The Second Album
On the foggy Friday morning before Thanksgiving, 2023, Joshua Kushner drove up the promontory of Point Dume in Malibu to visit a man he had never met, carrying a question he could not quite articulate.
Rick Rubin's clifftop estate sits above high bluffs and rocky coves—the kind of place where Johnny Cash, Metallica, and the Geto Boys had come before him to lay themselves bare to the great beard's tutelary magic. Kushner was thirty-eight years old. He was the spouse of a supermodel, the brother and in-law of American political royalty, and the founder and CEO of what had very suddenly become one of the most coveted venture capital firms in the world. He was also, that morning, a man in crisis.
Dressed in his customary robes—shorts, t-shirt, bare feet, majestic mane—Rubin received Kushner with coffee in his backyard, where two chairs overlook the Pacific. For thirteen years Kushner had been building Thrive Capital, the New York–based investment firm whose trajectory from a $5 million seed fund in 2010 to a $3.3 billion eighth fund by 2023 traced a line so improbable it seemed drawn by someone who hadn't read the rules. Along the way, Thrive's bets on Instagram, Spotify, Warby Parker, GitHub,
Slack, Robinhood, Skims, Stripe, and OpenAI had become conspicuous for being prescient, aesthetic, and exquisitely timed—among its mostly vindicated admirers—or for being absurdly priced, momentum-chasing, and too highly concentrated in dysfunctional businesses with unproven returns—among increasingly sheepish critics. The firm had just committed $1.8 billion to Stripe at a $50 billion valuation and $150 million to OpenAI at $29 billion. Those companies are now valued at $107 billion and $500 billion, respectively.
None of which is why Kushner drove to Malibu.
"My deepest insecurity is that I have these intuitions about things that I cannot explain to anyone," he told Rubin as they sat overlooking the ocean. "Sometimes I see or experience something and it makes sense to me, I fall in love, but I cannot explain why. Like when Thrive invested in Instagram or Spotify or OpenAI. I could not explain to anyone why the products made sense to me." He paused. "Which is why my even deeper insecurity is … what if I lose it? Like, what if I lose the capacity to feel or experience these things?"
Rubin answered with a question. "Do you know the biggest mistake most musicians make? Their first album comes from love, heartbreak, passion, or depression. They have no expectation of how the world will respond. They write it from the heart, and if it catches on, they're validated by the world. But then they start writing their second album, and they don't necessarily write it based on love, heartbreak, or passion. They write the album they think the world will want."
Be yourself, Rubin told him. Either you'll be right, and it'll feel good, or you'll be wrong—but at least you'll still be yourself.
Kushner walked out of Rick Rubin's house and looked at his phone. He had a missed call from
Sam Altman and probably twenty from Kelly Sims and Vince Hankes, two of Thrive's lead partners. While he'd been sitting in the garden above the Pacific, OpenAI's board of directors had fired Sam Altman. And so they went to war.
By the Numbers
Thrive Capital
$5MFirst fund, 2010
$10BMost recent fund raised (Feb 2026)
~$50BAssets under management
5Investment partners on a nine-investor team
$1.8BSingle check into Stripe at $50B valuation (2023)
$500BOpenAI valuation (2025), up from $29B at Thrive's entry
$3.8BJoshua Kushner estimated net worth (Forbes, Jan 2025)
The Furrier's Daughter
The story of how Joshua Kushner came to be sitting in Rick Rubin's garden—the story beneath the story of Thrive Capital—begins with a bag of dirt.
In December 2016, the head of Russia's state-controlled development bank, Sergey Gorkov, prepared two gifts for a meeting with Jared Kushner, Josh's older brother, at an office near Trump Tower. One was a piece of art from Novogrudok. The other was a bag of dirt from the same village. The selection was resonant—and, in the context of Russian intelligence tradecraft, deeply calculated—because the Kushner family's origin story is a story of dirt. Of digging in it, hiding in it, escaping through it, building on it.
Rae Kushner, Josh's grandmother, was born in 1923 in Novogrudok, then in northeast Poland, now in Belarus, where her father owned two shops that sold hats and coats. The name Kushner is Yiddish for "furrier." Of the town's 25,000 residents, roughly half were Jewish. When the Nazis invaded in June 1941, they smashed Novogrudok in the first month of Operation Barbarossa. In July, they selected fifty Jewish members of the town's intelligentsia, herded them into the town square, and murdered them while an orchestra played music and Wehrmacht soldiers danced. The Germans then picked out a few dozen Jewish girls, including Rae, and ordered them to wash the blood from the stones and load the bodies into wagons.
Soon after, the Nazis lined up 7,000 Jews at the Novogrudok courthouse. Each was directed left—to a labor camp—or right—to die. Rae, her three siblings, and her parents were told to go right. As they awaited trucks to the killing grounds, a German soldier asked the crowd if there were any furriers; they needed hats for the coming winter campaign against the Soviets. Rae's mother announced the family, and they were taken back into the courthouse—all except for Esther, Rae's older sister, who was driven to a mass grave outside the town, ordered to climb into it, and machine-gunned in the pit with 5,000 other Jews.
In February 1943, Rae's mother was murdered while her husband and surviving children watched through a window. By summer, only a few hundred Jews remained. With no other recourse, they began to dig a tunnel out of the ghetto—at night, after long days in forced labor, using spoons and pieces of wood, hiding bags of dirt in the courthouse walls. By September 1943, the tunnel was 600 feet long and only wide enough for one person to crawl through at a time. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, during a torrential downpour, the last living Jews of Novogrudok escaped. Rae's younger brother Chanon, who had survived being shot in the leg and burned in a fire on New Year's Eve 1941 when a drunken German soldier entertained his platoon by shooting Jewish boys, became disoriented in the rain at the tunnel's end. He was caught by the Nazis and killed.
Rae, her sister Lisa, and their father fled into the Naliboki Forest, where they spent ten days hiding before being discovered by the Bielski Partisans—the largest organized Jewish armed resistance against the Nazis, later chronicled in Nechama Tec's
Defiance and a 2008 film of the same name. In the forest, Rae met Yossel Berkowitz, who later became Joseph Kushner: the son of poor tailors, educated only through the fifth grade, who had spent three northeast Polish winters living with a pistol in a forest grave covered with branches.
After liberation by the Red Army, after posing as Greeks to board a train to Czechoslovakia, after crossing into Hungary, after being married by a rabbi in a Budapest synagogue alongside twenty other orphaned Jewish couples, after four years in a displaced persons camp in Rome, Rae and Joseph Kushner boarded the SS Sobieski in Genoa. They arrived in New York City on May 29, 1949. A caseworker at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society noted in their file: "They have a tremendous drive to establish themselves and start off again."
Hatchet Joe and the Holocaust Builders
In New Jersey, Joseph quickly earned the nickname "Hatchet Joe," as he was seldom seen without his primary work tool. For four years he worked at construction sites, often sleeping there to save money on bus fare. In 1953, at thirty-two, he went into business for himself. Rae worked the books from their kitchen table.
