Sneha Rana was two years into her job as an executive assistant at ICONIQ when her boss, Divesh Makan, one of the founding partners, called from the airport. They went over some business, and then, at the end of the call, Divesh told her he thought it was time to replace her.
Sneha was stunned. She'd worked so hard. They were such a good team. Her mind began racing.
"Why would you replace me?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't mean replace you," he said. "I mean replace the things you're doing because you're capable of so much more."
It's a moment that captures something essential about Sneha's journey at ICONIQ — a place that met her potential with possibility, and continued to do so. Over the past thirteen years, Sneha Rana went from executive assistant to Senior Vice President at the firm.
"Divesh always saw my capability, sometimes even before I could see it myself," Sneha recalls more than a decade later. "And he and the other leaders gave me the path and the space to get there."
Brought into the why
When Sneha joined ICONIQ in 2013 as an executive assistant, the firm was just a year and a half old. Two dozen people crowded into two rows of desks at Jackson Square in San Francisco.
From the beginning, her boss did something that would prove transformative: he brought Sneha into the why. Not just his schedule, but the strategy behind every meeting, every relationship, every trip. "He helped me understand the question behind the question," she says. "And that paid off in a meaningful way over time."
It gave Sneha the confidence to reach beyond the edges of her role. She stepped up to do events. She took on business development. She became a thought partner on how ICONIQ was building its presence in Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, as the firm expanded.
"I felt empowered to test and experiment," she says, of how the leaders at the firm supported her. “I felt like an entrepreneur within ICONIQ's entrepreneurial culture."
Building something new
Over the next decade, Sneha moved from executive assistant to overseeing operations, business development, and events for the firm. She built and managed a team of EAs at ICONIQ, and blazed a trail of promotion.
"When I was pushing to be promoted to VP from EA, it was something that had never been done," she says. "I had to figure out how to carve that path not just for me, but for others who would follow."
Today, there are multiple VPs at ICONIQ who started out in support roles. Sneha’s current chapter began over lunch in the Palo Alto office in early 2020. As the world shut down due to COVID, she proposed an idea: a weekly newsletter to help keep ICONIQ's community of client families, CEOs, and other leaders connected and informed. The answer from ICONIQ’s leaders was immediate: Go try it.
The response was overwhelmingly positive. Community, after all, is central to how ICONIQ operates — the belief that bringing together exceptional people, with genuine care and humility, is how extraordinary ideas can become world-changing realities.
For years, Sneha and her team had been quietly orchestrating the experiences that helped bring ICONIQ's community to life — intimate roundtable dinners, landmark client gatherings, moments that turned relationships into something deeper. She had a feel for it that was hard to teach, part creative instinct, part strategic precision.
That instinct ultimately led her, along with the help of founding partner Mike Anders and Genna Leebaw, to drive the creation of ICONIQ Studio, the firm's community engagement team. What started as a small in-house creative team focused on events, communications, and content has grown into a 20-person organization — the central engine for how ICONIQ nurtures and activates its community. At its heart is Network Intelligence, a function built on a simple but uncommon belief: that relationships deserve the same care and attention as any other asset
Giving more than you take
What makes Sneha rare, colleagues say, is the combination of a designer's eye for how things should feel, paired with a strategist's instinct for how they should work. Ask Sneha what makes her good at what she does, and she'll give you a single phrase: relationship intelligence.
It's hard to define, but easy to see. It's knowing not just who's in the community, but the history, the dynamics, and the give and take of every relationship. It's understanding that two clients have the same obscure hobby and sitting them together at dinner. It's knowing when to ask something of someone, like requesting a legendary leader take a call from a young entrepreneur, and when to wait until a better moment to make that ask.
"We always want to give much more than we take," she says.
The longer journey
In a way, the entrepreneurial path was laid out for Sneha long before ICONIQ. She grew up in Nepal, the daughter of a man who was part of the team that founded Nepal Television. He also made the country's first music video and first-ever commercial. When she was twelve, and her father was at the peak of his career, he gave it all up to move the family to the United States—not out of necessity, but out of conviction. Sneha’s parents wanted their children to have the chance to become anything.
"It was never pressure to be a doctor or a lawyer," Sneha says. "It was: America is a place where you can be anything you want to be."
Today, Sneha lives in the Bay Area with her husband, their four-year-old son Sai, and her extended family. And as for the opportunity to be anything, she took that chance and ran with it. She worked her way through college and built her early career through a series of relationships that each opened the next door. Finishing school and needing a more flexible job, she took a position on the sales floor at Nordstrom, and hated it from day one. That night, she went home and wrote a Craigslist ad offering her services. She could do anything, she wrote: drive your kids to school, help with errands, organize your home. She listed everything she thought she could provide. Fifteen minutes later, someone wrote back: “You sound exactly like who I'm looking for.”
They met at the Stanford Shopping Center. The woman hired her on the spot. Sneha worked as her assistant for several years, and the two became dear friends. When the time came to move on, her employer helped her find the next opportunity, which led to a role at a hedge fund. Her boss there saw the true potential in Sneha, mentored her, also became a close friend, and in time, helped Sneha find her next role at ICONIQ.
There was a moment where she felt it had all come full circle. One night she pulled up to one of ICONIQ's first major client events and realized the address was directly across the street from the house where she had landed that very first Craigslist job.
"In any moment where I've been confused," she says, "I've come back to that. My intuition is guiding me."
Published:
March, 30th 2026