David Bloom

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.

“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

“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

Until then, I think he felt that destiny was of his own making, that he was in control of what he needed to do.

“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.”

“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

“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.