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
The why now is always fundamentally important because irrespective of people and capital, you always need tailwinds. So I think it's always a fundamental part of our conversation. The why now in Oscar was so extreme. But I also think the interesting part about Oscar was...
a recognition entering the founding of a company that it would be something that we would do for decades because we knew how fundamentally difficult it would be. And what's the scale of Oscar now? So we're 10 years into the company. Oscar has a million members, six and a half billion of revenue. But... The first decade, in our opinion, is only a couple chapters through what the ultimate story is.
Oscar has been an incredible journey in terms of, we call it, the 10 plagues of Oscar. Affordable Care Act was extremely volatile. I think there were 33 new insurance companies that were created as a part of the Affordable Care Act, and only two are remaining. There was obviously a new administration that was very opposed to the Affordable Care Act, which led to increased volatility.
There was the global pandemic. When we started Oscar, I think one of the core insights that we had as we think about the next decade is if you were to start an e-commerce business today, You can launch on Shopify, you can plug in Stripe, you can plug in any basic data analytics service, and you're ready to go.
If you were to start a health insurance company 10 years ago or even today, there is very limited technology that you can utilize. So our idea was not only should we build a health insurance company that consumers loved, we also had this vision of what would it look like to actually create the operating system that would enable us to run a health insurance company end-to-end.
And as we actually think about the next decade, we are the only people that have created this end-to-end system that enables you to operate a health insurance company and have a longitudinal view of a member from end-to-end. And as we think about deploying LLMs across this product, we get extremely excited about the transformations that are going to come.
If there's one takeaway from founding businesses over my career, it's just as hard to start a small business as it is to start a large business. And it only gets harder the larger the business gets. It only gets more complex. I remember, it was probably six or seven years ago, we had made an offer to a CTO. And I remember having dinner with Carly.
And I said to her, if he accepts, everything will be in a good place. And she said, Josh, we've only been together for a couple of years now, but... You've been saying that for a lot of things and you just have to accept the reality that the challenges are only going to increase. That wisdom was so incredible for me.
She made me realize if you're building something and the ambition is extraordinary, the challenges are only going to continue to come because the problem that you're trying to solve is only increasing over time.
So I think as we invest in any company at the early stages or even invest in the companies at the later stages, our views are always oriented towards we should only try to be a part of things that have really grand ambitions. We should only invest in companies whose ambitions are to be standalone public companies.
We should only invest in products that have the desire to truly transform an industry or create a new one. And I actually think going through the founder experience and still going through it today, I spent a decent portion of my weekend working on something for Oscar. You just have to know that the bigger the business gets, the harder it gets.
And as a result of that, the ambition for what you're ultimately trying to create should only be extraordinary from the start.
Yeah, we've started over a dozen businesses and every single person on the investment team currently has been a part of an incubation at Thrive. So every single person at the firm is building. Everyone understands the pain the founders go through. They're experiencing it themselves. I think our view is there are big markets, there are large markets, and there are infinite markets.
And I think the only places that you want to play are in the infinite markets. I think no differently than our investments, every single incubation that we create has a grand ambition, but there's usually a very specific product that we believe should be built from the beginning that ultimately creates a wedge into a much larger opportunity.
we would ultimately be dissatisfied if that larger opportunity is not captured. And ultimately, no matter how thoughtful we are about identifying that opportunity alongside the partners that we're ultimately working with, if the person who is ultimately building that business is not N of 1, nothing's going to happen.
I think the last incubations at the firm have been created by Gaurav, Vince, and Kareem. And they have just an incredible amount of humility and self-awareness around the quality of the person that they ultimately want to work with. I think they're extraordinary top-down thinkers. in terms of thinking about what the opportunities are that could lead to outsized outcomes.
But at the end of the day, if we're not building alongside extraordinary people, nothing's ultimately going to realize its full potential.
So I went to Harvard, graduated in 2008. Mark Zuckerberg had started Facebook a couple of years prior. And I think that was very motivating to a lot of us there. We saw that someone who was a peer could build and build at an extraordinary level. And I think that inspired a lot of us that we could do the same.
So I actually started a company when I was in college with my co-founder at Oscar and Mario. It was a social gaming company. And that experience exposed me to this idea that something could be built and it could reach tens of millions of people. And that was really intoxicating. I actually suppressed that because
A lot of the people that I respected the most at Harvard at the time were actually going to work in finance. So I ended up applying for a bunch of finance jobs. I got a job at Goldman Sachs.
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