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
I will always take someone's desire to win more so than anything else. But our view is that there's a major difference between being intelligent and being smart.
And I think we look for people who are deeply independent in their thought process that have an incredible first principles lens and that are creative enough to imagine things that have never existed before, but analytical enough to be able to understand businesses at any stage and in any sector.
One of the things that we have done, I think, very effectively is we've taken people that have started off their careers at places like a Blackstone or Bridgewater that were trained with a very financial lens, but just realized that it wasn't the right place for them. And I actually think that has enabled us to truly identify people that are so unique in their thinking.
They don't know what everyone in our industry is talking about. If you were to sit down with anyone who works at any firm and ask them about artificial intelligence right now, they will likely be able to regurgitate whatever it is that they heard on whatever podcast they listen to. If you take someone who's thinking about global macro at Bridgewater...
or distressed debt investing and give them a day to give you their best points of views on whatever topic is interesting to us at Thrive. And they're able to come with incredible analysis and articulate it in a very intense debate.
Our ambition is to really be extremely concentrated in both ideas and people, both at the early stages and the later stages. We purposely have built a small team to actually create constraint around what we can do. How small is small? We manage approximately $15 billion and our investment team is nine people. Our view is the only way to have a team is to have a small team.
In addition to that, the only way to have a small team is to have a team of people who respect each other equally. And that doesn't mean that everyone needs to be exceptional at the same things. That means that every single person brings something completely different to the table, irrespective of their age, irrespective of their experience.
We're of the belief that artists like to live in artist colonies and that every single person that joins an organization should be the most extraordinary person that we can find irrespective of the role that they're playing. And I think we also have the belief that one extraordinary person could do 10 people's jobs.
One of the things that we've done very well, I think as a lot of organizations grow and people become more established, they start to hire for leverage. And our mindset has always been everyone that we hire to the organization should be extraordinary, but also every single person that is hired to the investment team has the capacity to be a partner.
The mindset is this person, a lot of organizations are come worker for two years, you're in, you're out. But every single offer that we give to people on the investment team is with the expectation that if they are successful, they will be a partner at the firm.
And I think that has forced us to be incredibly disciplined around every single person that we bring onto the team, irrespective if they're two years out of school or 10 years out of school. They should raise the bar for us. And I think that's enabled us to do as much as we've done with as few people as we've done. Going back to the only way to have a team is to have a small team.
We've taken, I think, a pretty unconventional point of view, which is that We don't believe in consensus. We don't believe in complete autonomy. We believe in the team. I think a lot of firms have a point of view that everyone needs to agree in order for a decision to be made.
A lot of firms believe that if you have the right people within the organization, they should have the capacity to just make whatever decision is that they want. I don't convince the team that we should do a deal. We don't do a deal because I believe in the team. And I think that's a very, very, very powerful thing
The only way to actually do that is if you have a group of people that respects each other, respects each other's points of views, respects each other's perspectives.
As we've talked about, we have a core belief that as a firm, we should be concentrated in exceptional companies and exceptional people. And our view is that the best companies compound themselves over very long periods of time. We're hoping to invest in companies that we're partnering with for decades. And I'm not sure if...
That's a benefit of our ages or the fact that we know that the best investors are the ones that have picked businesses and have held them for a very long period of time. The running joke in my family for some period of time is that my mom thinks I fix computers for a living.
She is still calling me when the TV is broken, but I've always tried my best to kind of explain to her what we do in the context of real estate. At the later stages, I always say to her that we invest in Fifth Avenue. And my view is you always pay a fair price for Fifth Avenue. Markets go up, markets go down.
But at the end of the day, if you invest in quality, that quality will ultimately compound on itself. There's a scarcity value to quality. Those that invested in Fifth Avenue a decade ago are happy that they have it today. The biggest mistakes that we've made as a firm are when we've way overpaid for Fifth Avenue or we've bought Third Avenue thinking that it would become Fifth Avenue.
And that's just never the case. Our view is if you are concentrated in the most exceptional businesses and you hold those businesses over very long times, a lot of the value in those sectors that you're investing in will ultimately accrue to the number one player.
There are a lot of firms that actually have a very different point of view, which is they like to invest in the second or the third player in an industry. Our view is... We want to partner with the most visionary founders that are building the category-defining assets in their sectors and partner with them over very long periods of time because the value will ultimately compound on itself.
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