In Thrive Capital\u2019s first-ever investor letter, founder Joshua Kushner has some unexpected things to say about his venture capital rivals on the West Coast.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the opportunity,\u201d Kushner wrote about AI in the letter, leaked to Bloomberg<\/a>. \u201cIt would also be a grave error in our minds to let excitement weaken our investment discipline. \u2026 Within Silicon Valley in particular, the industry can become fixated on hyperincremental technological turns rather than where the technology ultimately leads.\u201d<\/p>\n While his secretive New York-based firm, just like those in Silicon Valley, is betting heavily on AI, Thrive is doing so differently, he argues. There\u2019s no so-called spray-and-pray investing<\/a>. Thrive tends to go big on the companies it backs. Bloomberg estimates about 90% of its capital is poured into the top 15 investments in each fund.<\/p>\n That makes Thrive, he contends, a company of independent thinkers. \u201cWe are independent because markets move between fear and enthusiasm, and neither is a substitute for judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n His comments are in direct contrast to one of the basic premises of Silicon Valley venture capital: that it is a business of \u201coutliers\u201d as espoused by Marc Andreessen<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the \u201coutlier\u201d view, a VC firm makes a lot of bets, prepared to lose money on many \u2014 even most \u2014 of them. The few big hits will be so lucrative that they will cover the losers and much, much more. That philosophy leaves VCs forever looking for the next OpenAI or another mega hit. It can also lead to, as we saw during the post-pandemic lean years<\/a>, cutting ongoing support for startups not deemed to be on track to be the biggest winners.<\/p>\n In contrast, Kushner writes, \u201cWe believed an investment firm could be opportunistic across stage, sector, and geography, while remaining deeply concentrated in a small number of people and ideas.\u201d The idea is to \u201cbuild Thrive to concentrate our time, capital, and energy on the people and ideas we believe in most.\u201d<\/p>\n He also dismisses Silicon Valley\u2019s idea that VCs are in the business of disrupting incumbents.<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike many of our peers, our conviction was not only that these industries would be disrupted from the outside in but also that many would be transformed from the inside out,\u201d he wrote about AI\u2019s impact.<\/p>\n Thrive has largely stuck to this thesis. Its deepening relationship with OpenAI is its biggest example. The VC firm is a major investor in the AI lab. But in December 2025, the roles switched when OpenAI took an ownership stake<\/a> in Thrive Holdings, the VC firm\u2019s spinout. Thrive Holdings buys companies and then works with OpenAI to give them an AI makeover. Part of the deal involved OpenAI dedicating employees to work with Thrive\u2019s companies.<\/p>\n Thrive Holdings has bought more than 70 businesses and has a team of 35 engineers. Kushner says its accounting platform uses agents to produce tax returns 30% faster with 98% accuracy, and its IT services firm has agents independently solving half of its help desk tickets.<\/p>\n Still, Thrive\u2019s strategy is working in part because it nabbed stakes in some of the industry\u2019s best-performing startups ever. Its $516 million 2022 early-stage fund, for instance, made early bets on OpenAI, Anduril, and SpaceX, and is now worth more than $3.7 billion as of the end of June, Bloomberg reports<\/a>. Thrive has, over its 15 years, increased its stakes in all of them (and also had a sizeable stake in Cursor, which just closed its sale to SpaceX).<\/p>\n It has also backed Wiz, Ramp, and Stripe, to name a few other big names. Plus, it has led seed investments in new labs like Essential AI,<\/a> founded by former Google Brain researcher Ashish Vaswani,\u00a0the lead writer of the famed \u201cTransformers\u201d paper that spawned today\u2019s AI industry.<\/p>\n All told, Thrive has $60 billion of assets under management, Kushner revealed in the letter. He reports impressive profits: a gross internal rate of return (IRR) across all funds of 41% and a net IRR of 33%. Thrive has returned more than $1 billion of liquidity to its investors in the last 12 months alone, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere may be an opportunity for billions of dollars in additional liquidity in the coming quarters,\u201d he promises. <\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t specify which companies are headed for their exits, but obviously the SpaceX IPO was a start, and OpenAI is working toward its own public debut.<\/p>\n It should be pointed out that both Kushner\u2019s and Andreessen\u2019s approaches obviously work in terms of making money. Andreessen Horowitz returned $25 billion to its investors between 2009 and 2025, according to the last leaked returns, reported by Eric Newcomer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thrive\u2019s philosophy of concentrating capital may not even be possible for most smaller, scrappy emerging seed funds, whose founders weren\u2019t born into the kind of access that the son of a billionaire New York real-estate family has.<\/p>\n That said, Kushner\u2019s general premise of how overheated Silicon Valley\u2019s AI investing has become isn\u2019t wrong either. As he puts it: \u201cNot every fast-growing business is exceptional. And not every exceptional company is a great investment at every price. Our responsibility is to maintain those distinctions.\u201d<\/p>\n