By 1958, Joseph had built dozens of homes. By 1963, he was president of his own real estate company, building hundreds of garden apartments across New Jersey. In Elizabeth, he began working modest deals with the Wilfs, another survivor family, who together with the Kushners, the Halperns, the Dieners, and a handful of others would become known as the Holocaust Builders—a tight-knit community held together by Rabbi Pinchas Mordechai Teitz, one of the great figures in the modern Orthodox movement, who ensured they remained committed to their faith and channeled their wealth into a universe of schools, universities, hospitals, charities, and synagogues that over the second half of the twentieth century bestowed on the group a reputation as large in philanthropy as in business.
By the late 1970s, Joseph had built large houses for his children in Livingston, New Jersey, where his grandchildren, including Joshua, would be raised. In 1985—the year Joseph died at sixty-two and Josh was born—his son Charles formed Kushner Companies. Charles expanded the family business beyond New Jersey into New York, where the maiden purchase was the storied Puck Building in SoHo. By the late 1990s, the firm had become a billion-dollar operation with thousands of holdings across the Eastern Seaboard.
In her dotage, Rae moved into Charles's house, and Josh grew up sharing his home with what can only be described as a real-life Jewish American superhero. The furrier's daughter from Novogrudok who witnessed the murder of half her family, who crawled through a 600-foot tunnel and hid in frozen bushes, who crossed the Alps by foot and gave birth to her first child in a refugee camp before sailing penniless for New York—in her final years, among the people who called on her son and whom she welcomed as guests into her home in Livingston, were the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the President of the United States, Bill Clinton.
"She was my hero," Josh told Jeremy Stern of Colossus. "When you live with someone as resilient as she was and persevered through so much tragedy, you feel determined to make something of yourself. I am not first generation, but I grew up in a first-generation home. As a child, I was surrounded by the impossible."
I was interviewing a candidate recently who asked me, 'Why is everyone at Thrive so driven and motivated and hungry?' I told her it is because most of us are either first generation or from New Jersey, the state everyone is always making fun of.
What Is to Man, What Is to God, What Is to Business
The American literary tradition has long been preoccupied with what happens when paradise delivers on its promise—and then keeps going. Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Walt Whitman,
Anthony Bourdain, John McPhee: all New Jersey sons who understood that the Garden State contains both the dream and the hangover in a single geography. Josh Kushner's childhood was itself a distinctly American fusion of high and low. Shabbat dinners with Holocaust survivors. Pickup basketball in the driveway. Bar mitzvahs and funerals with the Holocaust Builders. CDs at the record store in Livingston. A lot of time on AOL. He was the youngest sibling, known in school for being studious and invariably polite. While his older brother Jared was expected to take over the family business, Josh's interests lay elsewhere—in finding new music and art, and tinkering around on the internet.
But the Holocaust Builders, pious and charitable though they were, could also be brutal in business. A 2020 Tablet essay by Joshua Chaffin describes how, as the years wore on, a number of them or their children were indicted for construction faults, bribing officials, or cheating partners. The Diener family patriarch reportedly described the community's operating ethos: "What is to man is to man; what is to God is to God; what is to business is to business."
By 2004, Rae, Joseph, and Rabbi Teitz were all gone. And by the paradoxical literary logic of the American dream—which was built in no small part on the sacredness of family—the world they'd made fractured at the fault lines of fraternal conflict. Charles Kushner had fallen out with his older brother Murray over personal and business disagreements. Following an explosive fight during a family Passover seder, Murray sued Charles, alleging he'd used company funds for political contributions. This triggered a federal investigation led by U.S. Attorney Chris Christie.
On July 13, 2004, while Josh was preparing for his freshman year at Harvard, his father turned himself in to federal authorities in Newark. Charles pleaded guilty to witness tampering—stemming from a bizarre scheme in which he hired a prostitute to entrap his brother-in-law, then mailed the evidence to his sister—as well as tax evasion and campaign finance violations. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
Jared Kushner later recalled picking up his father after his arraignment and driving home for ninety minutes in silence. Charles, pacing his patio with a tracker strapped to his ankle, eventually said: "In life, sometimes we get so powerful that we start to think we're the dealers of our own fate. We are not the dealers. God is the dealer."
During Josh's freshman year at Harvard, he flew on weekends to visit his father at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama. The unfaltering soft-spokenness and cheerful courtesy that marked him since childhood—and which his colleagues at Thrive attest has never once broken, even under enormous stress—can create a dissonance in the listener when he reflects on pain.
"By the time I was in high school, my father had accomplished a tremendous amount," Kushner said. "And then overnight our family were outcasts. The world treated us all one way for the beginning part of my childhood, and then suddenly they treated us very differently. That experience showed me how the world works, and why you should not care too much about what people think."
After his release, Charles took Josh to Novogrudok. They shared a room in a little motel on the town square where Rae, as an eighteen-year-old girl, had washed blood from the stones while German soldiers danced. They visited the tunnel site, the mass grave where Rae's sister was killed. A non-Jewish woman who'd served as an unofficial guide to the town's Jewish history was later imprisoned for her work. "We had this feeling that we were being watched," Josh remembered. "We spent the night there, and the next morning my father and I looked at each other and were like, we gotta get the fuck out of here."
The First Fund
In the fall of 2004, while Josh Kushner was a freshman at Harvard,
Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to work full-time on TheFacebook.com. This was not incidental. Kushner became part of the wave of students who started companies in their dorms. His junior year, he and two classmates—Daniel Kafie and Mario Schlosser—started Vostu, a social network for Latin America. It failed in its initial mission but found a second life as the largest social gaming developer in the region, at one point boasting 40 million users before eventually flaming out. He graduated, took a job buying distressed debt at Goldman Sachs, returned to Harvard for his MBA, and confirmed a suspicion: he liked building companies and disliked banking and school.
During his brief stint at Goldman, Kushner had been introduced to the founder of a social network called Hot Potato. When he inquired about investing, he was told he'd need to convince Joel Cutler, the startup's main backer at venture firm General Catalyst. Cutler—a cofounder of General Catalyst, a Kayak board member, and a man whose instinct for nascent talent bordered on the supernatural—gave Kushner $1 million to seed Thrive. "I told everyone that if they didn't give money to this young guy, they were out of their minds," Cutler told Forbes. "And if it didn't work out, I'd make good on it."
Cutler also introduced Kushner to Andy Golden, the legendary head of Princeton University's endowment. Golden later recalled a happy hour for VCs in Cambridge in 2010, where he saw a six-foot-three, emo-looking kid in a black cardigan standing apart from the group, staring at the floor. What Golden vouchsafed to Kushner was an insight that would become Thrive's structural backbone: investment firms, as they scale, lose their identity and wind up focusing not on what they're good at but on the size of their assets under management, leading to lower cost of capital, less ambitious people, more mediocrity, and lower returns.
