The Profile: Silicon Valley’s most mysterious VC fund & the investors who want to reach $1 trillion in assets

This edition of The Profile features KKR co-CEOs Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, Charli XCX, Divesh Makan, and more.

Good morning, friends!

My husband Anthony is putting on the second annual BUILD Summit, an exclusive NYC-based founders-only summit, on September 26, 2024. It’s an amazing event, and nearly 700 founders attended last year.

A few key details:

• It’s a conference exclusively for founders

• All attendees are vetted and approved by our team

• The conference is free to all who attend. (Please note there is a $50 refundable deposit to hold your spot.)

• Expect top-tier speakers, plenty of networking opportunities, and hours of practical-yet-insightful discussions on raising capital, scaling businesses, building products, managing teams, and driving innovation.

Below is the speaker lineup:

• Balaji Srinivasan, Entrepreneur, Investor and Author of The Network State

• Keith Rabois, Managing Director, Khosla Ventures & CEO, OpenStore

• Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder & CEO, Perplexity

• Lucy Guo, CEO, Passes

• Matteo Franceschetti, CEO & Co-Founder, Eight Sleep

• Alexandra Zatarain, Co-Founder & VP of Brand & Marketing, Eight Sleep

• Geoffrey Woo, Co-Founder, Anti-Fund, W & HVMN

• Bradley Tusk, Founder & CEO, Tusk Holdings, Author

• Mike Shebat, Co-Founder & CEO, Traba

• Nick Saltarelli, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Mid-Day Squares

• Dan Mulroy, Former Navy Seal & Chief of Staff, Acryl Data

• Cyrus Shirazi, Co-Founder & CEO, Haven

• Brendan Mahony, Founder & CEO, Sunset

I can confidently say it’ll be a really high-quality event from which you’re guaranteed to learn.

I figured the best way I could help was to share the application form with the founders who read this newsletter.

If you are in New York City on Sept. 26, and you’re interested in attending, reserve your spot here. See you there!

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BOOK RECS: Looking to read something captivating this Labor Day weekend? From sports biographies to moving memoirs to classic novels, check out what 16 of the world's most successful people are reading.

30 Book Recommendations From the World's Most Successful People

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PROFILES.

— The investors who want to reach $1 trillion in assets [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The real person whose life was portrayed the ‘Blind Side’
— The most famous kid on the internet
— The artist who released this summer’s hit album
— Silicon Valley’s most mysterious venture capital fund
— The company that makes 13 million crayons a day

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The investors who want to reach $1 trillion in assets: Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall are co-CEOs of KKR, the world’s third-largest alternative asset manager that boasts the industry’s hottest stock and biggest ambitions. They’re perpetuating the “two-parent” household model that KKR founding partners Henry Kravis and George Roberts followed for 45 years, but they have radically reshaped the machine that Henry and George built. In the rearview mirror are the slash-and-burn leveraged-buyout days immortalized in the famous book Barbarians at the Gate. The firm that’s dreaming bigger than any outfit on Wall Street is embarking on a remarkable journey that few could have seen coming. This is an excellent FORTUNE profile written by my former colleague Shawn Tully. (FORTUNE; you can access the article by creating a free FORTUNE account via this link)

"Henry and George modeled how a really good partnership can work for 50 years.”

The real person whose life was portrayed the ‘Blind Side:’ Michael Oher, the former football player whose high school years were dramatized in the movie “The Blind Side,” in which a wealthy white couple — Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy — took him in and helped him shop for clothes, get a driver’s license, bought him a pickup truck and arranged for tutoring that boosted his grades and made him eligible to play college football. Today, at age 38, Oher is suing the Touhys, claiming they have exploited him by using his name, image and likeness to promote speaking engagements that have earned them roughly $8 million over the last two decades — and by repeatedly saying that they had adopted him, when they never did. The Tuohys have claimed in response that Oher in recent years has attempted to extort them with “menacing” texts. Here’s how things went so wrong. (The New York Times; if you can’t access the article, try this link)

“I know that’s what some people are going to think. ‘He’s being ungrateful.’”

The most famous kid on the internet: For the past nine years, Ryan Kaji has been perhaps the most famous child on the internet, or at least among the most monetizable. His main channel, Ryan’s World, has more than 37 million subscribers and more than 50 billion views. On Amazon, there are toothbrushes, bedsheets, plastic eggs, monster trucks, robots, and paper plates with Kaji’s adorable little face on them. Ryan’s World-branded merchandise reportedly made more than $250 million in 2021. Kaji was only 3 years old when he became famous. Now, a decade later, he is navigating a whole new challenge of becoming a teenager. (Rolling Stone)

“We never thought it would go this big. We thought it’d be kind of this fun project among family in Japan and Vietnam, so they could see Ryan’s daily life.”

The artist who released this summer’s hit album: Charli XCX’s album “Brat” was everywhere this summer. Brat is her sixth studio album, and its 18 party-girl anthems have dominated the discourse since it dropped in June. It has spawned countless memes, TikTok dances, and think pieces, and its lyrics have coined a flurry of catchphrases. The music has been almost secondary to the “brat aesthetic.” It’s a vibe. It’s a pose. It’s a lifestyle brand. It’s a lot. Here’s how it’s made her more famous than she ever expected. (New York Magazine; if you can’t access the article, try this link)

“I’m very well aware that you can’t be omnipresent forever.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

Silicon Valley’s most mysterious venture capital fund: In 2013, the former SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg encouraged Divesh Makan to launch Iconiq Growth, now Iconiq Capital’s venture capital arm. Goldberg wrote the fund one of its largest initial checks. Goldberg also helped the fund land some of its first deals, and he sat on the firm’s first advisory board. Makan has never spoken publicly about Goldberg and the instrumental role he played at Iconiq until now. For that matter, he almost never speaks publicly about Iconiq at all. Take a look inside one of Silicon Valley’s most mysterious VC funds. (FORTUNE; you can access the article by creating a free FORTUNE account via this link)

“Each day, every day, all day long: Hold it up. We want to earn it. We want to deliver. We want to make sure we really deliver against every one of the commitments that we’ve made.”

The company that makes 13 million crayons a day: For a lot of companies, the weeks between July 4 and Labor Day are a quiet time, full of employee vacations and summer Fridays. Not Crayola. During those months, the company’s flagship factory in Easton, Pennsylvania, churns out at least 13 million crayons every day—up more than 8% from the rest of the year—to prepare millions of kids for back-to-school season. “That’s our Super Bowl,” says Crayola CEO Pete Ruggiero. What a fascinating visual story about the process of making a crayon. (Bloomberg; if you can’t access the story, try this link.)

“Making crayons is messy, noisy work.”

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