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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So as on-prem moved to cloud or desktop moved to mobile or other things have transformed over time, I think the ability, analog moved to digital, like the ability for every company to just implement this technology very seamlessly is something that we're seeing at a pretty rapid pace.
I think the other thing that we at least have a point of view and perspective on is that this is going to be both top line and bottom line of creative writing. The ability to transform enterprise or consumer experience and potentially increase ARPU or in addition to that, automate a lot of processes is likely as well.
We have a core belief that there's an important place in the world for crypto. I think the technology that has been created and will continue to be created can be extremely meaningful. I think the reasons why we struggled over the last years has been primarily oriented towards the fact that it has felt like there's been solutions in search of problems.
And we try our best to be extremely simple in everything that we do. And we tried really hard to kind of understand the problems that some of these technologies were trying to solve. And we couldn't. And our orientation to kind of approaching the sector was more oriented towards, okay, if this is something that is going to take off, let's invest in the picks and shovels associated with the space.
But I think you can invest in something that you don't understand. There's a difference between a great company and a great investment and don't invest in things that you don't understand. If you don't understand it, you can't invest in it.
And I think the discipline that we brought to the sector is something that I'm both proud of, but in the spirit of vulnerability, I think we felt deeply insecure as everyone else- Making money hand over fist. Was pitching this version of the world. It's funny, as we talked about, I'm not a big Twitter user, but in my one tweet of the year, I went back and I said, where did all the .eths go?
They're gone. No one has NFT profile pics anymore. Did we just erase this from our memories?
But anyway, I think blockchain as software is something that we believe in. And I think it has an important purpose in the world.
Our fintech investments so far have been on the infrastructure side, as we've talked about, Stripe and Plaid. On the direct consumer side, NewBank in Brazil, Monzo in the UK, Robinhood. And then on the B2B side, Ramp. And then in some respects, B2B2C, Affirm.
I think from our perspectives, we've just always been oriented towards, there's been this incredible consumerization of financial services products. And the ability to actually create meaningful relationships with a lot less friction within consumers has created businesses that have grown pretty significantly without any customer acquisition as a result of the products that they've created.
And I think as we've seen across our portfolio, there's usually one hero product, and that product leads to incredible demand, but utilizing that distribution to ultimately introduce lots of different products over time is something that we've seen create meaningful enterprise value. We are big believers that there will continue to be tremendous innovation in the financial services space.
We're also tremendously impressed by how some of the incumbents have reacted to the innovation that has been brought forth by some of the companies that I've mentioned. But I think there's so much more to ultimately do.
If I were to frame the way in which we think about investing, we invest in consumer. So e-commerce and on the direct to consumer side, we've invested in businesses that are very much oriented around the framework of cost, quality, and convenience. So how do you actually sell a better product in a more convenient way at a lower cost than the incumbent?
So throw Warby, Skims, Harry's, Hims into that relevant framework. I would say aggregation, commerce, so Instacart or Fanatics. And then the third is just traditional marketplaces.
On the second category that we've traditionally invested in would be traditional industries that are utilizing software or the distribution of the internet to provide a better consumer experience to the end consumer in a more capital efficient way. So think financial services, healthcare, insurance, real estate. The third is software.
We've talked a lot about some of the companies that we've invested in. And then the fourth would be software enabled hardware. It would be Android and SpaceX. I think hardware is something that we've traditionally avoided, just given the capital requirements associated, but also just the long lead times.
But the ability to kind of apply an operating system on top of hardware is something that we've seen with those two companies and is something that we've been paying much closer attention to.
So Michael Lovitz invested in Thrive's first $5 million fund. Talk about someone willing to do the work. Yeah, 100%. I never really properly spent time in Silicon Valley before. And he suggested while I was there, I spent a couple of days with interest in Horowitz to kind of learn about how they operated the firm. And Mark was so generous. He had me sit in on all of his meetings.
I was 25 years old at the time. And I was truly blown away by one, his generosity, his willingness to include me because a friend of his suggested that he did was just extremely kind and generous of him. his curiosity, but also his tenacity.
And actually one of the mottos of Thrive after I came back from that experience was Mark started Netscape and he's still doing everything he possibly can to be an extremely value-added partner to his founders. We didn't start Netscape. So we need to go above and beyond. So even a line that we use today at the firm is we did not start Netscape.
Showing 161–180 of 255 · page 9 of 13
← Previous
Next →