In Thrive Capital’s first-ever investor letter, founder Joshua Kushner has some surprising issues to say about his enterprise capital rivals on the West Coast.
“It’s troublesome to overstate the magnitude of the chance,” Kushner wrote about AI within the letter, leaked to Bloomberg. “It might even be a grave error in our minds to let pleasure weaken our funding self-discipline. … Inside Silicon Valley specifically, the business can turn into fixated on hyperincremental technological turns slightly than the place the know-how finally leads.”
Whereas his secretive New York-based agency, similar to these in Silicon Valley, is betting closely on AI, Thrive is doing so in a different way, he argues. There’s no so-called spray-and-pray investing. Thrive tends to go large on the businesses it backs. Bloomberg estimates about 90% of its capital is poured into the highest 15 investments in every fund.
That makes Thrive, he contends, an organization of unbiased thinkers. “We’re unbiased as a result of markets transfer between worry and enthusiasm, and neither is an alternative to judgment.”
His feedback are in direct distinction to one of many primary premises of Silicon Valley enterprise capital: that it’s a enterprise of “outliers” as espoused by Marc Andreessen.
Within the “outlier” view, a VC agency makes quite a lot of bets, ready to lose cash on many — even most — of them. The few large hits shall be so profitable that they’ll cowl the losers and far, rather more. That philosophy leaves VCs without end in search of the following OpenAI or one other mega hit. It may possibly additionally result in, as we saw during the post-pandemic lean years, chopping ongoing help for startups not deemed to be on monitor to be the most important winners.
In distinction, Kushner writes, “We believed an funding agency may very well be opportunistic throughout stage, sector, and geography, whereas remaining deeply concentrated in a small variety of individuals and concepts.” The concept is to “construct Thrive to pay attention our time, capital, and vitality on the individuals and concepts we consider in most.”
He additionally dismisses Silicon Valley’s concept that VCs are within the enterprise of disrupting incumbents.
“In contrast to lots of our friends, our conviction was not solely that these industries can be disrupted from the skin in but in addition that many can be reworked from the within out,” he wrote about AI’s influence.
Thrive has largely caught to this thesis. Its deepening relationship with OpenAI is its greatest instance. The VC agency is a significant investor within the AI lab. However in December 2025, the roles switched when OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, the VC agency’s spinout. Thrive Holdings buys corporations after which works with OpenAI to present them an AI makeover. A part of the deal concerned OpenAI dedicating workers to work with Thrive’s corporations.
Thrive Holdings has purchased greater than 70 companies and has a workforce of 35 engineers. Kushner says its accounting platform makes use of brokers to provide tax returns 30% quicker with 98% accuracy, and its IT companies agency has brokers independently fixing half of its assist desk tickets.
Nonetheless, Thrive’s technique is working partially as a result of it nabbed stakes in among the business’s best-performing startups ever. Its $516 million 2022 early-stage fund, as an illustration, made early bets on OpenAI, Anduril, and SpaceX, and is now value greater than $3.7 billion as of the top of June, Bloomberg reports. Thrive has, over its 15 years, elevated its stakes in all of them (and likewise had a sizeable stake in Cursor, which simply closed its sale to SpaceX).
It has additionally backed Wiz, Ramp, and Stripe, to call just a few different large names. Plus, it has led seed investments in new labs like Essential AI, based by former Google Mind researcher Ashish Vaswani, the lead author of the famed “Transformers” paper that spawned at the moment’s AI business.
All instructed, Thrive has $60 billion of belongings beneath administration, Kushner revealed within the letter. He stories spectacular earnings: a gross inside fee of return (IRR) throughout all funds of 41% and a internet IRR of 33%. Thrive has returned greater than $1 billion of liquidity to its buyers within the final 12 months alone, he stated.
“There could also be a possibility for billions of {dollars} in further liquidity within the coming quarters,” he guarantees.
He doesn’t specify which corporations are headed for his or her exits, however clearly the SpaceX IPO was a begin, and OpenAI is working towards its personal public debut.
It must be identified that each Kushner’s and Andreessen’s approaches clearly work when it comes to earning profits. Andreessen Horowitz returned $25 billion to its buyers between 2009 and 2025, in accordance with the final leaked returns, reported by Eric Newcomer.
Thrive’s philosophy of concentrating capital might not even be potential for many smaller, scrappy rising seed funds, whose founders weren’t born into the type of entry that the son of a billionaire New York real-estate household has.
That stated, Kushner’s common premise of how overheated Silicon Valley’s AI investing has turn into isn’t fallacious both. As he places it: “Not each fast-growing enterprise is phenomenal. And never each distinctive firm is a good funding at each value. Our duty is to take care of these distinctions.”
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