He started with $5M and a website that had one sentence. He ended up as the only person who gave OpenAI a term sheet in 2022. Some people build things. Josh Kushner bets on the people who do.
Josh Kushner's office is in the Puck Building in lower Manhattan. His apartment is also in the Puck Building. When he decided to work past 11pm - which is often - he doesn't go home. He just stays. One elevator ride is all that separates his life from his work, and it's not always clear he thinks that's a distinction worth making.
At 24, Kushner founded Thrive Capital with roughly $5 million. That's not a lot. The website had one sentence of text for years - not out of laziness, but because Thrive never needed to market itself. The returns did the talking. Fund I was $5M. Fund X, closed in February 2026, was $10 billion and oversubscribed. Investors were turned away.
That's not a growth story. That's a transformation. And the interesting part isn't the numbers - it's how he got there without becoming the thing he clearly doesn't want to be: loud, self-promotional, drunk on access.
Josh makes high-conviction bets on high-quality companies and founders, and he doesn't care too much about what other investors think.
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAIThe Thrive method is not complicated to describe, just hard to execute: find founders worth believing in, show up when things are hard, don't talk about it publicly. A firm with $50 billion in assets under management maintains a profile roughly equivalent to a mid-level accountant. That's intentional.
Kushner's portfolio reads like a map of the internet's last decade and AI's next one. Instagram (Series B, doubled in 72 hours when Facebook acquired it for $1 billion). GitHub (~10% stake, sold to Microsoft for $7.5 billion). Figma (listed on NYSE in 2025 at $13.5 billion). Robinhood, Affirm, Nubank, Instacart - public. Stripe, Databricks, Ramp, Cursor - private and growing.
And then there's OpenAI. In 2022, when most institutional investors were still debating whether large language models were a science project, Kushner's Thrive was the only VC firm to provide OpenAI with a term sheet - investing $130 million at a $29 billion valuation. That investment sat at a $285 billion valuation by December 2025. OpenAI then turned around and took an equity stake in Kushner's new holding company, Thrive Holdings, embedding its engineering teams inside Holdings' portfolio companies. The student has become the landlord.
Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face.
- Mike Tyson (Josh Kushner's go-to quote for startup founders)The Thrive hiring process takes up to eight months. An intern's job offer was once rescinded after the candidate was rude to office assistants. Neither of those facts requires explanation to anyone who has spent time inside the firm.
The investment process is equally deliberate. Kushner allows himself to be outvoted in deal meetings. He remembers the favorite whiskies of people he met once three years ago. He responds to emails at midnight from founders in distress. In November 2023, when Sam Altman was suddenly fired from OpenAI, Thrive's COO Brad Lightcap called Kushner immediately. His first words were not about the investment. They were: "How are you? How's the company? I'm here for you."
None of this is incidental to the returns. It's the engine of them.
10 funds raised since 2009. Total capital deployed: $22.3B+
Josh Kushner grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, son of a real estate developer who built one of the East Coast's most significant property empires - and then spent 14 months in federal prison for tax fraud, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering. His father Charles was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2020 and currently serves as U.S. Ambassador to France. His brother Jared married Ivanka Trump and served as Senior White House Advisor. Josh voted Democrat in both 2016 and 2020 and has never publicly endorsed his family's politics.
When he launched Thrive Capital, the family name carried both access and stigma. Yale's legendary CIO David Swensen refused to take a meeting - a direct consequence of his father's criminal record. Kushner sent an email. It said, simply: "I am not ashamed of my father in any way...Everyone makes mistakes, and I love my father." Swensen was so moved he drove personally to meet Kushner. Yale's endowment became a Thrive investor. That email is now VC folklore.
His first company was a Harvard student magazine called Scene. Students created a Facebook group called "Scene Magazine Is Bullshit" to protest its launch. He went on to co-found Vostu - which became the largest social gaming company in Brazil with 40 million registered users before declining after copyright litigation with Zynga. Then he founded Thrive, then co-founded Oscar Health (now public), then Cadre with his brother Jared, then helped build Bedford Media with Karlie, which relaunched Life magazine in 2025.
He and Karlie Kloss met in the summer of 2012, when she was 19 and he was 26. They dated six years. She converted to Judaism. They married in October 2018 in an upstate New York ceremony, followed by a Wyoming celebration attended by Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom. They have three children - Levi, Elijah, and a daughter born in September 2025.
The couple's personal politics caused some friction with Kushner family dynamics through the Trump years - Karlie publicly voted for Clinton and Biden - but Josh consistently described his relationship with Jared as loving and separate from politics. Family, in Kushner's worldview, is its own thing.