the DNA of Thrive

“Thrive was a stage-, geography-, and sector-agnostic venture firm that would concentrate all its investments in a very small number of companies; that it was not only an investment firm but also itself a company; that it incubated its own companies as well as invested in others; and that it didn’t just invest and incubate but functioned as a service provider, product creator, and embedded operational commando unit for founders.”

“Do you know the biggest mistake most musicians make? 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 album they think the world will want.”

“I was interviewing a candidate recently who asked me, ‘Why is everyone at Thrive so driven and motivated and hungry?’ I told her it is because most of us are either first generation or from New Jersey, the state everyone is always making fun of.”

“In life, sometimes we get so powerful that we start to think we’re the dealers of our own fate. We are not the dealers. God is the dealer. Sometimes we have to be brought back down to earth to get perspective on what is really important.”

“By the time I was in high school, my father had accomplished a tremendous amount,” he said. “He was deeply impactful in both the business and philanthropic worlds. And then overnight our family were outcasts. The world treated us all one way for the beginning part of my childhood, and then suddenly they treated us very differently. That experience showed me how the world works, and why you should not care too much about what people think.”

“I do believe that there is something in my family lineage. We are capable of figuring shit out. My parents taught us that every day you have to try to be better than you were the day before, that you have to just keep going in life, because we are all on borrowed time.”

“Everyone hates the man until they become the man.”

One insight 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.

“At that moment in venture you were either an early stage firm or a later stage firm. You were either a software firm or a consumer firm. You were either a European firm or a US firm. The idea of having a fund that could build companies, invest in companies, invest in them early or late, and inside or outside the US, it was just deeply unconventional.”

“When you’re in private equity you spend all your time trying to figure out what could go wrong,” Zaki said. “My conversations with Josh were much more about what could go right. 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.”

Asked what he made of the scene at Trump’s second inauguration, he smirked. “That weekend I spoke with my brother several times, and we reminisced about all the people who made his life and our family’s lives miserable for four years, and were all there celebrating now as if they had won the election themselves,” he said. “The world is very predictable.”

“One of the reasons the tech industry is so creatively bankrupt is that people just focus on attributes you can measure.”

“The people who win deals are the ones who want to win them most.”