Jared Kushner: BrainCo, Affinity Partners, and the Geopolitics of AI

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. I'm Sarah Guo, and Elad and I are here today with Jared Kushner at the Miami headquarters of his investing firm, Affinity Partners. We're here to talk about Affinity, the new co they're launching, BrainCo, and his career in government, business, and investing. Welcome, Jared. Jared, thanks so much for doing this with us.

**Jared Kushner** (0:28)
It's good to be with you guys.

**Sarah Guo** (0:29)
So you have a couple of interesting new and newish projects. Let's start with Affinity. You were an investor before, and you started a firm after your time as a public servant. What did you do differently?

**Jared Kushner** (0:41)
When I left government, I was thinking, what could I do to apply the different learnings that I'd had to my next version of a business career? And as I was studying all the different firms out there, I realized the world didn't need another, you know, a couple billion dollar private equity firm. But I tried to focus, as I would speak to my friends who were investors on what they needed, what value we could provide. And what we saw was that we had the ability to be complex problem solvers. That's the way that it didn't government. That's what we were good at. And we thought we could do that in partnership with a lot of other firms. So the aspiration with Affinity is to be the most value add and outcome determinative partner to the best entrepreneurs and the best companies in the world. And so we focused on finding the best companies, thinking through what are their biggest challenges, what are their biggest opportunities and thinking through how we can partner with them, putting skin in the game by investing with them versus a consultant and being in a position where we can then help them achieve their aspirations. And a lot of, you know, we have a very unique large network and very trusted by the people we deal with. And so they open up to us about their challenges and opportunities. And then we're able to, you know, scope and look for different solutions. And then we validate them through investment and then we're able to add value to the companies we're investing in by helping them find new customers and new opportunities.

**Sarah Guo** (1:59)
In what ways do you think companies are not as globally ambitious as they should be? Like if they knew what you knew or had the network you did?

**Jared Kushner** (2:08)
I think for most people to be very successful at something, they usually are very focused on an industry or on a geography. And to be exceptional, you have to be fairly obsessive about whichever of the fields you are trying to be exceptional in. And so what happens is, is they usually have a lot of perspective in their field or in their geography, but they don't have the time or the knowledge or the network in order to see how people like them are doing similar things throughout the world. And so by having a real global perspective, I was able to see that in most places, if you're successful, you have a fairly positive and local centric view of yourself. But when you can look at a global view, I would say, wow, these guys in India or these guys in the Middle East or these guys in Europe, they're doing the same business but in a different way. And so by giving those suggestions, sometimes connecting them together, you can help people who are very good at something, accelerate or modify their business in order to do something, hopefully, better than they would have done without your perspective.

**Elad Gil** (3:09)
I sense that Yuri Milner did that when he showed up for Facebook and did a famous investment there. It's because he'd been involved with a core or he started a Russian social network. And so he realized that Facebook could monetize in all these ways that it wasn't doing it. And so that's how he did valuation. And I think at the time, everybody thought his valuation was crazy. And how could you invest in Facebook at $5 billion or whatever it was? And of course now it's like a trillion dollar-ish company. And so I think it's really notable when people kind of bring these cross-border things over. I think you mentioned in the past that you all are involved in businesses in Israel, in Europe, in Latin America.
Could you give some specific examples of some of the things that you've done through Affinity and how that has pulled together from a global perspective?

**Jared Kushner** (3:46)
Sure. So I agree very much with what you're saying about being a generalist. Sometimes you can miss things, but also sometimes you can see things that other people don't see. And the cool thing about investing is you don't have to be right about everything. You have to be very focused on finding the things that you think you have a differentiated perspective on where you can have high conviction and then you place your bets on those high conviction bets that you want to take. And so by being global, we've done things a lot in the technology space. We've done a lot here in the US in technology and AI and the data layer and some of the models and some of the different applications that we've worked on. You've helped us source and introduce us to some incredible companies in that space. And we also have made investments throughout the world. We've done some in insurance. We've had four insurance investments which we like. I mean, those fit into more of our bucket of conventional businesses that have some form of differentiation, great leadership and can be long-term compounders. Another one of those businesses we did was we bought into the food sector in Brazil. We bought a lot of the Burger Kings there and then we bought the Starbucks and the Subway out of bankruptcy. We did that in partnership with Mubatala, which has been great so far and I think that will be a great long-term investment.