Joshua Kushner was just 26 years old when he founded Thrive Capital in 2011. Since then, his firm has backed some of the most notable startups of the past decade, including Instagram, Spotify, and most notably, OpenAI.
The tech startup has become ubiquitous because of ChatGPT, which launched in 2022 to nearly overnight success. At the time, not many were willing to invest in the newcomer, and even Sam Altman himself told Kushner that the company was anything but a sure bet. But Thrive has ultimately put in around $1.3 billion into the ChatGPT maker since its inception. In 2023, the firm led a funding round for OpenAI, investing nearly $130 million. And in 2024, another Thrive-led round ended with a OpenAI valuation of $157 billion.
At the Fortune Global Forum on Tuesday in New York City, Kushner said he invested into the company for two key reasons: He believed in the person running the company, and he believed that the company would stand the test of time.
“Since day one as a firm, we have been very much oriented towards being extremely concentrated in people and ideas,” the CEO revealed, adding that it’s the people steering the ship who often keep it afloat. “In our world, there’s an ephemerality to technology. Those assets are fairly limited, but I think most importantly, it’s so driven by the person who’s running those businesses.”
A long-term view is also a key part of Kushner’s’ OpenAI bet, and he invoked the investment styles of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet—two famous value investors—to describe how he thinks about the company.
“If you kind of project forward, our view is there’s going to be multiple winners in this space,” he said about the AI sector in general. “We have deep respect for Google and meta and xAI, but our belief is that open AI is going to be one of those. And we feel very lucky to be partnered with them.”
Kushner, now 39, first met Altman in 2011. But it wasn’t until 2022 on a walk that the two reconnected. As OpenAI’s Sam Altman previously told Fortune about Kushner: “Josh makes high-conviction bets on high-quality companies and founders, and he doesn’t care too much about what other investors think. I feel a lot of camaraderie with that.”
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