Josh Kushner
speaker
255 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Josh Kushner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And once they're inside, they realize that it's not all that they thought it was meant to be. So then they start chasing for the next ring and the next ring and the next ring. And the essay concludes that effectively the goal of life should be to not try to chase anything, but rather focus on your craft, focus on the people that you love the most.
And unbeknownst to you, you will appear as if you're safe and sound within a ring to the outside world, but you will have absolutely no idea. And I think for me, I have that framed in my office.
Actually, I try to live my life every day by focusing on the things that I'm passionate about, my family, people that I love, my closest friends, and just trying to get better at the things that I do every day and try to not get distracted about the outside world.
Yeah, one of the values of Thrive is to focus on the inputs, not the outputs. I think if you're chasing success, then you're unlikely to realize it. And if you are focused on a problem that needs to be solved, you will likely achieve success. So I think the people that we view as the most driven are the ones that are entirely focused on improving themselves constantly.
It's this level of self-motivation and self-awareness that is entirely a competition between them and themselves. And I think that is the thing that I've seen from the best founders that I've ever worked with. Those that are motivated by how the world will ultimately perceive them will likely make bad decisions.
Those that are motivated by a mission or a cause or the ambition to solve a problem are the ones that will ultimately achieve it. In many respects, having the firm based in New York City has been very much driven by the idea of us, I would say, being out of an echo chamber or an ecosystem so that we can actually have true independent thought.
And I think these are human emotions that you feel when you're in the middle of something. When I was in college, I had the opportunity to go to a Knicks game with someone who worked in finance in New York City. And he took me courtside. The seats were amazing. I was in heaven and he looked over five seats to his right and he said, my seats are good, but this guy's seats are better.
And that was... Inner rings. That was a really important moment for me because it made me realize that the way to ultimately do my job really well is to create the right boundaries for me to actually be on the outside and have true independent thought. A large portion of our investments are out West there every month.
But I think in some respects, the idea of not being there every day has enabled me to focus on just be a lot more clear in my thinking.
What that experience taught me is that being a founder is incredibly romanticized and the pain that is taken in order to ultimately achieve success is just extraordinary. I feel like the ability to do both is something that I just feel so fortunate to do because I feel like being a founder has enabled me to appreciate all of those that Thrive is fortunate enough to invest in.
And the ability to be exposed to so many extraordinary founders by being a part of Thrive has enabled me to be a much better founder myself. But as a firm, we have definitely created a culture of building. We're building Thrive. Thrive is a product. We just happen to invest in other companies. And our ambition is to be the most meaningful partner to our founders.
And we need to constantly iterate and tinker in terms of ways in which we can do that. But also every single person on the investment team in some respects is building. And I think that gives them a true appreciation of the founder struggle and the entrepreneur struggle.
I broke my ankle playing basketball. I went to the hospital, went through the traditional experience. But I remember getting home and getting my insurance bill and realizing that I had absolutely no idea what it meant. I had just started Thrive, and I didn't know what my benefits were, what doctors or hospitals I had access to, how to pay a claim. I said to myself, how is it...
that the internet and software and data and design are transforming every single industry around us. There's this relationship that is so fundamentally important to so many people in the country, both from a human perspective, but also from a financial perspective.
And what would be the way in which we can take this relationship and make it simple and transparent and understandable through technology, data, and design? When I had thought about this idea, the Affordable Care Act was just being introduced. And the reason why this was so exciting was because healthcare had traditionally been sold in a B2B capacity.
People were not making decisions for themselves. And the Affordable Care Act was taking the largest industry in our country, which represents a little less than 20% of GDP, and transforming it from B2B to B2C. And when people can actually make decisions for themselves, they usually choose the product that has the perfect combination of cost and quality.
And there are so many examples of consumer choice transforming industries. That could be the shift from businesses giving their employees Blackberries to employees choosing iPhones for themselves, or defined benefit moving to defined contribution through 401k.
And I think as a result of this new market being created, where there are so many people flooding to the market at the same time, the barriers to entry, which had traditionally been so high in a world in which there's probably a trillion dollars of enterprise value, were lowered at one moment. And there was just one moment where a new brand could be created to create trust for consumers.
Almost at the exact time that I had this poor consumer experience, Mario, who is my co-founder at Vostu, had his first kid and he equally had a terrible experience. And I remember calling him and saying, Mario, I really think that there needs to be a new type of health insurance company. He agreed, got together. We both read the Affordable Care Act over a weekend, which is light reading.
And we got going and the experience has been extraordinary.
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