Not many wealth managers can fathom affording their own $20 million house, much less two of them, but then again few wealth managers are as successful as Will Griffith and his San Francisco-based Iconiq Capital. Described by Forbes in 2014 as “an obscure Silicon Valley firm” that’s technically an ordinary registered investment advisory, the 10-year-old company has been transformed by its founders — Divesh Makan, Michael Anders, Chad Boeding and Griffith — into a highly exclusive tech mogul billionaires club that “operates as a cross between a family office and a venture capital fund.”
Today, Iconiq’s client list reads like a who’s-who of Silicon Valley greats. But their most famous client, and the key to their success, is Mark Zuckerberg, who met Makan in 2004 while Facebook was still in diapers. Zuckerberg gave fledgling Iconiq a big name in Silicon Valley, and the company’s client roster now includes Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Dustin Moskovitz, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Also now clients of Iconiq are folks outside tech’s inner circle — billionaire hedge funders David Bonderman, Henry Kravis, and Tiger Global Management’s Chase Coleman, all of whom sit on the company’s board of directors.
In recent years, Iconiq has increasingly begun acting more as a hybrid firm — focusing on venture capital investing while also still handling clients’ mundane day-to-day financial affairs. Its founders have invested in dozens of tech startups around the globe; earlier this year, the company launched a new European office. And in 2019, it began buying up thousands of rental apartments across the United States.
As of early 2021, Iconiq had more than $50 billion in assets under management, ranking the secretive firm as one of the country’s fastest venture capital/private equity success stories. And while it’s not clear exactly how much money has trickled down to the executive ranks, it’s certainly been kind to the net worth of cofounder Griffith. Back in May, the Stanford MBA and his longtime wife Calla paid exactly $20 million for an oceanfront house on Malibu’s exclusive Broad Beach, records reveal.
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