Josh Kushner - Building Thrive Capital - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]
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Welcome to this classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past ten years, published once a month. These are n of one conversations with n of one people. This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of the best investors of the past decade, Josh Kushner. As a side note, Josh is one of the very best people that I've met in this journey over the last ten years. I hope you enjoy it. Here's a puzzle. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercel, Plaid, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? The answer is that they're powered by today's sponsor, WorkOS. If you're
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
My guest today is Josh Kushner, founder and managing partner of venture firm Thrive Capital. Josh started Thrive in 02/2010 and launched its first institutional fund in 02/2011. That first institutional fund was $40,000,000, and in it, Thrive led Warby Parker series a, invested in Instagram, and incubated the business, which Josh cofounded called Oscar. Thryv has gone from strength to strength since and now manages $15,000,000,000 with a small team of nine investors. Their portfolio is stage agnostic, and their track record includes many of the best known businesses from the past decade, inclu
I think as a firm, we've always taken a very different approach with regards to how we present ourselves to the world. And I think that has come from a couple of different frameworks. The first is, and most important, our belief that the founders are heroes, and the idea of taking credit for their success is not something that we've ever wanted to do. I think personally, the construct of seeking validation from others is not something that we've ever believed would lead to us getting to the right conclusions on things that we do. We've always been different internally, forget about how we woul
the things that comes up if you ask around about you and Thrive is if I say, like, what questions should I ask Josh? Several people will say, talk about the taste on the consumer side that developed early because for the most part, Thryv invested in in the consumer space, which on average didn't do that great, but leading companies did very, very well, and Thryv was often invested in those things. How do you think about the development of taste?
Taste is something that you should always question at the same time. Understanding quality and understanding taste and having a deep appreciation for that is something that is fundamentally important, but that doesn't mean that you're always going to get it right. Good design does have some basic principles. It's the people who can, I would say, understand how that design applies to lots of different industries and sectors, and have the capacity to kind of think outside of the box that are ultimately able to thread those common principles through lots of different things? The people that I res
and I, I think, are both in love. You turned me on to it. This chapter in his book called Rules. Can you tell me why you love that chapter so much? What it says and why you love it so much? Highly recommend people go listen to it
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