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
Our product is our strategy and our investment process, but also our ambition to be the most meaningful partner to our founders. And we let our founders determine what meaningful is to them. The market is constantly changing. And the idea that people in our industry can have the perspective
That the market can change, but the ways in which they do their jobs doesn't change has never necessarily resonated. And I actually think the ways in which we approach Thrive is no different than how a lot of our founders approach their businesses. Our best companies ship weekly or monthly.
And our view is we need to be shipping weekly or monthly in terms of the ways in which we are making decisions or serving our founders. But we are a company. We are building a company. We are founders. We just happen to be founders of an investment firm. And I think a lot of people don't think about investors as founders. They don't think of them as builders. We think of ourselves as builders.
We're just building thrive. We do have strong opinions on the ways in which we do things, which is we believe in the generalist model. We've always shied away from sector-specific funds. And I think if you have these funds that are so focused... On a specific sector, the argument that you can make is that you see everything and that you have the prepared mind to make the right decisions.
The counter argument is you feel the pressure to deploy capital into a sector as a result of the fact that you have a sector-specific fund. So we really believe that the best ideas are the ones that we should invest in. Thrive started by primarily investing in consumer-oriented businesses.
Our first funds had, as I mentioned before, Warby and Harry's and Twitch and Instagram and Spotify and many others. If we had stayed focused entirely on on being consumer-oriented, then I think the returns that we would have created would look very differently. You can apply the frameworks that you have from one opportunity or one sector to another.
You've asked me a lot about how we actually identify companies. I actually think we, in many respects, apply a consumer lens to every single deal that we're doing, whether or not it's a payments business or an enterprise software business. At the end of the day, each product has a consumer. It has an enterprise.
Understanding kind of the nuance of that product, understanding how special that product is, whether or not it's a feature or something that is truly fundamentally important to someone and why it's important to someone. is something that we constantly go back to.
So I think you can apply the framework from one sector to another, but I think the idea of actually being sector specific is not something that we've ever oriented towards.
I can't speak for them, but I think there was an extraordinary amount of independent thought that went into the thesis behind Thrive. And I would say a tenacity and a drive to do whatever was possible in order for us to ultimately be the best versions of ourselves. I think there's a level of self-motivation, humility, that immigrant-like mentality that goes into
the ways in which every single person thinks of the firm that I think resonated with them because they're all thinking very similarly.
So my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. They both lived in what would be modern-day Belarus. My grandmother lived in a small town. At one point, it became a ghetto. She was a part of a small group of people that dug a tunnel that was 90 feet to escape the ghetto, had many members of her family murdered. escaped to join the partisans in the forest, the Belsky Brigade.
There's a movie called Defiance, which Daniel Craig stars in, which was that group of people to then wait out to finish the war, to live in a refugee camp in Italy for three or four years, to come to the States with nothing but her and my grandfather, the shirts on their back, to create a life for themselves.
So growing up around the dinner table, I was hearing that story and the story about how my grandfather, who came here as a laborer on construction sites, how he would sleep in the homes that he was building in order to save money on gas. And I think the lessons for me were I'm entitled to nothing. America is the greatest country in the world where everything is possible.
Perseverance and tenacity and having the capacity, as I expressed earlier, to just deal with pain is something that leads to greatness. And I think a lot of people that work at Thrive have very similar mindsets. they feel like they need to do whatever they can to be the best version of themselves.
I think stories are impactful, but actions are a lot more impactful. So as I think about how Carly and I can ultimately pass lessons down to our children one day, it's going to be entirely based on our actions and how we act and how we live our lives and the priorities that we have and the values that we have with regards to work.
My partners and I could never ask anyone to do anything that we're not willing to do ourselves. I actually feel like as the firm has gotten larger, in many respects, the tenacity has increased. The desire to be even better has increased. The focus on winning and the ways in which we want to do it with our values and integrity, I think, are things that we're even more focused on.
We can talk about talent whenever you want, but there's a line that I use at the firm all the time, which is if you actually have to choose between the most experienced person, the most educated person, or the person who actually wants it the most, you always pick the person who wants it the most. There is no substitute for hard work. There is no substitute for willing to outwork someone else.
And that can translate into your personal life just as much as it can translate into your work life. I think I said this to you during lunch. If you're not embarrassed about who you were two years ago, you're not growing. A mentor of mine once said that to me. I feel that way about myself as an individual, not just within the business world.
I think it's that chip on your shoulder that you feel like you just have to get better all the time that I think is what we look for in people at the firm.
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