Josh Kushner - Building Thrive Capital

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Before we transition to the episode, I want to highlight the Founders Podcast, which is part of our Colossus Network. David Senra, who hosts Founders, has devoted his life to learning from history's greatest entrepreneurs, and every week he distills the lessons of a different founder. If you want an entry point, I highly recommend starting with episode 136 on Estee Lauder or episode 288 on Ralph Lauren.
I hosted David on Invest Like the Best last summer, and it's hard not to walk away insanely energized after listening to any episode with him. You can find a link to Founders and those episodes in the show notes of this conversation. You can also search all past transcripts on our website, joincolossus.com.
Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:52)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Invest Like the Best. He is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum 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 PositiveSum 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 PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:21)
My guest today is Josh Kushner, founder and managing partner of venture firm Thrive Capital. Josh started Thrive in 2010 and launched its first institutional fund in 2011 That first institutional fund was $40 million and in it, Thrive led Warby Parker Series A, invested in Instagram and incubated the business which Josh co-founded called Oscar. Thrive has gone from strength to strength since and now manages $15 billion 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, including Spotify, Unity, Stripe and Twitch, among many more. Josh rarely speaks in public about the firm and their philosophy, so it was a blast to do this with him. Please enjoy my conversation with Josh Kushner.
I have a strange opening question for you, which is about, it's a very meta question about the nature of this interview in the first place. I've talked to you about it a bunch, and I think you literally at one point wrote a note to yourself about why you might do this.
And when and if we publish this, I think it will represent probably 80% of the total minutes of you being recorded in a conversation. And I'm just curious about that. Everything else we'll talk about, I think is somewhat downstream of some very deliberate choices you've made, your style, your personal style. I've really enjoyed getting to understand. And so I'm just curious in that note, what were you saying to yourself?

**Josh Kushner** (3:48)
Well, 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 in that we don't apply to the Midas list or things like that, just because even internally, forget about how we would want to be perceived externally.