In response, Kushner pitched an idea that sounded, in 2010, preposterous: an opportunistic vehicle agnostic to stage, sector, or geography, which viewed itself as an enabling technology for the world it wished to see, and which had the capacity to not just invest in companies but to build them. The firm would concentrate all its investments in a very small number of companies. It would incubate its own companies as well as invest in others. It would function as a service provider, product creator, and embedded operational commando unit for founders.
"At that moment in venture you were either an early stage firm or a later stage firm," Kushner recalled. "You were either a software firm or a consumer firm. You were either a European firm or a US firm. The idea of having a fund that could build companies, invest in companies, invest in them early or late, and inside or outside the US, it was just deeply unconventional."
Golden seeded Thrive with $10 million. Another $30 million materialized. The first institutional fund was $40 million. The limited partners included Princeton University, the Wellcome
Trust,
Peter Thiel, and General Catalyst. By 2023, every self-respecting investor on Sand Hill Road was saying such things about themselves. In 2010, nobody was.
The summer between Kushner's first and second year of his MBA, the incoming dean at Harvard Business School was Nitin Nohria—who had grown up in Calcutta until 1969, when his family fled to Delhi in the wake of the Naxalite insurgency, then studied under Irish Christian brothers before earning a PhD at MIT and spending twenty-two years at HBS teaching case studies on business history. On his first day as dean, July 1, 2010, his assistant informed him a student was requesting an appointment. "What kind of student wants to see the dean on the Fourth of July weekend?" Nohria thought. When they met, Kushner told him he wanted to drop out. He was starting two companies—Oscar Health and Thrive Capital—and didn't want to mail it in.
"Anybody who's crazy enough to think they can start two companies at the same time is already doing one thing too many," Nohria told him. "So if you think you can be responsible enough to give attention to two things, why not three?" They made a deal: if by Thanksgiving, Kushner still wanted to leave, Nohria would refund his tuition. He stayed.
The Broken Ankle and the 906-Page Bill
The pickup basketball game in which Kushner broke his ankle in 2010 is, in the oral history of Thrive Capital, the equivalent of Newton's apple. Like any American who's made a routine hospital visit, the incomprehensible bill he received left him poleaxed. His classmate and Vostu co-founder, Mario Schlosser, had just had his first child and was likewise startled by the opacity of the claims process. They discussed how the internet, software, data, and design seemed to be transforming nearly every industry except healthcare—perhaps the most important sector to consumers from both a human and financial standpoint, and one that accounts for nearly a fifth of U.S.
GDP.
Their timing was somewhat propitious: the Affordable Care Act had just been passed with the goal of allowing people to shop for health plans rather than accepting whatever their employer provided. According to Kushner, he and Schlosser stayed up one weekend reading the entire 906-page ACA and decided to start Oscar Health. Of the thirty-three new insurance companies created in the wake of the law, only two survived to Oscar's IPO in 2021. Oscar Health, filed as an S-1 with the SEC on February 5, 2021, had by 2025 grown to 1.8 million members and $12 billion in revenue.
The parallel launches of Oscar and Thrive were not separate projects so much as two expressions of a single thesis: that technology was a horizontal force, not an isolated vertical, and that every category-leading company in every industry would eventually have to embrace it. This idea—obvious now, heretical then—is the thread that connects a health insurance startup to a venture capital firm that invested in Instagram and Spotify and incubated companies in healthcare and real estate simultaneously.
"I don't think we could do this without Obamacare," Schlosser said. The irony was thick: Josh's brother Jared owned a stake in Thrive, and therefore in Oscar, through which he was effectively a beneficiary of the law his father-in-law's administration spent four years trying to destroy. A White House deputy counsel noted in a January 2017 letter to the Office of Government Ethics that "Mr. Kushner's continuing interest in Oscar could require his recusal from a variety of particular matters that will have a direct and predictable effect on the health insurance industry."
Seventy-Two Hours Before Facebook
Many of Thrive's earliest victories bear Kushner's distinct imprint, but the one that put the firm on the map happened in seventy-two hours.
In April 2012, Thrive was one of three firms to invest in Instagram's $50 million Series B financing round at a $500 million valuation. Kushner had invested time in Instagram for a year before investing money. Kevin Systrom, Instagram's co-founder, later explained why the nascent Thrive—barely two years old, operating from the Puck Building with a skeleton crew—won the allocation over much larger, more established VCs. "His relatability and strategic thinking mattered way more than any firm pedigree," Systrom told Forbes.
Seventy-two hours after the round closed, Facebook acquired Instagram for roughly $1 billion. Thrive doubled its money before the ink was dry.
Then there was the 2012, $6 million investment in a growth round of the Stockholm-based Spotify out of a $150 million fund—an allocation Kushner regarded as a favor until learning, nearly a decade later, that Spotify's CEO
Daniel Ek had needed exactly $6 million to close the round. The reason Ek knew he liked Kushner: a few years earlier, when Spotify was only available in Europe, an executive notified Ek that someone in the United States had managed to register a fake UK address in order to download the app via the UK App Store. They discovered it was Kushner, sitting in the library at HBS.
Some people just have innately wonderful taste and intuition. Josh has wonderful taste. I think it bleeds into his product intuition, which is just fabulous.
By 2014, Thrive had raised its fourth fund at $400 million—the firm's largest to date—with LPs including Princeton, the Wellcome Trust, and numerous endowments. The portfolio included Warby Parker, Harry's, Twitch (sold to Amazon for nearly $1 billion), GroupMe (acquired by Skype), and a growing roster of investments that bestowed on Thrive a kind of urbane, Atlanticist varnish not typical of the aesthetically challenged investors in Silicon Valley. But the details behind Thrive's biggest successes—the ones that transformed it from a plucky New York outfit into a technology investing behemoth—make one wonder whether Kushner's greater gift isn't his taste in other people.
The Ketchup Salesman and the Code Repository
In early 2015, Miles Grimshaw—raised first in England then in Boston in a Brady Bunch–style family of seven children united by his mother's remarriage to a serial software entrepreneur and Korean immigrant whom Grimshaw first met on September 11, 2001, watching the towers fall on the TV—saw GitHub as a potential crown jewel for Thrive's portfolio. He'd been hanging around the firm's offices to visit his friend Will Gaybrick, an early Thrive partner now president of Stripe, and one day found himself sitting in a meeting where Gaybrick offhandedly referred to him as the firm's "entrepreneur in residence," which was news to Grimshaw.
At an 11 p.m. investment meeting, the twenty-three-year-old Grimshaw pushed for GitHub. The company had bootstrapped for years, wasn't seen as a fast grower, and had raised money only once. But Grimshaw was convinced it was strategic: "More infrastructure's getting abstracted into code," he argued, "and GitHub is the single most important tool in that ecosystem." They decided to invest 7% of Thrive's $400 million fund.
