Inside one of Silicon Valley's most mysterious venture capital funds

Iconiq Growth, which has long avoided the spotlight, recently closed a $5.8 billion startup war chest.

- Jessica Mathews

The sudden death of former SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg nine years ago shook Iconiq Capital founder Divesh Makan. He had first met Goldberg and his wife, former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, in 2002, when all three of them were still “nobodies,” as Makan puts it.

“It was the first real death that I had in my life,” Makan told Fortune in an interview. “It was the first death I felt.”

Goldberg had been an important client at Iconiq Capital, the investment firm that Makan cofounded after leaving Morgan Stanley in 2011 with a roster of wealthy tech and celebrity clients. But most significantly, Goldberg had been a close friend and mentor to Makan. Right up to his passing, Makan says, he and Goldberg spoke via phone, text, or email almost daily—and the intimate dinners Goldberg hosted at his house shaped how Makan thought about the word “community.”

It was Goldberg who encouraged Makan to launch Iconiq Growth, now the investment firm’s venture capital arm, in 2013, and who would write the fund one of its largest initial checks. He helped persuade Will Griffith, who had worked at the venture investing shop TCV for nine years, to join and launch it (and school him in poker in the meantime, Griffith says). Goldberg also helped the fund land some of its first deals, and he sat on the firm’s first advisory board.

“He was our biggest reference source. He was our biggest critic. He was our biggest advocate. And he was our biggest cheerleader—all in one,” Makan says of Goldberg.