Inside Thrive Capital: Investing in OpenAI, Wiz, Cursor, Nudge, Physical Intelligence

Philip Clark (0:00)

Our philosophy at Thrive that Josh taught me is that the people who win deals are the people who want to win deals the most.

Molly O'Shea (0:16)

Philip, welcome to Sourcery.

Philip Clark (0:17)

Thanks for having me.

Molly O'Shea (0:18)

This is a very big day. We have a very stealth private fund here. Okay, so you've been at Thrive for the past three years. You joined there in 2022

Philip Clark (0:28)

Yeah.

Molly O'Shea (0:28)

And since then, you've been involved in some pretty incredible investments, like OpenAI, Cursor, Wiz, Nudge and Physical Intelligence. How did you get to Thrive?

Philip Clark (0:40)

Yeah. I think at the end of the day, I'm just a technologist and an optimist.

I have always really wanted to study and be like the people who worked on really big technology products and projects that bent history in the right direction. I was a kid, my heroes were Oppenheimer working on the Manhattan Project, or Claude Shannon working at Bell Labs, or Elon Musk starting SpaceX when I was four or five years old. And I actually went to school originally to study physics. I really thought that was the right way, sort of in the mold of some of those earlier figures of thinking about the hardest problems in technology. Now, truth is, I was pretty good at physics, I probably wasn't quite good enough. And the road to making an impact on physics problems that are open in the field, very, very long, I ended up switching to a more pragmatic route, which was studying computer science. But even so, really always inspired by this idea of technology being the right engine of history. And I think after spending a lot of time thinking about having an impact there, there are kind of two big options today, if you want to actually be part of that technological engine. One is you can go start a generational technology company. To be perfectly honest, I didn't have any really great ideas of how to do that coming out of school. Or the second is you can be a partner to these sorts of companies and help them make the really important decisions. And so over time, it became pretty clear that the second was the path that I wanted to take and Thrive seemed like a really exciting place to do it.

Molly O'Shea (2:10)

I think Jeff Bezos had the same problem. He wasn't that good at physics.

Philip Clark (2:14)

He actually tried to do math and then physics and then he did quant trading.

Molly O'Shea (2:18)

So how did you meet Thrive?

Philip Clark (2:20)

Yes. A little bit of a funny story here. So to the point of being an amateur physicist at one point, I was really into semiconductors. I think they're one of the great examples of applied physics in the world. We literally have machines that zap plasma with lasers twice in order to imprint patterns on semiconductor dye. And so I used to maintain a little sub stack about semiconductors. And my now partner Josh, who started Thrive back in the 2010s, was really interested in 2021, 2022, about the idea of reshoring semiconductor manufacturing to America. These days, I think almost all of advanced semiconductor manufacturing happens in Korea and Taiwan. This actually is a big change from history. Back in the 1990s, about 40% of semiconductor manufacturing happened in the US. Today, it's something like 10%.

So drastic decrease. And as you know, and I'm sure as all your viewers know, these are probably the single most important inputs to all information technology, whether they be computers or artificial intelligence or what have you. So big question of is there a way to get America to be a major producer of these things again? Josh was exploring this and came across my sub stack because a former colleague at Bridgewater, where I worked before ABC was at Thrive at the time. And he got in touch and we started talking about semiconductors and I'll spare you all the gory details, but turns out it's very difficult to reassure semiconductor manufacturing or at least would require a little bit more money than Thrive had available at the time. But this was something where I had the reaction of someone who had the boldness and ambition to think about an idea as important as that. Well, if you go back to great technologists working on great technology projects, that felt really unique and distinct. And so as it became clear that I wanted to move from being in sort of quantitative trading, hedge fund world to actually investing in early stage and fast growing technology companies, I went to Josh for advice and you know what they say, ask for advice, get a job, and now I'm at Thrive.