Shortly after they wired the money, GitHub's founder fired the CFO, head of product, and head of marketing in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal. The immediate consensus in Silicon Valley was that the company was a dysfunctional dumpster fire. Thrive's phones rang off the hook with LPs asking if 7% of the fund was going to zero. Grimshaw remembers mentors at other firms telling him to get out.
That same week, Thrive hired Nabil Mallick to lead its portfolio impact team—which at the time consisted of Nabil Mallick. A self-described "very observant Muslim" from Karachi, Pakistan, Mallick had moved to New Jersey as a child, watching his father go from washing dishes at a Mexican restaurant while getting his master's to starting a civil engineering company that eventually employed nearly a hundred people. "We were the little engine that could," Mallick said of his family. "Very much the middle-class American dream."
Prior to Thrive, Mallick sold ketchup. Specifically, he took a job with 3G, the Brazilian private equity firm, and was one of the first non-Brazilians to move with the firm to Pittsburgh following its acquisition of Heinz. 3G were specialists in railroads, but convinced that the condiments business, like all businesses, was basically the same. Within three months, the thirty-year-old Mallick was running Heinz's finance and operations for all of North America, bridging cultures between Brazilian executives who yelled about rail and ketchup being the same thing and the sweet old woman who'd been doing accounts receivables for thirty-five years. He led teams that increased working capital by $400 million and drove nearly $700 million of cash flow.
Then Heinz's big innovative bet for the year was to launch a line of mustard. "And I was like, fuck," Mallick recalled. "I saw my career flash before my eyes."
When Kushner caught wind that Mallick was looking for his next move, they met for coffee. Mallick warned that he knew nothing about technology. "Just so you know, I have a BlackBerry, I've never had an iPhone," he told Kushner. "And, like, you said 'SaaS' just now, I have no idea what that word means and I don't know what TAM is. So I don't know what you're thinking. But I guess let's go."
Thrive immediately dispatched Mallick to GitHub, which no longer had a CFO but still needed to finalize its budget and operationalize its go-to-market strategy. For nine months, Mallick flew between New Jersey and San Francisco, effectively serving as GitHub's interim CFO. In the process, he concluded that despite its troubles, the company's growth rate was accelerating. Less than a year after buying shares at a $2 billion valuation, Thrive invested another $120 million across two tranches at a 25% discount.
"Think about it," Mallick said. "We started with a $20–30 million check, and then created the opportunity to make it the most concentrated, consequential investment Thrive's ever made up to that point. We go from 1% to 10% holders and get asked to serve as observers on the board of directors." Thrive made about seven times its money in eighteen months. In 2018, Mallick helped run GitHub's M&A process, which in three weeks resulted in Microsoft's acquisition for $7.5 billion in an all-stock deal. Microsoft, which issued stock at $95, is now at $500.
"It also helps to know ketchup," Mallick concluded, "which is just like software."
The $7 Billion Problem
Being in New York cloistered Thrive from both the demented rapture of 2021 and the great heebie-jeebies of 2023. In 2021, rock-bottom interest rates and pandemic-driven digital transformations led scores of investors to cash-cannon money into startups at vertiginous valuations. By 2023, rate hikes, poor returns, and infamous failures like FTX caused them to stop dead. Tech stocks cratered. IPOs dried up.
This was a problem for Stripe, whose shot clock was ticking. Years earlier, Facebook had invented dual-trigger Restricted Stock Units, allowing employees to defer taxes on stock options until an IPO. The IRS blessed the innovation with a caveat: you couldn't defer forever. By 2023, Stripe's earliest employee options were approaching expiration. If the company didn't raise several billion dollars or go public, its employees would face a tax bill in the neighborhood of $2–3 billion in ordinary income taxes on $5 billion worth of shares.
Kareem Zaki—the son of immigrants from Cairo who fled to Cleveland to escape Egyptian persecution of Coptic Christians, whose father graduated first in his medical school class only to have the university skip the customary professorship due to his religion, then repeated all his medical training from scratch at the Cleveland Clinic—had been at Thrive since 2014. After applying to medical school to become a physician, Zaki had instead taken a job in Blackstone's private equity group, where he spent his time figuring out what could go wrong. "My conversations with Josh were much more about what could go right," Zaki said.
When the Collison brothers reached out in early 2023, Thrive's response was immediate. Kushner flew to Paris to meet with John Collison, bringing along Vince Hankes—the son of two hairdressers from Mount Clemens, Michigan, who first learned about business working as a golf caddy before studying finance at the University of Michigan, eventually joining Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global, and Thrive in 2019.
Over dinner, Kushner and Hankes asked Collison to lay out his conundrum. When he explained the quantum of capital Stripe needed—something approaching $7 billion—they said they'd anchor the round with nearly $2 billion from Thrive and its LPs, then help raise the rest.
Raising the other $5 billion required Thrive to do something it never does: pitch other investors. "We're never out there talking our own book," Hankes said. But this time they had to sell the deal to a market that was stuck in the weeds of that year's growth rate and margins. "They were so stuck on trying to get the 2023 number right," Zaki recalled. "The ironic thing is people spend so much time trying to predict the short term because it feels tangible, it feels close to us. But it's actually very hard to predict the short term."
Several well-known firms passed. Their reasoning, as John Collison later told Colossus, was telling: "They couldn't answer the question, 'Why are we so lucky?'" It seemed too broadly shopped. Kushner was the opposite. "He committed $1 billion, which later became $1.8 billion, before the round had even started coming together."
John Collison's response was decisive: he took over as CFO and within twelve months brought Stripe from break-even to nearly 20% margins. Secondary shares that had been trading at $50 billion started trading at $65 billion. By September 2025, Stripe was valued at $107 billion.
"It also helped again to be in New York," Zaki explained, "where we were surrounded by traditional industries and finance, which made this kind of thinking more intuitive for us at a time when it wasn't for others."
I Saw the Future
Thrive had first gotten involved in OpenAI in early 2022, after meeting with Sam Altman to discuss a new round. They'd been given a preview of GPT-3, the foundation model that preceded ChatGPT. Kushner reportedly became so obsessed with it he almost seemed haunted.
Caution was perhaps in order. OpenAI was a "capped-profit" subsidiary controlled by a nonprofit board, with the mission of "safe AGI development" taking legal precedence over profits. Microsoft's $1 billion 2019 investment gave it a dominant position with complex revenue-sharing agreements. The company was valued at $29 billion while doing a trivial $50 million in revenue. It was all very weird. There was a reason no other investor submitted a term sheet for that round.
Kushner marshalled his case to the investment team: forget the nonprofit structure and Microsoft and all the red flags. If you can create this much enterprise value, everything else is solvable. Colleagues recall him repeating things like "I Saw The Future" and "This is The One." In the spring of 2022, Thrive submitted a term sheet—$130 million from its main fund at the $29 billion valuation. It was the only one OpenAI received.
In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Within two months, it became the fastest-growing consumer app in history. By the summer of 2023, Thrive was working on a $90 billion round, and in August agreed to anchor $400 million of a $500 million employee tender offer—critical leverage in the exploding war for AI talent. By November 17, 2023, Thrive had committed around $700 million in the company.
