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
But while I was at Goldman, there were days where I was working 20 hours a day, and then there were days where there was absolutely nothing to do because it felt like the world had stopped during the global financial crisis. And I got introduced to a company called Hot Potato, which ended up selling to Facebook, ironically. And I asked him if I could invest in the business.
And he said, of course, but you need to convince my venture capitalist. And I said, that sounds great. I didn't really appreciate what venture capital was as an industry at the time. So I ended up speaking to this firm and I ended up being general catalyst. And they said, well, while you're at HBS, why don't you come by for a coffee? So I did that. And I thought I was coming for a coffee.
And they effectively offered me a job. And I didn't join them. But after school, I would go and I'd hang out at their office and learn from them. And in between my first and second year of business school, the three of them effectively said, we think you could be really good at this. We want to give you a million dollars to invest on your own.
And I feel really grateful to them because in many respects, this is not something that I knew that I could do. I was working at Goldman the year prior buying distressed credit. I just feel so lucky that they did that for me.
But that was an extraordinary, extraordinary thing because it enabled me to have the capacity to just meet with founders, both in New York as the ecosystem was taking off, but also on the West Coast around the time that the iPhone was introduced. And as a result of that, I was able to invest in some really great companies. that enabled Thrive to get off the ground.
Towards the end of my time at school, General Catalyst introduced me to Andy Golden, who is the CIO of Princeton. And similarly, I think Andy saw more in me than I saw in myself. And he really spent time with me talking to me about what I wanted to do and what I wanted to build.
And he had this really powerful line that really resonated with me, which was as firm scale, they start to lose a sense of who they are. They start to focus on AOM. They start to focus on doing things that they weren't necessarily good at in the beginning. That leads to the vicious cycle. The vicious cycle is you have a lower cost of capital.
The lower cost of capital leads to lower human capital, less ambitious people. Less ambitious people leads to lower returns, and it just leads to mediocrity. And I came back to him and I said, well, Andy, what if I told you what I dreamed Thrive would be in 10 years from now? And I started doing that today.
And I pitched him this idea of being this opportunistic vehicle that had the capacity to invest across stage sector and geography. And keep in mind, this is at a moment in time in which you're either an early stage firm or a later stage firm. You're either a software firm or a consumer firm. You're either a European firm or a US firm.
Yeah. So the idea of actually having a fund that actually could build companies, invest in companies early and invest in companies late was so deeply unconventional. I feel really lucky that he saw it and he understood it. But what has enabled us to do is do the exact same thing from when we started the fund till today. Our first institutional fund was $40 million.
Our last institutional fund that we raised was about $3 billion. But the strategies have been exactly the same. The only things that have changed are the team, the scale of the brands, the knowledge and insights of the people within the organizations.
The opportunistic strategy that we've laid out to our limited partners was seen as unconventional. So the sequencing of making sure that every fund had essentially the right ingredients to the cocktail that we ultimately wanted to create took time. Thrive 2 was our first institutional fund. It was $40 million. But in that fund, we had our first incubation at Oscar.
We led the Series A of Warby Parker. And we invested in Instagram. That was fund two. Fund two. Yeah. At a half a billion dollar valuation. Fund three had multiple incubations as well. Quite a few early stage investments. But we also invested in Twitch and Spotify at the later stages as well.
I think fund four was the first time where we not only did everything that we did, but we started to develop our frameworks for concentration. So in that fund, we had about a 15% position in GitHub. about a 10% position in Slack, 10% in Stripe, 10% in Unity. And then we invested in BenchLink and Lattice at the seeds, but we ultimately built those up into about 10% positions over time.
And then we also incubated Cedar in that fund as well. So I think that was the first time that we weren't only doing everything, but we started to develop clarity that it's not only about investing at every stage and in every geography and in every sector, but also being extremely disciplined investors.
around almost doing a lot, but not doing a lot, and making sure that ultimately the things that we wanted in the portfolio were ones that we were extremely concentrated in, that we wanted to hold for a very long period of time.
Everything always seems simple in retrospect, but I think our view at that time was there was this mismatch in terms of at the earliest stages and the later stages in that no one was creating and no one was also investing at later stages.
And our ability to actually beat out traditional later stage funds as a result of our product and strategy orientation at the later stages was something that we were taking advantage of that time because the competition was
was mostly coming from mutual funds, blending down towards privates and our ability to kind of approach what we believed to be these category defining businesses at the later stages and deploy meaningful amounts of capital into them. for what we believe to be attractive prices, even though they were seen as later stage at that time, was something that we were indexing towards.
We have specific points of views on this, but I think it would be unfair to say that the other views that others have are incorrect. What works well for us might not work well for other people. I think the most important framing that we have internally, as I expressed earlier, is Thrive is a company. We have a product.
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