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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.

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“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

This is the category-defining profile of one of the most important figures and institutions in American business, investing, and technology. Joshua Kushner and Thrive Capital. Kushner and his partners speak, as do Sam Altman, Jony Ive, Demis Hassabis, and John... See more

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

“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

Golden vouchsafed to Kushner was that investment firms, as they scale, start to lose a sense of their identity and wind up focusing not on what they’re good at but on the size of their assets under management, in turn leading to a lower cost of capital, less ambitious people, more mediocrity, and lower returns.

“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.”