Then the board fired Altman.
Five Days in November
Kushner, whose past life had likely disposed him toward people in crisis and steeled him with an affinity for emergencies, went back to his hotel. He immediately set up a video call with the other Thrive partners that ran 24/7, uninterrupted, for five days. The first day was Shabbat—the only one anyone at Thrive can remember Kushner working.
The first call Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer, made was to Kushner. Lightcap expected a panicked stakeholder demanding a full run-down. Instead, Kushner's priority was the company and its people. "It was, 'How are you? How's the company? I'm here for you, I support you guys. What can I do to help?'" Lightcap later told Fortune.
In its process of discovery, Thrive concluded that the board's accusations against Altman of failing to be "consistently candid" were baseless, and that the board had no day-after plan—not even a script for addressing hundreds of bewildered employees. They also learned the board was trying to sell OpenAI to Anthropic, the competitor started by former employees, in what appeared to be an attempt by hardline Effective Altruists to capture the leading AI company. From Thrive's perch in New York, the board's philosophical justifications were preposterous.
More than anything, Thrive's leverage lay in the half-billion-dollar employee tender offer that was underway. Without it, OpenAI employees who'd waited years for liquidity might revolt. Convinced the board was both wrong and incompetent, and with $700 million of its own money at stake, Thrive reportedly put implacable pressure on the board—working connections at Microsoft, leaning on other investors, shaping press coverage, and preparing class action lawsuits.
During that crazy week where I got fired and rehired, he just put his entire life on hold. He didn't leave his hotel room for 72 hours. He just worked non-stop, very strategically, very effectively, to get things back on the rails.
On November 22, Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman were reinstated. The board was restructured.
"Josh is incredibly polite," an investor at a competing venture firm told Colossus on condition of anonymity. "But I wouldn't want to get crossways with him. When there's someone he's loyal to at stake, it's not pleasant to be on the other side. He can be merciless."
A few months later, Kushner delivered what the investor called "probably a masterstroke." After proving Thrive's mettle in wartime, he negotiated another $1 billion investment in OpenAI at a $150 billion valuation, then negotiated the exclusive right to invest an additional billion at the $150 billion valuation through January 2026—effectively a call option on the future of artificial intelligence that no one else received. By early 2025, OpenAI's valuation reached $500 billion. "That option was grossly valuable then," the investor said. "It's disgusting now."
The World Is Very Predictable
The election of
Donald Trump in 2016 was, by Kushner's own account, the second great inflection point of his life, after his father's incarceration. "My brother and I are best friends," he said. "His support and love towards me have always been unconditional and unwavering. He was there for me when my father was not able to be in ways I will never be able to repay him for."
But seeing how the world responded—to Jared, to the family, to Josh himself, irrespective of his own political views—was "this incredible reminder that the world can be cruel." When asked if people simply were mean or actually came after him, he responded: "In ways that are hard to believe."
The attempts by The New Yorker, NPR, ProPublica, and others to weaponize Rae Kushner's testimony against Jared—itself a means to casting Trump as "literally Hitler"—were, as Jeremy Stern wrote, "not only embarrassed by subsequent diplomatic events, but made grotesque use of a Holocaust survivor's memory, in turn fixing Jared as the sole lens through which thousands of Americans learned of the family saga that also shaped Josh, whom few knew existed."
To Fortune's Alyson Shontell, Kushner offered a characteristically guarded statement: "I love my brother dearly. Anyone who has an issue with that is not someone I care to have in my life." At the Fortune Global Forum in 2024, asked about Trump's return, he said simply: "Irrespective of who our president is, it's very important that we're all patriotic."
But in private, the recollection carries more edge. "That weekend I spoke with my brother several times," he said of the second inauguration, "and we reminisced about all the people who made his life and our family's lives miserable for four years, and were all there celebrating now as if they had won the election themselves. The world is very predictable."
The Lafayette Room
After the Stripe deal closed but before the blip at OpenAI, there were the October 7 attacks in Israel. Kushner had his phone shut off for Shabbat. At sundown, the first call he got was from Mallick, who in business school would walk home with Kushner across the Charles River on Friday nights in lieu of a taxi.
By the following week, the pogroms, the impending war, and the fallout on the streets of New York were affecting the firm. Kushner, Mallick, and Zaki—the three main faces of Thrive: the grandson of Novogrudok, the observant Muslim from Karachi, the Coptic Christian whose family fled Egyptian persecution—decided to hold an all-hands meeting in the Lafayette room at the Puck Building, where Thrive began in 2010. Kushner talked about growing up knowing people hated Jews but never having experienced it firsthand in America, until then. Mallick spoke of growing up a Muslim boy in New Jersey and New York in the wake of 9/11. Zaki spoke of persecution in Egypt. All three discussed their faith.
Two months later, in the immediate aftermath of the OpenAI crisis, Kushner and Philip Clark took a call with Assaf Rappaport, CEO of the Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz, who was somehow crushing sales goals in the middle of a multi-front war despite reservist call-ups. They decided to invest, flew to Israel forty-eight hours later—through Paris, then Cyprus, then a puddle hopper to Tel Aviv, because the country's airspace was closed due to ballistic missile attacks—and arrived at 7 p.m. for a four-hour meeting where they agreed on a deal.
"There were no other venture investors in Tel Aviv at the time, because why would you go to a war zone?" Clark remembered. "But our viewpoint was if our founders are there, we should be there." The deal resulted in a $1 billion stake for Thrive after leading Wiz's final two rounds—one at $12 billion, the other at $16 billion—before Google acquired the company for $32 billion.
Not Da Vinci but Medici
After stepping down from Harvard Business School in 2021, Nitin Nohria walked away from an offer to run his own $300 million fund to accept Kushner's offer to become executive chairman of Thrive. The role was deliberately ambiguous, but Karlie Kloss, Kushner's wife, captured it best: "Nitin is Yoda. He's in very few scenes, but he's in the ones that matter."
"I keep coming back to
J.P. Morgan," Nohria told
Colossus. "Morgan wanted to be a part of the financiers of his time, but also independent of them in an important way. His view was that you could be the trusted party, the person and institution that could be trusted to anchor the broader movement of capital across America at that pivotal moment in history. That idea is what drew me to Josh from the very first."
By February 2026, Thrive raised a $10 billion fund—$1 billion for early deals, $9 billion for growth—putting it behind only Andreessen Horowitz's $15 billion raise but ahead of Lightspeed's $9 billion and General Catalyst's $8 billion. The investing team remained absurdly small: outside of Kushner, only Zaki, Grimshaw, Hankes, and Clark. They back roughly a dozen new companies a year. The portfolio includes OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks, Cursor, Anduril, Isomorphic Labs, Wiz, and A24, with Thrive partners on many boards.
Kushner has described the firm's self-conception with a metaphor that reveals more than he perhaps intends: "Our founders are heroes. We're not Da Vinci. We're Medici. Our opportunity is to enable the artists that we're fortunate enough to support to create their masterpieces."
