“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

“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

The tension I often feel is that you always have to be pushing forward, but you can never forget where you came from,” Josh said. “My biggest fear is ... what is the line? ‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.’ You always need to stay rooted in your values and in the... See more

“I keep coming back to J.P. Morgan,” said Nithin Nohria, the historian of American business history. “Morgan wanted to be a part of the financiers of his time, but also independent of them in an important way. His view was that you could be the trusted party, the person and institution that could be trusted to anchor the broader movement of capital... See more

“Think about it,” Mallick said. “We started with a $20–30 million check, and then created the opportunity to make it the most concentrated, consequential investment Thrive’s ever made up to that point. GitHub is the most strategic asset in software, and we become one of the company’s most meaningful partners. We go from 1% to 10% holders and get... See more

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.

Kevin Systrom’s belief that Kushner was harder working and more independently minded than other, much larger VCs fighting to get in.

“I feel like I’m allowed to trash investors because I was one for most of my career,” Sam Altman told Colossus last month. “Most investors don’t work that hard, they’re usually not available for midnight calls or won’t drop everything to fly across the country on short notice to do a small favor for you the next day. Josh is consistently willing to... 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