:58And similarly, each of these folks, because they were well known and ran something, their brands collectively opened up a lot of interesting, unique investment doors for us. So there was always a focus on creating and curating an exceptional network of clients who we worked for. And because the job is really intimate and we end up having some incredibly exciting but also hard conversations over the course of these relationships, there's a level of trust that's built up that's incredibly intimate and vulnerable. but we understood from the beginning that no matter how close these relationships became there was a client and we served the client and these clients were mostly incredibly well known and so if they were the professional golfers if they were the tiger woods we wanted to always remind ourselves we were the caddy and we should be anonymous we should be below the radar and that would allow us to operate on their behalf more effectively.

30:18And how do you actually curate that kind of this group and this collective intelligence, especially at this very, very early stages where when you guys started, a lot of these people who were your clients weren't necessarily who they are today. So how did you kind of curate those? How did you go about finding your clients and picking your clients and just building this incredible network that would eventually become something what Iconic is today? Yeah. So I have to be clear, there has been an enormous amount of luck in the building of Iconic. We've worked hard. We've worked honestly. We've tried to work diligently and create goodwill.

30:56And we genuinely care. So we can take some credit for a few things. But the amount of luck over the course of the 20-year arc is undeniable. And so those early clients helped really shape the vision. And they also helped us execute upon the vision because not only were they themselves, as luck would have it, CEOs who became even more well-known, they knew lots of other CEOs. And then I think there was also an opportunity for us at the very beginning to really bet on founders who were not well known at the time, who didn't actually have any money at the time. But when you got introduced to them and someone really smart and reputable and in the know suggested we meet this founder or that founder because of what they were building, even if we didn't see the vision of what this particular founder or that founder was building, we did feel their ambition.

32:10We felt their drive. And so also from almost the very beginning at Iconic, we did place some bets. And our bets were not investments of capital. They were investments of time. And so for some of these founders, some of whom are some of our most famous clients, there were years and years of pro bono work. And it wasn't because we knew these companies would be huge. It was because they had vision and drive and we liked them. And there was a genuine sense of purpose to want to help them. And the things that they really were not steeped in knowledge with trust, estate, tax planning, we actually knew a lot about.

33:03And those were the things that maybe they didn't even want to talk about, but they really needed to talk about. Because if these companies worked out, there would be a lot of optimization around their equity ownership that would be meaningful. And so the combination of having a few older established CEOs that were family relationships or relationships we were lucky enough to make and who helped shape this vision, coupled with betting on a few folks, that is ultimately what sort of made Iconic's first chapter. And then we did sort of take that luck and run with it. And we spent a lot of time and still do today looking at sort of the world and understanding from our own client base the direction of where the world is going.