The analogy is apt in ways both flattering and uncomfortable. The Medici were patrons, yes, but they were also bankers, power brokers, and empire builders who understood that enabling genius was itself a form of sovereignty. There is in the comparison an acknowledgment that Thrive's ambition extends well beyond returns—that what Kushner is building is not merely a fund but an institution, one designed to endure the cyclical destructions and reinventions that define American life.
T
Thrive Capital: Key Investments and Outcomes
Selected deals illustrating the firm's concentrated, high-conviction approach
| Company | Entry | Outcome / Current Valuation |
|---|
| Instagram | $12M, Series B at $500M (2012) | Acquired by Facebook for ~$1B, 72 hrs later |
| Spotify | $6M growth round (2012) | $6M closed the round; Spotify now public ($80B+) |
| GitHub | 7% of $400M fund (2015); doubled down at 25% discount | Acquired by Microsoft for $7.5B (2018); ~7x return in 18 months |
| Stripe | $1.8B at $50B valuation (2023) | Valued at $107B (Sep 2025) |
| OpenAI | $130M at $29B (2022); ~$2B+ total committed | Valued at $500B (2025) |
A Daughter Named Rae
Despite his success as an entrepreneur, his proximity to political power, his marriage to Karlie Kloss, and his mastery of the nexus between capital and technology, there persists in Joshua Kushner an enduring sense of Jewish apartness, an inability to forget that he is two generations from Novogrudok. It shows itself in his compulsion to succeed, in his need to test himself, in the ambivalence he feels about how he comes off, and perhaps in a determination to re-earn a right to a place in America for himself and his family. These qualities are also visible in the other first- and second-generation Americans who have built Thrive alongside him: the Pakistani ketchup salesman, the Coptic Christian from Cairo, the Indian dean's son from Calcutta, the hairdressers' kid from Michigan.
"I have navigated many complex situations in my life," Kushner said. "I have learned not to care too much about what the world thinks. Not because I am special, but because I have had a unique lens on what the world is and how people can act. People love you, and then they hate you, and then they love you. The only thing that ultimately matters is how you feel about yourself."
A sense of the precarity of utopia is a classically American condition, not merely a Jewish one. It is a consequence of always living with one foot in the future while the rest of humanity lives somewhere between the present and the past. It is why every few generations Americans undergo a period of near-total collapse, only to rewire themselves as freer, more tolerant, and richer than before. These cyclical destructions are, historically, dangerous for Jews. They are also both the cause and symptom of new technologies, new fortunes, and new machines.
On September 11, 2025, Colossus editor Jeremy Stern left Thrive's offices on the seventh floor of the Puck Building after a month of interviews. He passed the Lafayette room, where the firm holds its all-hands meetings, and remembered the story of October 2023—the three men from three faiths, standing in the room where Thrive began, speaking about what they'd endured. He was eager to check his phone. He contacted Kushner for one final comment on that period.
Kushner could not be reached, as his wife had given birth that day to their third child.
A daughter, Rae.
Joshua Kushner built Thrive Capital from a $5 million seed fund in 2010 to a $10 billion raise in 2026—a trajectory that produced stakes in Instagram, Spotify, GitHub, Stripe, OpenAI, Wiz, and Anduril, among others. What follows are the principles that emerge from that trajectory: not abstract investment philosophy, but patterns of behavior, decision-making, and institutional design that recur across Thrive's most consequential moments.
Table of Contents
- 1.Write the first album, not the second.
- 2.Concentrate to the point of discomfort.
- 3.Be the firm, not the fund.
- 4.Recruit from the margin, not the center.
- 5.Use geographic isolation as competitive advantage.
- 6.Embed, don't advise.
- 7.Predict the decade, not the quarter.
- 8.Run toward the burning building.
- 9.Make loyalty the product.
- 10.Erase the individual, elevate the institution.
- 11.Treat hardship as curriculum.
- 12.Stay rooted or lose the signal.
Principle 1
Write the first album, not the second.
Rick Rubin's observation—that musicians ruin themselves by writing for the market instead of from the heart—is the ur-principle of Thrive Capital. Kushner's earliest investments (Instagram, Spotify, Warby Parker) were products he loved before he could explain why they would work as businesses. His $130 million check to OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation, when the company was doing $50 million in revenue and no other investor submitted a term sheet, was not an analytical conclusion. It was a conviction that emerged from a preview of GPT-3 that left him, in colleagues' descriptions, "haunted."
The danger Kushner identified in Rubin's garden is real: as Thrive scaled from $5 million to $10 billion, the temptation to optimize for what LPs expect, what the market validates, or what peer firms are doing grows exponentially. The principle is that the firm must resist this temptation structurally, not merely rhetorically—by keeping the team small, by refusing to let assets under management dictate strategy, and by preserving the conditions under which intuition can operate.
Tactic: Before committing to any major decision, ask whether you are acting from genuine conviction or from a model of what the market rewards—and design organizational structures that make the former more likely than the latter.
Principle 2
Concentrate to the point of discomfort.
Thrive's portfolio construction is radically concentrated. The firm backs roughly a dozen new companies a year and makes a small number of very large bets—7% of a $400 million fund into GitHub, $1.8 billion into Stripe, $2 billion–plus into OpenAI. This is not conventional diversification logic. It is its inversion.
The theory is simple: deep conviction requires immersion, and immersion requires a small enough portfolio that you can truly understand every aspect of every company. When GitHub's leadership imploded and LPs called asking if 7% of the fund was going to zero, Thrive's response was to embed an operator and double down at a 25% discount. That move—from 1% to 10% ownership—turned GitHub into the most concentrated, consequential investment Thrive had made to that point.
Concentration also creates asymmetric information advantages. Because Thrive has fewer positions, it can go deeper than firms with hundreds of portfolio companies, which in turn generates the kind of proprietary insight that makes the next doubling-down possible.
Tactic: Build portfolios where the cost of deep engagement with each position is sustainable, and where concentration creates an information feedback loop that compounds over time.
Principle 3
Be the firm, not the fund.
From the beginning, Kushner described Thrive as "a company that happens to invest" rather than "a fund." The distinction is not semantic. Fund structures are episodic—raise capital, deploy it, return it, repeat. Company structures are persistent—they build institutional knowledge, internal tools, operational capabilities, and cultural identity that compound across cycles.
This shows up concretely. Thrive incubates its own companies (Oscar Health, Cadence, Cedar, Rightway). It builds internal tools and AI systems (Puck, the firm's internal AI agent, and Thrive One, the broader system on which Puck operates). It invests in public companies and has allocated over $1 billion to Thrive Holdings for AI roll-ups in accounting and IT services. It has invested in at least seventeen other venture capital funds from its growth fund, creating deal-flow networks that function as early warning systems.
The firm-as-company model also explains Thrive's retention: the same LPs from 2010—including Princeton University—remain invested fifteen years later. "They haven't blinked," as Mallick put it.
