“Josh is incredibly polite,” an investor at a competing venture firm told Colossus on condition of anonymity. “But I wouldn’t want to get crossways with him. When there’s someone he’s loyal to at stake, it’s not pleasant to be on the other side. He can be merciless.”

Yet the details behind Thrive’s biggest successes—the ones that have taken it from a plucky little New York firm with a seemingly counterintuitive mission set into a technology investing behemoth—do make one wonder whether Kushner’s greater gift isn’t his taste in other people.

Thrive: an opportunistic vehicle agnostic to stage, sector, or geography, which viewed itself as an enabling technology for the world it wished to see, and which had the capacity to not just invest in companies but to build them.

People love you, and then they hate you, and then they love you. The only thing that ultimately matters is how you feel about yourself. Trying to appease others is never a winning game.

I was very lucky at Apple, because Steve [Jobs] showed me there was a way to articulate things like sensibility, intuition, taste, which all start with a feeling. But first I had to make friends with this frustrating part of myself, which was the inability to articulate what I feel.

“Their first album comes from love, heartbreak, passion, or depression. They have no expectation of how the world will respond. They write it from the heart, and if it catches on, they’re validated by the world. But then they start writing their second album, and they don’t necessarily write it based on love, heartbreak, or passion. They write the... See more

“My advice to you and your team is to just be yourselves,” Rubin explained. “Because if you do what you think the rest of the world wants, one of two things will happen. You might be right, but if you are, you won’t really know why; and if you’re wrong, you’ll be angry at yourself for deviating from what is true to your core. So just be yourself,... See more

I was also just eager to be with another young person who was finding a way to build and create, and not have to wait 10 or 15 years before you get your chance

“It’s a boast to say we will be the next J.P. Morgan,” Nohria clarified. “We’re not there. But I think we will have the opportunity. With AI, data centers, the associated energy and chips, these are our equivalent of Morgan’s railroads and steel. Like with Stripe and OpenAI: You need a person and institution that can come into these complicated,... See more