Tactic: Design the organization to accumulate institutional capabilities—tools, knowledge, relationships, operational muscle—that compound across fund cycles rather than resetting with each new raise.
Principle 4
Recruit from the margin, not the center.
Thrive's team is conspicuous for what it is not: a collection of Stanford MBAs with prior experience at Sequoia. Instead, the firm's key operators came from Heinz (Mallick), Blackstone's PE group (Zaki), a Michigan golf course (Hankes), and a Brady Bunch family in Boston (Grimshaw). Many had zero experience in venture capital. Most were first- or second-generation Americans from New Jersey.
Kushner's recruitment philosophy, described by multiple partners as a nine-month courtship that ends with them suddenly working at Thrive without quite knowing when it became official, selects for a specific type: diffident politeness fused with the immigrant's slightly menacing compulsion to succeed. The ketchup salesman who'd never had an iPhone. The Coptic Christian whose father repeated his entire medical education from scratch in Cleveland. The kid who first learned about business as a golf caddy.
The logic is that people who have navigated cultural dislocation, economic precarity, or family upheaval bring a particular kind of hunger, adaptability, and perspective that cannot be trained into someone who grew up on the right side of Sand Hill Road. They also bring the outsider's skepticism toward consensus, which is perhaps Thrive's most valuable attribute.
Tactic: When hiring, weigh the formative struggle and adaptive capacity of candidates at least as heavily as their domain expertise or pedigree.
Principle 5
Use geographic isolation as competitive advantage.
Thrive is based in New York, not San Francisco. This has been read as either an irrelevance or a disadvantage. It is neither. In multiple key moments—GitHub's implosion, Stripe's 2023 round, the OpenAI crisis—being outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber gave Thrive separation from the consensus view that proved wrong.
When GitHub's leadership collapsed and the Valley declared the company dead, Thrive was 3,000 miles away with an embedded operator who could see the growth rate accelerating. When the 2023 market downturn caused tech investors to stop deploying capital, Thrive was surrounded by traditional industries and finance, where thinking in terms of long-term profit dollars rather than short-term margin percentages was intuitive. When OpenAI's board launched its coup, the doomerist contagion that animated Effective Altruist circles had never quite reached Puck Building.
New York also shaped Thrive's aesthetic and sector range. The firm's portfolio—which includes Warby Parker, Harry's, A24, and Skims alongside Anduril and Databricks—reflects a sensibility that values consumer design and cultural products in ways more native to Manhattan than to the Peninsula.
Tactic: Locate your base where the ambient culture sharpens rather than dulls your contrarian instincts, and treat distance from consensus centers as an information advantage.
Principle 6
Embed, don't advise.
The venture industry's standard offering to portfolio companies is "advice"—a board seat, a quarterly call, maybe an introduction. Thrive's model is fundamentally different. When GitHub lost its entire C-suite, Thrive didn't send a memo; it sent Nabil Mallick for nine months to serve as de facto interim CFO. When Yashoda Clark embedded at Headway, she operated as the firm's "operational commando." These aren't favors. They are the product.
Embedding creates three forms of value simultaneously. First, it stabilizes the company. Second, it generates proprietary information—Mallick's time at GitHub revealed that the growth rate was accelerating, enabling the doubling-down that produced 7x returns. Third, it builds trust with founders that translates into preferential access to future rounds and M&A processes. Mallick's relationship with GitHub's leadership gave Thrive a front-row seat to the Microsoft acquisition.
The model is expensive. It requires people who can operate, not just evaluate—which explains why Thrive hires ketchup salesmen and former chiefs of staff rather than junior analysts.
Tactic: When a portfolio company faces a crisis, don't advise from the outside—deploy operators who can do the work, and use the embedded access to inform future capital allocation.
Principle 7
Predict the decade, not the quarter.
Thrive's Stripe investment was underwritten on a single question: will e-commerce grow over the next ten years? Not on Stripe's 2023 margins, not on that quarter's growth rate, not on whether Patrick and John Collison were the right leaders for the next phase. "If there's one thing that I could predict between now and the day that I die," Kushner said, "it's that people buy more stuff on the internet every year."
During due diligence, other investors obsessed over the short-term number. "Just the number of people that would nitpick and say, 'Oh, Stripe is less profitable than Adyen,'" Hankes recalled. "Or, 'Patrick and John have been really great for the last decade, but actually in the next decade maybe they're not the right ones to do it.'" Several well-known firms passed because they couldn't answer the question: "Why are we so lucky?"
The principle is not that short-term analysis is useless—it's that it is, paradoxically, harder to get right than long-term analysis. Macro-level inevitabilities (more e-commerce, more AI, more software) are more predictable than next quarter's revenue. The mistake most investors make is treating the tangible near-term as more knowable than the distant future, when the reverse is often true.
Tactic: Anchor investment theses in secular inevitabilities that are likely to persist over a decade, and refuse to let short-term volatility override long-term conviction.
Principle 8
Run toward the burning building.
When everyone told Grimshaw to sell GitHub, Thrive doubled down. When the 2023 market froze and investors wouldn't touch Stripe, Thrive committed $1.8 billion. When OpenAI's board fired Altman and Microsoft was ready to let him go, Thrive worked around the clock for five days to reinstate him. When Israel's airspace was closed due to ballistic missile attacks, Kushner and Clark flew through Paris and Cyprus to reach Tel Aviv for a meeting with Wiz's CEO.
The pattern is consistent: Thrive's most consequential investments and actions have occurred at moments of maximum uncertainty, when competitors retreated and conventional logic counseled caution. This is not mere contrarianism. It is the combination of deep conviction (built through the concentration and embedding described above) with a cultural disposition toward crisis that seems rooted in something more personal than investment philosophy.
"Josh always had a line to me when I joined Thrive," Clark said, "which is that the people who win deals are the ones who want to win them most."
Tactic: Build the organizational capacity—in knowledge, conviction, and emotional resilience—to act decisively at moments when others are paralyzed by uncertainty.
Principle 9
Make loyalty the product.
More than thirty-five people were interviewed for Fortune's 2023 cover story on Kushner. Not one cited a hostile exchange. Sam Altman recalled texting Kushner at 2 a.m. during a recruiting battle; Kushner was awake, got on the call for ninety minutes, and helped close the candidate. OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap's first call during the board crisis was not to a lawyer or to Microsoft—it was to Kushner.
This is not incidental kindness. It is a strategy. In venture capital, where your network and reputation dictate your deal flow, the quality of the relationship with the founder is the product. Kushner's approach—remembering whisky brands, arriving at the hospital, calling at midnight, offering support before asking questions—creates a form of loyalty that generates preferential access. Altman called Kushner first when raising capital not because Thrive was the largest fund, but because Kushner had invested a decade in the relationship.
⚖
Thrive's Approach vs. Conventional VC Wisdom
| Conventional Wisdom | Thrive's Approach |
|---|
| Diversify across many bets | Concentrate in ~12 companies per year |
| Specialize by stage or sector | Stage-, sector-, and geography-agnostic |
| Invest, advise, wait | Embed operators inside portfolio companies |
| Build your personal brand (Midas List) | No individual attribution; team decisions only |
| Flee at the first sign of trouble | Double down during crises at discounted valuations |
| Base in Silicon Valley for deal flow | Stay in New York for contrarian perspective |
Tactic: Treat every interaction with a founder as a deposit in a relationship account that may compound over a decade, and never let short-term investment pressures override long-term relational trust.
Principle 10
Erase the individual, elevate the institution.
No one from Thrive appears on the Midas List, Forbes' annual ranking of individual investors. No individual name gets attributed to any deal. Investment and most other decisions are made as a team. Kushner, despite being the founder and by all accounts the driving force behind Thrive's largest bets, is relentless in deflecting personal credit.
This could be read as false modesty—or, more generously, as a corrective learned from watching what happens when family patriarchs accumulate too much personal power. But the structural logic is sound. Institutional identity, rather than individual celebrity, creates durability. It allows the firm to survive the departure of any one partner. It prevents the founder from becoming a single point of failure. And it attracts a specific type of person—one more interested in building something lasting than in personal fame.
Andy Golden's original insight—that investment firms lose their identity as they scale, drifting from what they're good at toward maximizing AUM—is the threat Thrive's institutional design is built to counter.
Tactic: Design attribution structures, decision-making processes, and cultural norms that bind identity to the institution rather than to any individual, especially the founder.
Principle 11
Treat hardship as curriculum.
Kushner's father went to federal prison when Josh was eighteen. The family went from hosting presidents and prime ministers to being outcasts overnight. His brother's role in the Trump administration subjected the entire family to years of political fury. The March of the Living in high school. The trip to Novogrudok with his father. Polish residents spitting on Jewish students near Auschwitz.
"Every difficult experience has taught me that there are two ways you can deal with hardship," Kushner said. "You can either feel sorry for yourself, or you can orient towards the idea that life is a set of experiences that train you for the next one."
This is not motivational poster material. It is an operational philosophy visible in Thrive's hiring practices (select for people who have endured dislocation), its crisis response (act immediately, without self-pity), and its relationship to market cycles (downturns are opportunities, not threats). The firm's cultural DNA—the ketchup salesman, the Coptic Christian, the Pakistani Muslim, the hairdressers' son—is itself a collection of people for whom hardship was not an interruption but a formative condition.
Tactic: When evaluating potential team members, partners, or founders, weight their response to adversity as heavily as their track record of success—resilience under duress is the truest predictor of long-term performance.
Principle 12
Stay rooted or lose the signal.
Kushner's visit to Rick Rubin was, at bottom, about the fear that success would destroy the very capacities that created it. The fear that external validation—LPs praising you, valuations vindicating you, Fortune putting you on the cover—would distort the intuitive signal that led to Instagram and OpenAI in the first place.
Rubin's answer was to stay yourself. Kushner's answer has been structural: keep the team small, stay in New York, maintain the same LPs, refuse the Midas List, embed operators instead of sending memos, build internal tools rather than outsourcing, and name your third child after the grandmother who crawled through a tunnel in Novogrudok.
The quote that hangs framed in Kushner's office is from C.S. Lewis's "The Inner Ring": "The true road lies in quite another direction." The inner ring—the desire to be part of the elite, to be validated by the in-crowd, to write the second album for the audience instead of from the heart—is the greatest threat to any institution that has achieved early success. Thrive's architecture is a bet that the threat can be structurally resisted.
"Everyone hates the man until they become the man," Kushner said. That's the American condition: the cyclical rise and fall and rise, the trashing and rebuilding of operative identity. The question is whether you can endure the cycle without losing the signal that made you who you are.
Tactic: Build organizational rituals, physical environments, hiring criteria, and cultural norms that continuously reconnect the firm to its founding conditions—the hunger, the outsider perspective, the genuine conviction—even as success creates pressure to abandon them.
In their words
My deepest insecurity is that I have these intuitions about things that I cannot explain to anyone. Sometimes I see or experience something and it makes sense to me, I fall in love, but I cannot explain why. Which is why my even deeper insecurity is … what if I lose it?
I have navigated many complex situations in my life. I have learned not to care too much about what the world thinks. Not because I am special, but because I have had a unique lens on what the world is and how people can act. People love you, and then they hate you, and then they love you. The only thing that ultimately matters is how you feel about yourself.
Most investors don't work that hard, they're usually not available for midnight calls or won't drop everything to fly across the country on short notice to do a small favor for you the next day. Josh is consistently willing to do all these things.
I keep coming back to J.P. Morgan. Morgan wanted to be a part of the financiers of his time, but also independent of them in an important way. His view was that you could be the trusted party, the person and institution that could be trusted to anchor the broader movement of capital across America at that pivotal moment in history.
Our founders are heroes. We're not Da Vinci. We're Medici. Our opportunity is to enable the artists that we're fortunate enough to support to create their masterpieces.
Maxims
-
Intuition is a muscle, not a method. The inability to articulate why you believe something does not invalidate the belief—but you must build structures that protect the intuitive signal from being drowned by external validation.
-
The second album is the dangerous one. Success creates the temptation to optimize for what the market rewarded last time rather than what you genuinely believe this time; this is where most firms, bands, and people lose their edge.
-
Ketchup is just like software. Operational fundamentals—working capital, cash flow, go-to-market execution—transfer across industries; the person who ran Heinz's North American finance can stabilize a code repository in crisis.
-
Predict the decade, not the quarter. Secular inevitabilities are paradoxically easier to forecast than next quarter's revenue; anchor investment theses in macro-level trends and refuse to let short-term noise override long-term conviction.
-
Concentration compounds. Deep immersion in a small number of positions creates information advantages that enable the next doubling-down; diversification is often just a hedge against the discomfort of conviction.
-
The echo chamber is the enemy. Geographic, cultural, and intellectual distance from consensus creates the conditions for contrarian action at moments when others are paralyzed; surround yourself with people who think differently, not more comfortably.
-
Embed operators, not advice. The highest-value service a capital provider can offer is not a board seat but an embedded human who can do the work—finalize the budget, run the M&A process, close the candidate—and who generates proprietary information in the process.
-
Hardship is the curriculum. Select for people whose formative experiences include dislocation, loss, or reinvention; they bring hunger, adaptability, and skepticism toward consensus that cannot be trained into the comfortable.
-
Loyalty is the product. In a business where reputation dictates deal flow, every interaction with a founder is a deposit in a relationship account that compounds over decades; the midnight call answered, the 2 a.m. recruiting help, the flight to a war zone—these are not favors but strategic investments.
-
Erase the individual, build the institution. Personal celebrity is fragile and creates single points of failure; bind identity to the firm's mission and culture rather than to any one person, especially the founder.
